Welcome to Latin American Literaure

This blog will have my reader responses to the stories that we are reading in the Winter 2011 Latin American Literature course. I love this literature because it is so imaginative, and it makes me stretch my understanding of people's motivations. Although we are reading these texts in translation, I think we have some good translators that offer us beautiful language in English, although I do enjoy reading these pieces in Spanish when I have a little more time. I am a particular fan of Borges and the amazing way he shifts reality in his writing so that dreams seem more real than the world we actually live in. In the literature that comes from Latin America it seems that there is a juxtaposition of gritty reality and dreamy magical realism. It seems that mixing the two creates a new way to endure difficulty because the magical realism extracts the suffering of everyday life into a mythical world where I get to feel like a hero because I just made it through another day. It makes even the prosaic marvelous.