Call for Essay Proposals for Teaching the Latin American Boom

For the Options for Teaching series, the Publications Committee has approved development of the volume Teaching the Latin American Boom, edited by Lucille Kerr and Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola. The volume will comprise literary, political, historical, economic, and media-based analyses of the Boom phenomenon and will therefore provide an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literary production for specialist and nonspecialist instructors of Latin American literature.

The editors seek proposals for essays (approx. 3,000–3,500 words in length) exploring the following topics: (1) the Boom's new aesthetics (e.g., precursor practices, formal innovations, new literary language); (2) politics, polemics, and debates (e.g., the Cuban Revolution and its discontents, the uses and abuses of magic realism); (3) marketing the Boom (e.g., publishing, translations, international readership); (4) the Boom and other literary traditions (e.g., US American, Brazilian, Spanish, Latino) and forms of cultural production (e.g., film, media, music); and (5) the Boom's relation to diverse groups of writers, genres, and cultural tendencies (e.g., writing by women and ethnic minorities, testimonial literature, the new historical novel, popular culture). Proposals for other relevant topics are welcome, particularly those with a wide-ranging scope and interdisciplinary focus. The editors encourage the participation of junior and senior scholars from the field of Latin American studies and from related areas and disciplines.

Please send one- to two-page abstracts by 10 January 2010 to Kerr (lckerr@northwestern.edu) and Herrero-Olaizola (aherrero@umich.edu); hard copies can be sent to Kerr: Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, Crowe Hall 1-141, Northwestern Univ., 1860 Campus Dr., Evanston, IL 60208-2161.