Seminar: Text, culture, society 09-SSTKS-3MH-33

The seminar will read and comment on representative texts of Spanish-American avant-garde narrative. These are texts written in the first decades of the 20th century (1920s and 1930s), which testify to a literary milieu eager to try out new artistic forms. The novels to be discussed in this course are formal "experiments" that expand the boundaries of literary creation, thus offering authentic lyrical and narrative mosaics. Moreover, they are texts governed, as critic Fernando Burgos rightly notes, by the audacious "principle of assimilation, of mixing, of collage of discourses," and which "reveal a source with an unquestionable Surrealist provenance, but realized in a new Latin American context," which "produced an exceptional result, a source of surprising productivity, nourished by its own explorations and original experiments." These texts opened the way for later literary innovations. The main authors to be read in the course are: César Vallejo, Macedonio Fernández, Arqueles Vela, Roberto Arlt, Julio Garmendia, Pablo Palacio, Martín Adán, Felisberto Hernández, Vicente Huidobro (with his short novels written with Hans Arp) and Juan Emar.

Primary bibliography (provided to students at the beginning of the course)

Barrera, T. (2006), Las vanguardias hispanoamericanas, Madrid: Síntesis.

Burgos, F. (ed.) (1986), Prosa hispánica de vanguardia, Madrid: Orígenes.

Millares, S. (ed.) (2013), Prosas hispánicas de vanguardia, Madrid: Cátedra.

Niemeyer, K. (2014), Subway de los sueños, alucinamiento, libro abierto: La novela vanguardista hispanoamericana, Madrid: Iberoamericana.

Osorio, N. (1981), “Para una caracterización histórica del vanguardismo literario hispanoamericano”,
Revista Iberoamericana, 114-115 (1981), 227-254.
Pérez Firmat, G. (1982), Idle Fictions: The Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926 -1934, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Schwartz, J. (1991), Las vanguardias latinoamericanas, textos programáticos y críticos, Madrid: Editorial Cátedra.
Verani, H. (986), Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica: manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos, Roma: Bulzoni.