Courses

An important portion of Latin American literature of the recent decades has been characterized by a crisis of the book. Contemporary writers have actively left the boundaries of literary fiction to incorporate other registers and methods to their work—historical, visual, anthropological. Critical and theoretical scholarship from and about the region has enacted a similar displacement. Literary scholars have diversified their objects of study to include not only the unique manifestations proposed by these contemporary writers but also other, mostly visual, materials—a phenomenon that has been identified as the visual turn in literary studies.

This course maps and explores some of the most influential projects that constitute this phenomenon. Our class discussions will alternate between the analysis of works of contemporary art and literature and the examination of the critical and theoretical scholarship around them. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which these scholars articulate and design their projects and how they develop frameworks to approach objects that may at first appear as dissimilar and/or disciplinarily hybrid.