Literature in Translation: Fantastic Gallery: 20th-Century Latin American Short Fiction

Gothic stories, usually linked in people’s imagination to B-movies and best sellers of all times (Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, The Golem, Frankenstein, Edgar A. Poe’s short stories, Carmilla, The Castle of Otranto, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Rapaccini’s Daughter, or Aliens) are all, despite their intense individuality, unending variations on a single subject—mainly the relation between sexuality (the body, the material), art, and Death. Accordingly, the scenarios where these Gothic sagas take place are solitary and archaic places: castles, rundown mansions, and the like. As if a sublime geography and scenery, subdued by awe and despair, were crucial for the display of emotions, that is for the apparition of the unconscious, the hidden otherness of “evil.” Gothic “monsters,” on the other hand, constitute a strange gallery of unwanted and/or orphaned characters—usually artists fixated on desire and sexual fears. In this course, we will explore, through literary texts and films, both the North American and European “classics.” Then, we will concentrate on the wonderful contributions of Latin American writers to the Gothic “canon,” while drawing a possible portrait of the artist/poet as a deprived child who obssessively yearns for the impossible and, in so doing, becomes an intruder into the sexual politics of the symbolic. In other words, we will use Gothic literature to discuss aesthetics—mainly, the relation between beauty and mourning, loss and desire, death and forbidden drives. Mandatory film screenings will be part of this course.