Latin America: A Paratext
F06
Jonathan Pitcher
This course will consider the often erroneous marketing of 20th- and 21st-century Latin America, both from within and beyond its borders, via an open evasion of reading and a privileging of discussion. A combination of the peritext and the epitext, a paratext is everything but the “text” (whether literature, film, music, or a t-shirt) itself. It is hoped that in studying the title, introduction, footnotes, binding, artwork, opening credits, reviews, and publishing (in short, the context) of key artifacts of Latin American modernity, we will construct a meta-discourse through which primary debates may be accessed with some facility, regardless of linguistic inexperience. Students will, however, develop their oral and written skills, progressing from paragraph-level exposition to an initial defense of ideas. The course should, almost osmotically, provide contextual support for future studies in Spanish.