by Andrew Anderson ´10
Seven pages of Circe, a short story by prolific Argentinean author Julio Cortázar, sit before me. Book 10 of the Odyssey is open on the computer and my Spanish Grammar book is dog-eared in countless places as my hair is slowly being pulled out at the thought of the approximately 459 Verb tenses I don´t know. I have to read it by the next day for my 5th Course Literature class with a focus on Classics; although it is unlike any classics course I have ever been in.
Tommy Williams ´11 and Jake Steffens ´12 enjoy some light reading The tenet of the class is to read a classic, such as Antigone or the Odyssey, and then a rendition of that myth by a contemporary Argentinean author. For example 
Naturally I was intrigued by Latin American authors´ seeming fascination with the classics, and rewriting them within the context of Latin America. This interesting idea, which seems to me to be unique to Latin America, or at least exaggerated in the region, led me to do some research in the Latin American Boom. This is the group of authors who wrote from roughly the late 1950´s to the 1970´s. Hemingway called the post WW1 expatriates ``The Lost Generation´´ but the title more aptly refers to this generation of Latin American authors, they were an ``orphan literary generation, without a Latin American father of influence.´´
Thinking back to my instructions from the great Mr. J.T. Danforth, we as United Stateans have received our literary history from the British. However the Latin American Boom was literally a new creation, before this few Latin American authors were even considered in discussions on literature; however authors like Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez (of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera fame) are now part of the Western Literary Canon.
These writers had an interest in classics, and rewriting them, because it was seen as a way of creating a unique Latin American mythic and cultural narrative, something that had failed to exist before. The Greeks had their myths, their start of civilization, and the authors of the Latin American Boom realized that the New World needed that as well.
The perspective of an ``orphaned´´ Latin America made me realize the power of novels in forming how we think about our country. I remember how Mark Twain and Herman Melville are so crucial in creating a national identity; I also give a little shudder for Twilight. To fully understand a culture, we are lost without knowing its origins, how it thinks about itself. So those seven pages were the most grueling, difficult seven pages of my life, but perhaps we might consider the countless countries that are just waiting to be written.
Brophy students go on a quest for cultural narratives
by Andrew Anderson ´10
