BASC70244 - Two Latin American Masters of the Short Story Part 2 - Julio Cortazar's Short Fiction: The Surreality of Everyday Life

Course Description

Instructor:  Joshua Daniel.  This short course is Part 2 of an exploration of the Latin American short story. This course stands alone from Part 1, but it’s worth stating that you will have a more multi-dimensional experience if you’ve taken the first part. The second part examines the short fiction of Julio Cortazar, one of the central figures of the Latin American Boom in literature in the 1960s. Less explicitly philosophical than his predecessor Borges, though no less intellectually demanding, Cortazar excelled at entangling the ordinary and the surreal in the smaller and larger moments of human life. Discussion will focus on how the surreal elements of Cortazar’s stories interact with their more realistic elements, tracing how he’s attempting to enrich and not only disrupt literary realism. Course code: BASC70244 Literature