I found this book by César Vallejo, Contra el secreto profesional. It has been translated into English too. It is essays and aphorisms. It has interesting things about his poetics. There was a book of aphorisms that came out in English translation a few years back, and these are mostly (if not all) from this book. I'm thinking of using some things from it in the intro to lit class next semester. There is one about hats that is hilarious, and could be presented to students as a prose poem.
3 comments:
I love CSP and your idea is very intriguing, although I don't know if my students could hack it.
I was going to use the old textbook Aproximaciones a las lits. hisps. plus one non textbook reading this spring, because it can be an e-book and it has English reading aids and we may have to be remote and I just figured the students would need the crutch. Now it's out of print and I'm thinking of just reading texts again, not having it in textbook. Maybe I should consider CSP, hmmm.
Also and maybe OT, but re teaching, I came across some article of yours from 2011, I think, about teaching and receptivity. It's interesting for purposes of this course (and against everything they are telling us now at my university, we have to teach measurable skills, not just get people to have experiences or become receptive).
Most of it is too hard, but I can take some brief parts of it teach essay / aphorism / prose poem, in conjunction with microrrelatos of Julia Otxoa and short stories by Cortázar.
Measurable skills: creating meaningful interpretations of enigmatic literary texts, expressing them coherently and defending them in grammatical Spanish. Comparing two such enigmatic texts in a meaningful way.
Brilliant translation into measurability!
My department chair will be upset it I teach Cortázar or Borges again, too enigmatic, students see ambiguity as Satanic, complaints come. Although now we have a new chair, hm. Death and the Maiden got a complaint because Polanski made a film of it and Polanski is a rapist, so Dorfman is immoral. All of this is why having something inside a canned textbook is a good defense -- the Borges brouhaha was about how I had assigned marginal science fiction when I should be teaching major figures, and had it been Borges inside a textbook as opposed to in some less digested format, I would have been all right.
(It was of course very easy to show that Borges was a major figure, and then they accused me of having been mean to chair and administration by exposing their ignorance.)
These things having been said, I'd like to bring this kind of creativity to this course. Currently my theory of it is just to have them have exposure to reading fiction and literature -- many NEVER HAVE read anything but textbook copy, manuals, and so on and do not associate reading with any sort of pleasure, creativity, exploration or adventure.
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