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Speaker(s): Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This talk explores how two key works of mid-twentieth-century fiction registered the uneven and contradictory dynamics of rural modernization in Latin America. While it remains commonplace to associate the rural with tradition and/or backwardness, this talk explores how fiction envisioned rural spaces as sites of particularly violent processes of modernization in their own right. In Juan Rulfo’sÌýPedro PáramoÌý(1955)Ìýand José Donoso’sÌýEl lugar sin límitesÌý(1966), Beckman will show, modernization is figured as a kind of living hell, in which rural spaces are alternately drawn into and thrown out of circuits of capital accumulation at different moments of history. Drawing from these two texts, Beckman will point to larger ways in which Latin American fiction depicted the creation and destruction of rural worlds during the long twentieth century.

For more information and the pre-circulated readings, please contact graduate student coordinators Patricia Valderrama (pvalderr [at] stanford.edu (pvalderr[at]stanford[dot]edu)) or Monica VanBladel (monicavb [at] stanford.edu (monicavb[at]stanford[dot]edu)).

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