This course juxtaposes fictional narratives from the northern and southern parts of the American hemisphere which share a common obsession with history. Traumatic scenes of the past—the European invasion of the “New World,” the institution of chattel slavery across the hemisphere, the Mexican Revolution, genocide and military dictatorships, civil and revolutionary wars—are revisited by twentieth-century novelists because these are “pasts that are not past.” Rather, these are historical events which keep festering like an open wound, and which continue to haunt the present of contemporary New World nations forged in the crucible of racial and ethnic violence.

Throughout the course, we will ask the following critical questions: What is an appropriate way of reconstructing violent histories such as slavery, dictatorships, or the Mexican Revolution? What are the advantages of using the overtly subjective, biased modes of memory and fiction as opposed to the detached, intellectual exercise of writing history? How do literature and historical fiction shape or reflect ethnic and national identities in the Americas? How does gender, race, and class influence the way writers approach the process of remembering and reconstructing the past? Is it possible to read these narratives as more than national (U.S., Mexican, Colombian, Guatemalan etc.) works—as works belonging to a common transamerican, hemispheric history, as well as a hemispheric “literature of the Americas”?

Texts:

• Herman Melville. “Benito Cereno” (from Norton Critical Edition of Melville’s Short Novels).
• Carlos Fuentes. The Death of Artemio Cruz.
• Gabriel García Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Rudolfo Anaya. Bless Me, Ultima.
• Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigobert Menchú.
• Ariel Dorfman. Death and the Maiden.
• Roman Polanski, Dir. Death and the Maiden (1994).