BASC70082 - Octavio Paz: Poet and Thinker

Course Description

The works of the Mexican writer Octavio Paz (1914-1998; Nobel Prize 1990) invite an exploration of the complex relationship between thought and emotion, idea and image, individual experience and philosophy, mythology and history, the national and the universal. We will enter this fascinating world through the double door of Paz’s poetry and essays. The creative feedback between a selection of his poems and two of his prose books, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1975) and The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (1993), will reveal more about Paz’s creative process and his unique place in the twentieth-century literature. 

Course Outline

Reading List:

Paz, O., The Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987. New Directions, 2018. ISBN 978-0811227568
Paz, O., The Labyrinth of Solitude. Grove Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0802150424
Paz, O., The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Mariner Books, 1996. ISBN 978-0156003650