SPAN 378 Buenos Aires in Latin American Fiction and Film

The course adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the question of how place and landscape (Buenos Aires and the pampas) influence literary and filmic imagination. Buenos Aires is one of the great cities of Latin America. Readings for the course include nineteenth-century essays and stories which document the harnessing of the agricultural resources of Argentina into a meat-exporting economic machine; turn-of-the-century fiction and essays also document the transformation of Buenos Aires by new European immigration (often non-Spanish), the impact of European anarchist thought, and the architectural boom at the end of the nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth-century writers such as Borges, Cortázar and Sábato will be discussed in the context of their references to specific Buenos Aires neighborhoods (e.g. Chacarita, Belgrano, San Telmo, and Retiro). Through documentaries and narrative films, the second half of the Spring course introduces students to the rise of the Argentine Armed Forces, the enduring influence of Peronism, the trauma of the dictatorship years, and the economic and political contradictions of contemporary Argentina.