ENGL 6410-01: Latinx Literature Now

Professor Ricardo Ortiz

Section Description: “Latinx Literature Now,” ENGL6410, focuses on literary and other cultural material produced by writers of US Latinx heritage published in the decade-plus between 2010 and 2024, as well as works of scholarship and criticism in Latinx literary and cultural studies that will help us frame the literary and creative material. The Anglo-US signifier “Latinx” already announces that our work can only be happening “now,” in the current moment of the mid-twenty-first century, and in a United States cultural and political context that struggles violently to know and to manage itself in the face of its increasing complexity and diversity. It also signals the necessarily intersectional as well as interdisciplinary nature of this course, since “Latinx” demands being read not just as a complex marker of ethnicity and/or race, but also of gender, and of sexuality, and of class, nation, and even political orientation. Key writers and artists featured in the course will include Elizabeth Acevedo, Daniel Alarcón, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Ada Limón, Valeria Luiselli, Carmen Maria Machado, Manuel Muñoz, and Justin Torres.