Authors: The Curious Case of Senorita Amelia

Rise and fall of the Term Third World – Ben Zimmer - Reverse telos versus linear progression
Third World Literature – Neil Larsen - What was happening at the turn of the century? Who represents who?
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad o The Europeans represented Doctor Z. The Africans (?) represented
Allegories of Atlas – Jose Rabasa Amelia
The Curious Case of Senorita Amelia – Ruben Dario - An example of modernism
Punishment, To the Sons of India, Song Offerings – Rabindranath Tagore o Reverse telos; it goes back; it can be cyclical
Journey Back to the Source – Alejo Carpentier o History is not linear  it is cyclical
The Heights of Machu Picchu – Pablo Neruda  Do the colonized really develop once the colonizers leave?
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe - This is the case for LAM; journey back to the source is for Africa
The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon - 3 movements:
The Blue Bouquet – Ocatavio Paz o Romanticism
Africa – David Diop o Parnassianism
The Smallest Woman in the World – Clarice Lispector  Stressed restraint, objectivity, technical perfection, and
precise description as a reaction against the emotionalism
and verbal imprecision of the Romantics
Modernism o Symbolism
- Shift in the dominant paradigm - Focused on the New World
o From religion  leaps in science o A search for newness to describe a new world
- Late 19th and early 20th century Spanish literary movement - This reading is the case of dwarfism  amelia didn’t grow old at all. Note that
- Used daring metaphors and innovative meters everyone got older as represented by the hair of doctor Z and Amelia’s sisters
- Sensuous imagery to express highly individual values looking older Commented [PM1]:
- Writing poetry of uncompromising aesthetic beauty - On Modernism: concept of time is questioned (hints of magical realism?)
Heart of Darkness - Luz and Josefina are sisters
- An early and important example of modernist experimentation in English fiction Punishment
- Meanings evade the interpreter; they are larger than the story itself - Patriarchal structure of society
- One reason for the centrality of heart of darkness to the history of modernism is o Leads to dehumanization of women
its openness to interpretation o Life of brother > life of wife because the wife is a mere accessory to
- Marlow’s journey to central Africa to confront the power-mad Kurtz can be the husband
interpreted as a political statement about imperialism and race, a critique of o “If I lose my wife I can get another, but if my brother is hanged, how
bureaucracy, a journey to the center of the self can I replace him?”
- No single interpretation exhausts its meaning - Dukhiram and Chidam Rui – brothers
- Use of multiple narrators undermines the nineteenth-century convention of - Radha and Chandara – sisters (in order of wife)
narrative omniscience - From the beginning of the text, the women were already reduced to systematic
or natural
 o Quarrelling and shouting
o They are expendable
- Furthermore, it reduces human into nothing more than an animal
- Tagore exposes the dehumanization of women in order to confront the issue
and give a voice to a suppressed demographic. His portrayal of woman as
invisible and expendable is thought-provoking
- Chandar’s self-sacrifice can be seen as a symbol of her wresting control from her
husband and the patriarchal society
o “Such a fierce, passionate, pride”
o She rises above the selfishness and pettiness of her original portrayal
and refuses to dehumanize her murdered sister-in-law
o She becomes a voice for equality and path towards respect, visibility,
and worth of women everywhere
Journey Back to the Source
- Totality of the information creates an image of a lusty man who has led a
relatively uneventful life
- Going back to the source  going to a time of innocence
- Symbolisms:
o Rome (Ceres) – represents change
o Old Negro – symbol of Afro-Cuban history
 History of slavery and colonization
 Pre-Columbian history
 Started the story-telling
 Griot-story tellers of the historic Africa
 Story telling serves as a resistance to the
oppression
 Begins as a seed in his mother’s womb
 Travelling back to the source  coming back to a pre-
colonized state  return to Semilia
 Prelapsarian state – the period of innocence;
period of purity, innocence, primeval
o Water – symbol of life and death
o Syncretism – story attempts to merge differing cultures or schools of
thought
- Cuban Characters:
o Marquessa – drowns
 Don Marcial may be responsible for this
o Old Negress
o Don Abundio
The Heights of Macchu Picchu
- Neruda speaks as the poet-spokesman for the LAM poor and oppressed
o Anchors the poem to the Earth Mother and the experiences of
returning to the geological origins to pre-contact civilizations to the
contemporary suffering masses
- I (the narrator)  dropping to Earth
o Works the experience of plunging, going down, dropping towards the
Earth
 Going back to the roots
 Exposes the harsh effects of capitalism in history in the
creation of Macchu Picchu
- Existential disillusionment with the pattern of life
- Talks about how the people in the city were being alienated; imagery of a city in
chaos
o There was a sense of resignation from the middle class; they have
accepted their miserable lives
- Neruda’s tone throughout the poem is mostly negative
o Where can we find unspoiled life?
o Alludes to the concept of decay and death to represent the death of
the middle class and the use of slaves?
- Neruda’s tone rises, falls, and rises again as he approaches Macchu Picchu
o He calls the ruins of MP as a place of death, humanity, and humanism
- His description of Macchu Picchu was almost chanting  this is to invoke into
existence the ruins of Macchu Picchu their buried dead
- Neruda talks of a hunger
o This hunger has been central to the creations of humankind as well as
the undoing of human beings, suffering for the brief glory of others
Things Fall Apart
- The ibo people are named after ideologies or superstitions
o When a person is given a name his gods accept it
From the Wretched of the Earth
The Pitfalls of National Consciousness
- The native devote energy in ending forced labor, corporal punishment,
inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc.
- Retrogression results due to the incapacity of the national middle class to
rationalize popular action – failure to see reasons for that action
- Native bourgeoisie of former colonies are unfit to do the nation-building
necessary to benefit all the people in the country. They are not genuine
visionaries but bureaucrats and technocrats
- Fanon says that that the country needs to reach out to the masses in the villages
outside of the capital cities and educate them to understand that the political
system needs to work in their interest and through them
- True change will come only when the common people take power
- Colonialism exacerbates class divisions
- Middle class as the transition between nation and a capitalism
On National Culture
- The legitimacy of claims to a nation
- The impulse to defend, rediscover, and tout cultural roots is both essential to
creating a national culture in the present, but also to the well-being of the
individual person
- Stages of development in the cultural worker:
o 1st: show that they have assimilated the dominant culture
o 2nd : rediscover their heritage
o 3rd: fighting stage where they try to awaken the people to struggle
- You show culture through the struggle itself
- Seething present  real movement is born and enacted
- Cultural struggle without politics and “street struggle” is empty
- Struggle for freedom vs expression of national culture
o Culture grows as the movement toward struggle grows  struggle for
nationhood
o A voice for the retrieved identity
o Marxism and communism at the service of black people
- Pan Africanism
o Note: all Africans lived in a situation that could be described as
colonial, semi-colonial or para-colonial
- Self-affirmation of black peoples
- Affirmation of the values of civilization of something defined as the “black
world”
Post-Colonialism and Post-Colonial Literature
- Aftermath of Western colonialism
- The movement of reclaiming the agency of people that suffered under the era
of imperialism
- Struggle of the IP’s
- One of the central themes: persistence of empire in human history – and
resistance to it
- Literature comes from former Western colonies
- Many writers of the movement write in the language of the colonizer and focus
on themes such as the struggle for independence, emigration, national identity
and culture, hybridity, allegiance among others.

Marxism
Negritude
- The expression of the value of “blackness” against the white supremacists who
used it as a slur