SPAN 331 Trans-Atlantic Literature

A study of the role that the written word played in building a transatlantic literary culture that linked the Spanish peninsula to the American colonies: the ways in which Spain shaped the literature of its colonies, and how the discovery shaped Spanish readers' understandings of the world and their place in it. Beginning with travel accounts and letters from America, students will explore the ways in which these reports depict and construct the image of the American other, the African slave, and the Spanish colonizer-particularly the role of intellectuals in the development of a circum-Atlantic identity.