SPAN 7850 Environmental Literatures of the Américas. Professor Charlotte Rogers, cwr4m
Mondays 3:30-6, NCH 315
This course approaches the literary traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean from the perspective of the environmental humanities. We will examine how practices of imperialism, extractivism, and science have shaped the depiction of the region’s entangled ecologies in literature from the colonial era to the present. The course will focus on how literary texts from a variety of genres, including colonial chronicles, regionalist novels, magical realism, and testimonies contest visions of the Americas imposed from the outside and how they reimagine relations between humans and the vibrant, more-than-human beings by drawing on Indigenous and Afro-diasporic belief systems and ways of knowing. Readings include the work of Horacio Quiroga, José Eustasio Rivera, Pablo Neruda, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor, and Davi Kopenawa. Readings available in Spanish with translations into English; class discussions will be in English; written work may be completed in either Spanish or English. This course fulfills elective requirements for the graduate certificate in Environmental Humanities.