Teaching Modern Latin American Poetries
- Editors: Jill S. Kuhnheim, Melanie Nicholson
- Pages: 352
- Published: 2019
- ISBN: 9781603294669 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603294096 (Paperback)
“This is more than a guide for literature and Spanish-language classrooms—it is an indispensable resource for other disciplines as well. . . .”
—Juan Pablo Lupi, University of California, Santa Barbara
The essays in this book, groundbreaking for its focus on teaching Latin American poetry, reflect the region’s geographic and cultural heterogeneity. They address works from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Uruguay, as well as from indigenous communities found within these national distinctions, including the Kaqchikel Maya and Zapotec. The volume’s essays help instructors teach poetry written from the second half of the twentieth century on, meaningfully connecting this contemporary corpus with older poetic traditions. Contributors address teaching various topics, from the silva and the long poem to Afro-descendant poetry, in ways that bring performance, digital approaches, queer theory, and translation into action. The insights found here will demonstrate how Latin American poetry can become a part of classes in African diasporic studies, indigenous studies, history, and anthropology.
Introduction: Teaching the Language of Poetry (1)
Part I:Poetic Literacy and the Latin American Canon
Looking Back to Look Beyond: Latin American Poetry from Its Origins to the Present (15)
Poetic Literacy: Beyond Nervous Cluelessness and the New Critical Residue (32)
An Entrance to Dark Forests: The Spanish American Silva from Sor Juana to Bello and Storni (43)
Difficult Poetry: Teaching the Avant-Garde and the Neobaroque (60)
Minding the Gaps: Strategies for Teaching the Contemporary Spanish American Long Poem (75)
A Course Model for the Liberal Arts Curriculum (90)
Part II: Orality, Multimedia, and Comparative Arts
Simultaneous Senses and Vital Dialogues in Latin American Poetry (105)
Teaching Experimental Latin American Poetry: Visual, Concrete, Performative, and Digital (119)
Songs of the Cenzontle: Re-cording Orality in Contemporary Mexican Lyric Poetry (134)
Creativity, Interpretation, and the Public Good in Teaching Latin American Poetry (147)
Insularity, Invention, and Interfaces: Brazilian Lyric and Contemporary Imperatives (160)
Leaning toward Affect: Teaching Poetry with Performance (171)
Part III: Poetic Contexts and the Idea of Latin America
Teaching Poetry and Human Rights (189)
Comparative Arts, Coloniality, and Decoloniality: Teaching the Afro-Descendant Poetry of Antonio Preciado, Elcina Valencia, and ChocQuibTown (204)
Teaching Latin American Poetry as a Vulnerable Genre (220)
Using Community-Based Learning to Teach Poetry in the Spanish Language Classroom (235)
On Poet-Scholars: Un Taller de Poesía (252)
From Paz to the Infrarrealistas : Rethinking the Mexican Canon (267)
Ri Pach’un Tzij aj Iximulew: Teaching Contemporary Maya Poetries from Guatemala (279)
Teaching Indigenous Poetries through Translation (292)
The Queerospheric Classroom: Queer Pedagogy and Brazilian Poetry (304)
Notes on Contributors (317)
Works Cited (321)
