C LIT 321 A / GLITS 314 E / SPAN 317 A
Mass Culture in Latin American Literature
Elizabeth Hochberg
Course description:
This course examines how Latin American prose writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries react to, illustrate, and conceptualize the rise and development of mass culture in the region, including comics, photography, radio, advertising, film, and video games. How do these writers account for new media--and forms of experiencing the world-- within the literary framework of the short story, essay or novel? Our course will focus on writers hailing from South America --Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay-- while also examining critical texts on media studies from other parts of the world. Particular attention will be paid to the role played by both social and aesthetic movements in the development of the literature at hand, as well as the ways in which reflections on mass culture are inscribed within specific historical and political contexts. We will largely travel chronologically through the primary sources on the syllabus while establishing connections between regions, literary genres, and different types of mass media.