Narrative Prose in Latin America: Finance and Form

This course examines the relations between economic systems and aesthetic form in Latin America from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Focusing on a cluster of questions rather than a purely historical genealogy, the course asks how economic systems translate into aesthetics and how aesthetic form renders, inverts, speculates about or mimes such systems. Emphasis on: 1) slave-based economies 2) fin-de-siglo finance capital 3) petroleum and other extractivist economies and 4) neoliberalism and digital finance. Readings in literature, art history, and criticism.