Narrating Poverty in Modernista, Postmodern and Contemporary Fiction and Film: Argentina, Chile and Brazil

This course is taught in English. Good reading knowledge of Spanish highly recommended.

This seminar examines fictional works that struggle (and sometimes succeed) in capturing the experience of poverty in multiple contexts and manifestations. A major concern of the last part of the seminar will be the effect of globalization (mundialización) on new forms and degrees of poverty in Latin America. To help us examine the limits and problems of representing poverty, we will also read theoretical texts on representation, marginalization and globalization (in relation to poverty). Some of the questions the seminar addresses include but are not limited to the following: how do the fictional texts and films discussed encode the complex nature of ethics in representing a subject as morally and politically loaded as poverty? What role do consumption and consumerism play in the texts studies? How are these texts and films consumed, and what relevant conclusions can we draw from these patterns of distribution and consumption? What role do questions of aesthetics play in metaphorizing poverty, or in addressing poverty symbolically? Can one speak of an aesthetics of poverty in dealing with some of these poems, novels and films?

The Seminar will be divided into four segments:

I. A historical overview of the treatment of poverty and the poor in Hispanic philosophy, painting and literature, including Juan Luis Vives’s A Treatise on the Poor. We will also read relevant scholarly contributions on poverty in the picaresque novel.

II. Urban and rural poverty in the poetry of Hispanic American and Brazilian avant-garde (particularly in the poetry of César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda and Carlos Dummond de Andrade)

III. Neo-realist depictions of the poverty during the mid-century by looking at proletarian neo-realist novels in Argentina and in Brazilian Cinema Nuovo. Unlike the rest of the material, most of the novels we will read during this segment have not been translated. If a student with less than good reading knowledge of Spanish wishes to take the class, we will need to discuss an alternative assignment to make up for the missed reading.

IV. Contemporary representations of poverty in Chilean, Argentina and Brazilian literature and film. Eltit’s and Fonseca’s works are available in translation. I am in the process of finding out if there is a translation of Aira’s novel. There is no translation, as of yet, of Chejfec’s novel, but the novel is short and relatively accessible (in strictly syntactical terms). 

Required Theoretical/Critical Reading

Fiction:

C. Aira, La Villa

C. D. de Andrade, selected poems

B. Bervistsky, Villa miseria también es América

S. Chejfec. Boca de lobo

D. Eltit, Mano de obra

R. Fonseca, Man of the Year .

C. Lispector, The Hour of the Star

C. Vallejo, Poemas humanos (selected poems)

Films:

Tire Dié ( Documentary, Argentina)

Pixote ( Brazil)

The Hour of the Star ( Brazil)

Man of the Year ( Brazil)

Una de dos (Argentina)

Amarelo Negro (Brasil)

El polaquito ( Argentina)

Theoretical/Critical Reading (Required)

Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

A. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty. (Read Introduction and Ch. 1)

G. Maiorino, All the Margins of the Renaissance. Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival. (Read “Econopoetics and the Great Chain of Handouts”)

J. Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Editor’s Introduction, Personal Itinerary, and Ch. 1 and II)

J. Luis Vives, A Treatise on the Poor

Yeatts, Guillermo M. Raices de pobreza. Las perversas reglas de juego en América Latina.(Cap. 1, 2, 3)

S. Zizek. Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Ch 1)