| Delivery Type | Delivery length / details |
|---|---|
| Lecture | Ten 1-hour lectures |
| Seminars / Tutorials | Ten 1-hour seminars |
| Workload Breakdown | Lecture and seminar attendance - 20 hours; lecture and seminar preparation (research and reading) - 100 hours; essay research and preparation - 45 hours; text commentary research and preparation - 35 hours. |
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Assessment | Continuous assessment Four 500-word response papers | 30% |
| Semester Assessment | Continuous assessment One 2500-word final paper | 40% |
| Semester Assessment | Continuous assessment One oral presentation centred on a critical topic, chosen by student | 20% |
| Semester Assessment | Continuous assessment Attendance and performance | 10% |
| Supplementary Exam | 1 x 2 hour examination if continuous assessment submitted. 1 x 3 hour examination if no continuous assessment submitted. | 100% |
On successful completion of this module students should be able to:
1. Arrive at a comparative understanding of Spanish American literature through the parallel study of history, aesthetics and linguistics;
2. Have a firm grasp of the ways in which different literary movements anchored in a specific language and culture spawn new formations in the space of Spanish American letters;
3. Envision the maps and timelines of modern Spanish American literature through the lens of travel and multi-cultural contact;
4. Engage in intensive class discussions centred around local and national conceptions of Spanish American literature;
5. Have good knowledge of a range of primary texts by the authors studied as well as strong familiarity with some of the most influential critical work that has been produced on them;
6. Be comfortable in developing their own lines of inquiry about the topics at hand, in brief and extended written and oral assignments.
This new module focuses on the figures of five migrant Spanish American literary practitioners - Domingo Sarmiento, Jose Marti, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Alejo Carpentier - to explore how the circumstances of travelling and displacement shape and inform their writing, as well as their idea about Spanish American history, politics and culture. The module will follow different moments in the writers' lives inside and outside their national space, in order to envision the national literatures of modern Spanish America in their cosmopolitan fluidity.
'Migrants, Outsiders, Cosmopolites' is shaped around five practitioners that span a century of Spanish American literature (from, roughly, the 1840s to the 1960s), and who have in common the circumstance of migration, whether political or voluntary. The module sets out to ask how the experience of travel to Europe or the United States informs their literature formally (on an aesthetic level) and thematically (in their understanding of local and global culture, politics and nationalism). Students will be able to study these writers comparatively through their affiliations with different artistic movements, different national spaces, as well as their contact with different languages (most prominently French and English), and will be encouraged to ask how this fluidity of contact influences their art as well as their conception of the world.
This module is at CQFW Level 6