Index # 12654
Will Count Towards Comparative Literature or Environmental Studies MAJOR
Will Count Towards Comparative Literature or Environmental Studies MINOR
Since the beginning of the 19th century and up to the present, a vast corpus composed of travel narratives, scientific accounts, literary fictions, feature films and documentaries have all contributed to the most common stereotypes of the Amazon: Unknown World, Eternal Landscape, Green Hell, Garden of Eden, Paradise Lost, Land of No Evil, Great Adventure, Pristine Rainforest, etc.
What these narratives have often in common is that their protagonists, often urban modern male subjects disillusioned with modernity, progressively turned their attention to the wilderness of the tropical forests. In there, they expected to find an opportunity for forging an alternative but still modern life-style in close contact with the landscape and its humans and nonhumans inhabitants.
The Amazon would offer to European and North American travelers and to criollo South American settlers an experience of the pre-historical origins of the world, or a laboratory of evolutionary history, or a refuge of ahistorical and universal truths about humans and nature (for instance, freedom, artistic authenticity, overcoming alienation from self and others, and the renewal of gender identity).
Unfortunately, at the end of their journeys, what these characters found was that colonization and capitalism had already preceded them. From rubber to logging to oil to natural gas to gold to coca leave and soybean plantations, the extractivist industries threaten to enslave travelers and settlers alike, just as they have done with native peoples. And if these protagonists are not destroyed by the agents of colonization, their search usually ends in failure, or death as the environmental, anthropological and historical peculiarities of the jungle shatters any previous expectations and assumptions.
For the reader of these narratives, the ultimate consequences of these crises are not as disappointing, after all. On the one hand, the reader witnesses the process through which the characters reach an awareness of their own embodiment, and embedment into the environment as a condition of personal and social being. On the other hand, as the reader follows the misfortunes of the characters’, he/she realizes that such experience of nature is interdependent with the social conditions that in fact made it possible. In conclusion, the Western archive of Amazonian narratives in fact illustrates the complex interaction of individual, society and nature in ways that resonate with current notions of political ecology, environmental history, social “metabolism,” and sustainability.
Focusing on a combination of Latin American films and fiction in translation from Spanish, and texts or films originally written in English, this seminar will explore the variations to the basic narrative outlined above in the past century, as we prepare for our own journey to the Amazon.
About Professor Marcone
Professor Jorge Marcone currently serves as Undergraduate Director in Comparative Literature, and previously has served as the Undergraduate Director in Spanish and Portuguese. He has directed the Summer Study Abroad Programs in Spain and Cuzco and is the departmental advisor for students attending study abroad programs in Spanish-speaking countries. In recent years Prof. Marcone has taught Honors sections of “Literature Across Borders” (Comp. Lit.), “Latin America: An Introduction,” and “Introduction to Hispanic Literature.” His research and teaching interests focus on “ecocriticism,” the umbrella name for a diversity of ecologically oriented interdisciplinary approaches in literary and cultural studies. Professor Marcone specializes on the history of environmentalism and ecological thinking in Hispanic literatures and cultures, and on the representation of Amazonia in literature, film, and other visual arts. At Rutgers University since 1991, Professor Marcone holds a B.A. in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics from the Universidad Católica del Perú, and a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin.