Latinx and Latin Amer Studies 445 - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is the best novel ever written in Spanish in the Americas. Appearing inauspiciously in 1967, it became the flagship of the so-called "El Boom," an aesthetic movement that inscribed Latin America in the banquet of world literature. It also inaugurated the style called "lo real maravillioso," loosely translated into English as Magical Realism. The narrative tells the rise and fall of Macondo, a mythical town in Colombia's Caribbean coast. At its center is the Buendias, a family of dreamers and entrepreneurs through whom the history of the entire region is told. It is fair to say that after One Hundred Years of Solitude, which brought Garcia Marquez the Nobel Prize, global literature has never been the same. Its influence on figures as diverse as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orham Pamuk, and Mo Yan is enormous and continues to reverberate. The course is structured as a Talmudic (e.g., detailed, contextual, ahistorical) reading of the novel. Other works by the author and his contemporaries will also be discussed. Conducted in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPAN 301 or consent of the instructor.  Spring semester: Professor Stavans.

How to handle overenrollment: Priority will be given to seniors and Spanish majors.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Students will be expected to do close readings, creative writing, and essay writing.