Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0227 - Garcia Marquez Mail Stream

Spring
2015
1
4.00
Norman Holland
06:00PM-09:00PM W
Hampshire College
316791
Emily Dickinson Hall 4
nshHA@hampshire.edu
The post office, asserts the Chilean writer Jos Donoso, is a writer's true homeland. This assertion certainly describes the major novels of the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Nobody Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, A Crime Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera. Throughout his novels, letters constantly circulate. Anticipated letters are never written, although on demand letters can be purchased. If need be, there is special delivery to heaven. Even when delivered, some are never read. History is a dead letter, an inconvenient detail. Still, letters endlessly proliferate, foreshadowing textuality in the age of the world-wide web. By tracking their movement, the course will trace and sort GGM's imaginary postal system, explore how his technology addresses the lettered city, and investigate our capabilities and longings as navigators of ever-accumulating bodies of texts, traces, and signs.
Culture, Humanities, and Languages Writing and Research Independent Work Multiple Cultural Perspectives In this course students are expected to spend 8 hours weekly in preperation and work outside of class time. This course statisfies distribution for Culture, Humanities, and Language.
Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.