Module Information

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.