Latin American Short Stories

About this course:

The short stories we read in this course span the history of Latin American literature marked by a luxuriousness of language, by metaphoric leaps, and uncanny conjunctions of the ordinary with the fantastic. These stories range from Fray Bartolome de las Casas’ narrative protests against the Spanish Conquistadors’ abuses of Indians to Machado de Assis’ “Midnight Mass” from the nineteenth century to Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” in the twentieth. We also include stories by such literary masters as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Rosario Ferre; as well as haunting reveries that characterize Maria Luisa Bombal’s “The Tree,” and a striking inventiveness that marks Alejo Carpentier’s “Journey Back to the Source,” told backwards because a sorcerer waved his wand and time flows in reverse. Suggested book: The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories.