First-Year Studies: New Literature From Europe

Perhaps more than anything else, literature defines the identity of cultures and nations. At the same time, few cultural manifestations help to bring together peoples and cultures as powerfully as literature, which gives a special significance to the fact that only three percent of the books published in the United States are translations. In a world where technology has made borders obsolete in many ways, the lack of curiosity for the great literatures of the world is an alarming symptom of North America´s cultural isolation. Starting with Latin America, all continents have an astonishing wealth of literatures. Europe is just one of them. The seat of ancient civilizations and empires that conquered the rest of the world, the Europe of today is dramatically different from what it once was. After two world wars and the collapse of formidable utopias, contemporary European reality is extraordinarily elusive and complex. Forty languages are spoken in almost as many European countries nowadays, each of them representing a vibrant body of literature. In this course, we will study the literary manifestations of the new Europe, paying special attention to her youngest authors. In our approach, we will focus on sociopolitical displacements such as the reshaping of the European identities, resulting from the influx of immigrants from all over the world, and the conflicts derived from the dream of a unity that coexists with the birth of a whole set of youthful countries that transcend the notion of nationality—ethnically, culturally, and linguistically.