Prof. Stephen Henighan (University of Guelph, Canada)
"Nation Through Landscape: Rodrigo Rey Rosa's Use of Environmental Themes in Lo que soñó Sebastián"
SPLAS Seminar (Co-sponsored by the Centre for Contemporary Latin American Studies [CCLAS])
Room: 50 George Square - 3.29
Date: Mon 21/10/2019
Time: 12:00 - 13:15
The Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa (b. 1958) began his literary career during the 1980s in exile in Morocco, where he was mentored and translated into English by the expatriate American writer Paul Bowles. In 1994 Rey Rosa returned to Guatemala. Under the influence of the travel writer Bowles, he assimilated his country into his fiction as a landscape rather than a social order; this led him to set his first novel with a Guatemalan setting, Lo que soñó Sebastián, in the Petén rainforest, and to focus on environmental themes. This presentation assesses the techniques used by Rey Rosa to dramatize the theme of environmental justice, as well as the significance of the jungle in terms of the trajectory of Rey Rosa's later career. Consideration will be given, also, to the changes Rey Rosa made to this material when he produced a feature film based on the book, What Sebastian Dreamt, released in 2004.
Lunch will be served.