Introduction to the class

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus, under financial sponsorship of the royal family of Castilla y Aragon, set foot  for "the first time" on a new continent.  Years later, Hernan Cortes set foot on the Mesoamerican coast.  It was the beginning of a culture shock that still echos today.  It was then that the "painful birth that is now the nation of Mexico" took place.  Two worlds saw each other for the first time, as Carlos Fuentes says, in a distorted mirror.  It was a time for conquistadors, tragedy, and the discovery of a new reality for both the conquistadors and those who had been conquered.  Later, a group of young, talented authors started a movement that has come to be known as the boom.  They began to describe this distorted reality using an artistic term, borrowed from German painting, called magic realism.

The objective of this seminar is to begin to understand this new way of capturing and exploring Latin American and Spanish reality.  This new and magic reality will be shown through the mediums of written word, as well as film.  In this course, the students will be exposed to this new way of viewing reality from  theoretical and historical perspectives through works from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Alejo Carpentier, for example, as well as movies such as the Casa de los Espiritus (The House of Spirits) or El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labrynth).  The students' culminating project for the course will be the creation of a story that reflects their study and knowledge of these concepts.