Narrativa Sonora: Sound and Literature in Contemporary Latin American Fiction
Instructor: Tamara Mitchell
Language of instruction: Spanish
Latin America has a rich and complex tradition of orality, both aural and textual. This course reads narrative fiction of the past three decades in relation to that tradition, considering how contemporary works build on, but more importantly diverge from, oral practices that have been the ground of storytelling, memory making, and political interventions in the region. Throughout the semester, we will attend closely to how contemporary aural novels grapple with and contextualize important sociohistorical, political and economic realities, such as gendered and cartel violence, ingrained corruption by political figures, disability, increased out migration through and to North America, and ecological disasters that are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. In particular, our conversations will inquire into how narrative texts invoke or represent sound, aurality, and silence formally—through literary devices and formal structure—as a means of indexing, critiquing, and deconstructing structures of power. We will read critical texts from literary sound studies and philosophy to account for how narrative aurality is deployed as a means of responding to precarity, inequality, and violence of the globalized present.
Readings:
- Úrsula de Jesús, Las almas del purgatorio
- Leonora Carrington, La trompetilla acústica
- Horacio Castellanos Moya, Insensatez
- Juan Villoro, Arrecife
- Jorge Comensal, Las mutaciones
- Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Los sordos
- Guadalupe Nettel, El huésped
- Rita Indiana, Papi
- Emiliano Monge, Las tierras arrasadas
- Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive