Mar 28, 2024  
Undergraduate Catalog 2021-22 
    
Undergraduate Catalog 2021-22 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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HISP 3390 - Contemporary Latin America


This course is taught in English and will provide students with the academic tools to appreciate, think, and write critically on cinema, literature, religious performances, and other cultural forms produced by contemporary Latin American societies. Different versions of the course will be offered, taught by faculty representing different areas of expertise in the department. By studying trends in contemporary cinema, literature and other cultural forms in today’s Latin America, the student will engage with alternative artistic and linguistic representations of a reality, that of Latin America, whose social, cultural, economical and technological otherness challenges and reconfigures Eurocentric world views. Accordingly, the topics of this course provide opportunities to step outside one’s own frame of reference by considering the human experience and the potential for human achievement from other perspectives. In one planned topic of this course, students will learn about a cinematic model that thrives in the midst of economic and technological limitations that are pertinent to Latin American reality. The way films are made in Latin America is very different from the modes of film-making in Hollywood and Western Europe. By examining this example of the arts, ideas and institutions in other cultures, this course will stimulate reflections on the characteristics of various cultures. In doing so, the course will also emphasize the adaptive nature of cultures or civilizations in response to the challenges of physical environment, intercultural and international relations, and internal socio-economic dynamics. In another planned topic of this course, by reading the works of contemporary Latin American poets and novelists, the student will be faced with manifestations of literary modernity that redefine what has been deemed as literary modernity in the West. Thus, in the process of examining works of literature produced outside the European cultural arena, the course will explore alternative views of modernization. The study of ex-centric sites of literary enunciation (e.g., Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina) will stimulate student reflection on the interaction of cultures and nations in an increasingly interdependent world. This course satisfies WMU Essential Studies Level 2: Exploration and Discovery – Artistic Theory and Practice Category. May be repeated for credit.

Credits: 3 hours



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