Artistic and Literatury Culture in Spanish America Dra. Patricia Nigro pnigro@austral.ar

1. Artistic and Literatury Culture in SpanishAmericaDra. Patricia Nigropnigro@austral.edu.ar

2. Latin America Literature • The New World possessed their own forms of artistic verbal expression: from prayers, hymns, and myths to theatre. But even the most advanced pre-Columbian civilizations lacked alphabetic writing, so their “literature” was exclusively oral. • A substantial number of these oral narratives were preserved, thanks to the efforts of friars, priests, and chroniclers as well as native historians who learned to read and write, and the narratives’ themes, characters, topics, and even metaphors have been periodically adopted by Latin American literature.

3. Latin America Literature • Popol Vuh (The book of the people)Written en quiché (Guatemala y Honduras). • Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) : Hombres de maíz (1949) (Men made from corn). Nobel Prize 1967.

4. Latin America Literature • Carta de Colón. • Crónicas de Hernán Cortés. • Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1542). • Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca: • Comentarios reales (1609).

5. Latin America Literature • A distinctive kind of Baroque art developed in colonial Latin America, a style that has come to be known as the Barroco de Indias, or “Baroque of the Indies,” arguably the first authentic artistic style to emerge in the region. • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695)

6. Latin America Literature • Romanticism in Latin America was coeval with the movements that brought about independence from Spain to all Latin American countries: • Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851): “El matadero” (1840) (The Slaughterhouse) • Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888): Facundo o civilización y barbarie (1845) • Jorge Isaacs (1837-1895): María (1867)

7. Latin America Literature • Modernismo: the first since the Barroco de Indias to have a distinctly New World inflection. Its leader was the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío(1867-1916), the first great poet in the Spanish language since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. • Darío, who had been reading French Symbolist poetry, took seriously Rimbaud’s injunction that “one must be absolutely modern.” In that spirit Darío chose “Modernism” as the name for his movement. This meant writing poetry of uncompromising aesthetic beauty. • Profane Hymns (1888) and Songs of life and hope (1905)

8. Latin America Literature

9. Latin America Literature • The next important artistic movement in Latin America was the avant-garde, or the vanguardia, as it is known in Spanish. This movement reflected several European movements, especially Surrealism. It can be safely said that the repercussions of Surrealism in Latin America lasted throughout the 20th century. • Borges and his colleagues poets (1920-1930).

10. Latin America Literature • In prose fiction the vanguardia did not arrive as quickly. The first step was a renovation of the novel but within accepted 19th-century Realist forms. The first novels to be considered modern—that is, contemporary—in Latin American fiction were those written during and about the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). • Mariano Azuela (1873-1952): Los de abajo (1915) (The underdogs)

11. Latin America Literature • In the rest of Latin America there appeared a host of novels that came to be grouped under the rubric novelas de la tierra, or novela criollista. These novels were widely read and attained international recognition. The most notable were three by authors who acquired prominent places in Latin American literary history: • Ricardo Güiraldes: Don Segundo Sombra (1926) • Rómulo Gallegos: Doña Bárbara (1929) • José Eustasio Rivera: La vorágine (1924) (The Vortex)

12. Latin America Literature • Boom novels: • Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude), by Gabriel García Márquez, a world-class masterpiece that has entered the canon of Western literature. • Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch), by Julio Cortázar. • La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes. • La ciudad y los perros (1963; The city and the dogs), by Mario Vargas Llosa. • El astillero (1961; The shipyard), by Juan Carlos Onetti. • Coronación (1962; Coronation) by José Donoso.

13. Latin America Literature • Magic realism, chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. • The term magic realism is a relatively recent designation, first applied in the 1940s by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), who recognized this characteristic in much Latin-American literature. • El reino de este mundo (1950; The Kingdom of This World); Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps), his best-known work .

14. Latin America Literature Some scholars have posited that magic realism is a natural outcome of postcolonial writing, which must make sense of at least two separate realities—the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered. Prominent among the Latin-American magic realists are the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, and the Chilean Isabel Allende.