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Crosslistings: LAST 267 |
In a speech delivered in October 1968 at the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Award ceremony, the Peruvian novelist, anthropologist, and 'indigenist,' Jose Maria Arguedas, one of the most influential and polemical writers of the 20th century in Latin America, stated the following. "I am not acculturated, I am a Peruvian who proudly, like a happy demon, speaks Christian and Indian, Spanish and Quechua." A little over a year later while completing EL ZORRO DE ARRIBA Y EL ZORRO DE ABAJO, Arguedas wrote the following prophetic sentence: "I will not survive the book." Three weeks later, this transcultural 'happy demon' ended his novel with "Nov. 28, 1969. I choose this day because it won't interfere so much with the functioning of the University." He then proceeded to sign the novel by firing two bullets into his head. In this course we will uncover the happy demons of Jose Maria Arguedas' writing as a fundamental means of examining the antinomies of Latin American modernity and modernization, of analyzing the limits and failures of transculturation and of magic realism, and of reading the beginning of the end of Utopia in Latin America. In other words, we will study the ways in which the understanding of Arguedas affords us particular and privileged insight into (and critique of) the complexities of 20th-century Andean (and Latin American) cultural and political history.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA RLAN Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.
Last Updated on MAR-18-2003
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459