Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez

This course examines the literary works of the two most influential Spanish-language writers of the 20th century: Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. Using different perspectives, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and cultural analysis, we will study these authors’ thematic and formal obsessions, exploring the ways in which their short-stories, essays and poems interrogate the historical traumas, political contexts, and aesthetic debates of the period. Their diversity will be explored within the context of shared obsessions (reflexivity, intertextuality, fragmentation, experimentalism; magic, myth, and fantasy) and recurring themes: time, memory, sexuality, class, ethnicity, language, war, history, power, modernity.