Carranglan National High School

F.C. Otic, Carranglan, Nueva Ecija

S. Y. 2022 – 2023

First Semester: Second Quarter

21st Century Literature

Notable Writers Around the World: Latin America & Africa

OBJECTIVES:
 Identify the notable authors around the world, specifically writers from
Latin America and Africa.
 Identify and understand their works.

INTRODUCTION:
Latin America is the portion of the Americas, compromising of the region
where Romance Languages are predominantly spoken.
Romance languages are the following:
 Spanish
 Portuguese
 French
 Italian
 Romanian
Meanwhile, Africa is the world’s second largest and second-most populous
continent.
Main Themes of Latin American Literature
Latin American literature consists of four major themes which are the
“fantastic”, magic realism, social realism, and female discourse.
The “fantastic” is the odd, remarkable or bizarre, grotesque and highly
unrealistic events occur in fiction. It takes place in an unreal world with unreal
characters, so it is not likely to happen in real life.
Magic realism is when magical or supernatural elements are introduced into an
otherwise realistic fictional setting. It is always serious because it is trying to convey
the reality of one or several worldviews that actually exist.
Social realism is the dark and often depressing depictions of life in Latin
America. Sometimes, the literature reflects the violent history of the region.

NOTABLE WRITERS OF LATIN AMERICA:

1. Isabel Allende is a Chilean American author born on August 2, 1942,

in Lima, Peru. Allende is considered to be one of the first successful women novelists
from Latin America. She is a writer in the magic realist tradition, in which realistic
fiction is overlaid with elements of fantasy and myth. Her works mostly encompasses
her portrayal of the South American politics, her experiences and the role of women
in Latin America.

 Awards and Honors of Allende:

In 1996 Allende used the profits from Paula to fund the Isabel Allende
Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations targeting issues faced by women
and girls in Chile and the San Francisco Bay area. She was awarded the:
o 2010; Chilean National Prize in Literature (Premio Nacional de Literature)

o 2014; U. S. Presidential Medal of Freedom

o 2016; PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Works of Allende
 The House of the Spirits
Her first novel, The House of the Spirits was actually a letter to her terminally
ill grandfather that she started writing in 1981 that evolved into her first novel.
The novel follows three generations of Trueba women—Clara, Blanca, and
Alba—as they struggle to establish their independence from Esteban Trueba, the
domineering family patriarch.

 City of the Beasts

The first young adult novel published by Allende in 2002.
City of the Beasts centers on the adventures of Alexander Cold. In the midst of
his mother's struggle with cancer, fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold has the opportunity
to take the trip of a lifetime. Accompanying his fearless grandmother, a magazine
reporter for International Geographic, Alexander sets off on an expedition to the
remote world of the Amazon.

 Daughter of Fortune
Daughter of Fortune is about a Chilean woman who leaves her country
for the California gold rush of 1848–49.

 Paula
Allende’s first nonfiction work, Paula, was written as a letter to her daughter,
who died of a hereditary blood disease in 1992.

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Columbian novelist and one of the

greatest writers of the 20th century. He was born on March 6, 1927, Aracataca,
Columbia. Marquez was associated with the magic realism genre. His works depicts
the provincial Columbia. In 1999, he was diagnosed with cancer, and he died on the
17th of April 2014 at Mexico City, Mexico.

 Awards and Honors:

o 1982; Nobel Prize for Literature

Works of Marquez
 One Hundred Years of Solitude
The novel’s central theme revolves around human isolation. The novel tells
the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio
Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo.

 Love in the Time of Cholera

 The novel, Love in Time of Cholera is all about learning to wait, about
perseverance and endurance, and about never forsaking the object of one’s love. It
also is about eternal fidelity and everlasting love.

 The novel is about a touching love affair that took decades to

be consummated.

 The Leaf Storm

Llosa’s first published work.

 The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch is divided into six sections, each one retelling a
similar story of a Caribbean dictator and his hold on power until the inevitable
revolution comes for him.

Marquez painted the lead character as an eternal dictator doomed to the same
terrible cycle of rising to power only to fall over and over again. Although different
circumstances bring him into power each time, he and the dictator he replaces
always become one and the same.

 Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Garcia Gabriel Marquez’s last work.

 Living to Tell the Tale

It focuses on the past 30 years of the life of Marquez. Living to Tell the Tale
is an account of the author's development from a shy young boy into a working
journalist, published short-story writer, and burgeoning novelist.

3. Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, actor,

and a former politician. He was born on March 28, 1936, Arequipa, Peru.
Marquez is committed to social change, which in sociology is the alteration of
mechanisms within the social structure, characterized by changes in cultural symbols,
rules of behavior, social organizations, or value systems.

 Award and Honors:

o 2010; Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded
annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will
of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most
outstanding work in an idealistic direction".

o 1994; Cervantes Prize

It is the most prestigious and remunerative award given for Spanish-language
literature. The Cervantes Prize is presented to an author whose Castilian-language
work as a whole is judged to have most enriched Spanish and Spanish-American
culture.

o 1995; Jerusalem Prize

 The Jerusalem Prize is awarded biennially to a writer whose work best
expresses and promotes the idea of “freedom of the individual in society.”

o Hemingway Award

o National Book Critics Circle Awards (Winner)

Works of Llosa

 The City and the Dogs / The Time of the Hero

The Time of the Hero was the first novel of Marques and was set in the cadets
of Leoncio Prado. The novel describes adolescents in a Peruvian military school
striving to survive in a hostile and violent environment.

An adolescent boy from a middle-class background comes of age as a cadet in

a military school. When the death of one of his classmates during a training exercise
is covered up by the school officials, the cadet tries to expose the truth.

 The Green House

The Green House is Llona’s second novel.

Vargas Llosa’s classic early novel takes place in Piura, a Peruvian town
situated between desert and jungle, and which is torn by boredom and lust. Don
Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while
he charms its innocent people, thus setting of a chain-reaction with extraordinary
consequences.

This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the
corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute:
Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both
excitement and escape.

 Conversation in the Cathedral

Conversation in the Cathedral is a novel about power and politics in Peru in
the early 1950’s. It is a history of Peru and Latin American dictatorship told in a
conversation between two of the characters who meet in a cathedral, a bar and a cheap
eating house.

Santiago is the son of an influential politician who, like so many idealistic

young people in the ‘60s, has rejected his father’s corrupt if pragmatic world.
Santiago is a minor editorial-page journalist.

One afternoon, at the insistence of his wife, he goes in search of the family
dog. Dogs were being picked up as strays, even if they weren’t, because the
dogcatchers got paid per animal.

At the pound Santiago runs into his father’s now-aging chauffeur, Ambrosio.
The subject of their long conversation is the 16-year dictatorship of Manuel Odría
who ruled Peru from 1948 until 1956, as Santiago seeks for the truth about his
father’s involvement in a notorious murder of that era.
 Over beers and a sea of freely spoken words, the conversation flows between
two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the
overall degradation and frustration that has slowly taken over their town.

 The Feast of the Goat

The novel, The Feast of the Goat, is set in the Dominican Republic. It is about
the story of 70-year-old Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo (also known as El Chivo,
The Goat) and the day of his assassination in 1961.

 Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter (film; 1990, Tune in Tomorrow)

The novel is about Marito and the people he met who played a role in his
becoming a man.

 Pantaleon and the Visitors / Captain Pantoja and the Special Services
(film;2000)
The Peruvian army captain Pantaleon Pantoja, a very serious and efficient
officer, is chosen to set up a special service of 'visitors' to satisfy the sexual needs of
the soldiers posted on remote jungle outposts.

 The Escape of Inca

The collapse of the Inca Empire started when the Spaniards arrived in Central
America and transmitted their diseases to locals who spread them to other parts of the
continent including South America.

 The War of the End of the World

An account of the 19th-century political conflicts in Brazil.

4. Patricio Pron is an Argentine author and literary critic. He was born

on December 9, 1975, at Rosario, Argentina.
Pron uses anonymous protagonists and secondary characters especially in his
novel, Tomorrow We Will Have Other Names.
He is also the author of seven novels and sic story collection.

 Themes of Pron’s Works

o Examination of contemporary society and relationships between

couples.
o Sexual abuse and changing gender roles.
o Growing power of social media and the decline of literary culture.
o Terrorist threat and the precariousness of modern existence.
o Environmental pollution.
o Impact of climate change on Madrid.
o Criticism of some aspects of Spanish culture.
o Issues of generational differences.
 Awards and Honors:

o 2008; José Manuel Lara Foundation Award

o Juan Rulfo Prize

 o Premio Literario Jaén de Novela Award

o 2019; Alfaguara Prize

Works of Pron
 Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets

 The Peculiar State

 My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

The novel deals with the era of the military junta: After years of studying, a
young Argentinean returns home from Germany to his father’s sickbed. In his desk,
he discovers clues to the political activities of his parents during the military
dictatorship. The supposedly happy family life of his childhood reveals itself to be an
illusion.

 Bringing it All Back Home

 2019; Tomorrow We Will have Other Names (Mañana tendremos otros

nombres)
It is a psychologically precise analysis of a failed love affair and, beyond that,
a portrait of a neurotic, universally networked society with its consumer-oriented
relation to the relationships of couples.

5. Rodrigo Hasbun is a Bolivian author ans he was born in 1981

(Cochabamba, Bolivia).

 Awards and Honors:


o Bolivian Santa Cruz de la Sierra National Book Award

o Bogotá 39

o Granta’s Best Young Spanish – Language Novelists

Works of Hasbun

 El Lugar Del Cuerpo

Hasbun’s first novel.

 Affections
Hasbun’s second novel.

In this compact and evocative historical novel, a filmmaker flees from the
scene of the twentieth century’s greatest crime, only to find his family enmeshed in a
deadly struggle on another continent. A skilled cameraman, Hans Ertl was a key
member of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda unit, but when World War II ended,
he was rendered a pariah in his native Germany. Now Hans, his wife, Aurelia, and
their three daughters are trying to start anew in Bolivia.
 }
 Cinco

 Los Dias Mas Felices Short Stories

 Cuatro

 Nueve
Volume of selected stories.

NOTABLE WRITER OF AFRICA

 1. Nadine Gordimer is a South African author. She was born on
November 20, 1923, Springs, Transvaal, South Africa and died on July 13, 2014,
Johannesburg, South Africa.
 Theme:
o Exile
o Alienation
o Apartheid
Apartheid, the Afrikaans name given by the white-ruled South Africa's
Nationalist Party in 1948 to the country's harsh, institutionalized system of racial
segregation, came to an end in the early 1990s in a series of steps that led to the
formation of a democratic government in 1994.
 Awards and Honors:
o 1991; Nobel Prize for Literature

o 1974; Booker Prize

o 2007; French Legion of Honor

Works of Gordimer
 The Conservationist
In South Africa under apartheid, Mehring is a rich white businessman who is
not satisfied with his life. His ex-wife has gone to America, his liberal son, Terry
(who is probably gay) criticizes his conservative/capitalist ways, and his lovers and
colleagues do not actually seem interested in him.

 The Lying Days

The Lying Days is the debut novel of Nobel winning South African novelist,
Nadine Gordimer. 

 Face to Face
First published short story collection by Gordimer. It is a collection of short
stories.

 Living in Hope and History; Notes from Our Century

Collection of essays, correspondence, and reminiscences.
NOTABLE WRITERS’S AROUND THE
WORLD:
LATIN AMERICA & AFRICA: GORDIMER

Reporters
Karrel Faith W. Alawas
Christian Josh Aquino
King Darwin Baltazar
 Jethro Mananga
Nadine Bautista
Diana Tarlino

Annalyn Corpuz Aspric

Subject Teacher