This course analyzes the beginnings of the short story in Latin America in the 20th century and its subsequent development, revising the different styles and literary movements which take place over time and the extraordinary contribution of women writers to this genre. The complex social, political and cultural reality will be studied as it is reflected in the Latin American short story. The stories of Horacio Quiroga, Modernism, “Criollismo”, Magic Realism and the most recent literary tendencies will be examined
The Latin American novel was one of the courses I was most excited for because I had taken multiple courses with similar objectives. The course also presented a focus on the evaluation of various Latin American short stories, which included a few stories I had previously encountered on other courses at CSUMB. However, there was a number of authors and stories that I had never came across and found significantly interesting and beneficial to my understanding of Latin American literature. Throughout the course we wrote a few paper and completed multiple analytic assignments that ultimately prepared us for our final essay in which we were assigned to present a comparison between a short story that we focused on in class and a Latin American novel. In decided to choose Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo as my Latin American novel because as I previously mentions I gained a great appreciation for it and was more familiar with the elements of Magical Realism that were useful in comparing it to the short story I analyzed in class.