PIGOTT HALL, ROOM 216
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Guest speaker: Ericka Beckman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spanish and Portuguese)

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’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites (1966), Beckman shows, 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 in history. Drawing from these two texts, Beckman points to larger ways in which Latin American fiction depicted the creation and destruction of rural worlds during the long twentieth century.

Ericka Beckman is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a DLCL alumna. Her research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. Her first book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region’s economies into world markets at the end of the nineteenth century. Her current book project looks at how literary fiction imagined the making and unmaking of rural worlds in the long twentieth century.