Jorge Ruffinelli
Jorge Ruffinelli
Department Director
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Contact:
Pigott Hall 221
650 725 0112
ruffin@stanford.edu
Office Hours:
Thursdays by AppointmentBIO:
Professor Jorge Ruffinelli (Uruguay), a disciple of Angel Rama at the University of Uruguay, followed him as Director of the literary section of the seminal Uruguayan weekly Marcha in 1968. In 1973 he was Adjunct Professor of the Latin American literature program (directed by Noé Jitrik) at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1974 he emigrated to México, where he was appointed Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias at the Universidad Veracruzana, a position he held for for twelve years. At the Universidad Veracruzana he was also Professor in the school of Letters, and collaborated in all the major cultural journals and newspapers of the Latin American continent. In 1986 he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. In Mexico he founded and directed the literary journal Texto crítico for twelve years. A member of various international editorial boards, in the United States he has directed the journal Nuevo texto crítico since 1987.
He has published twenty books of literary and cultural criticism and more than five hundred articles, critical notes and reviews in journals throughout the world. A recognized authority on Onetti, García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Latin American literary history, during the nineties his critical work has centered on Latin American cinema. In 1993 he filmed a documentary on Augusto Monterroso for which he interviewed major Mexican writers and critics. He is completing the first Encyclopedia of Latin American Cinema, for which he has written around two thousand articles on feature films from and about Latin America. His current work also includes a book of interpretation and survey of the most recent Spanish American prose published by writers born after 1968, a project that analyzes the work, marketing, and reception of over more than fifty authors (Ana Solari, Milagros Socorro, Karla Suarez, Mayra Santos, David Toscana, Rodrigo Fresan, Juan Forn, Martin Kohan, Jorge Vopli, among others). His teaching centers on the intersection of the interests above and cultural politics.
Professional Activities
At Stanford University, he has been Department Chair (1990-91, 1997), and Director of the Center of Latin American Studies (1994, 1997-1998), as well as a member of numerous university and interdepartmental committees. Throughout the years he has been a Jury Member in several international literary prizes and film Festivals: Marcha (Uruguay); Casa de las Américas (La Habana, Cuba); Premio Internacional Juan Rulfo (Guadalajara, Mexico); Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (La Habana, Cuba); Festival Internacional de San Sebastian-Donostia (Pais Vasco, Espana), Festival Internacional de Trieste (Italia).
Courses
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ILAC257Spr2012-13
Focus on Pinochet coup, the Falkland Islands, the prison Libertad in Uruguay, the "Plan Condor." How literature, journalism and cinema denounced and revisited the worst political times in Latin America. Taught in Spanish.
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ILAC251Win2012-13
Latin American literary theory through the works of José Carlos Mariátegui, José Enrique Rodó, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwartz, Angel Rama, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Josefina Ludmer, Flora Sussekind. This course will focus on the concepts of "the lettered city", "hybridization", "psychoanalysis", "marxist theory", "class struggle", "literary politics", "latinamericanism". In sum: Literary theory from the inside of Latin American culture, considering also its Western influences. Taught in Spanish.
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ILAC243Aut2012-13
Between 2000 and 2012, a young Spanish American novel emerges, taking at times a minimalist point of view to narrate individual stories with a subjective tone,
or continuing a tradition of the historical panorama to present national tragedies that occurred in the last two or three decades. Focus is on this new type of novel from different countries, with such titles as "El cuerpo en que nací" by Guadalupe Entel; "Las teorías salvajes" by Pola Oloixarac; "El ruido de las cosas al caer" by Juan Gabriel Vazquez; and "Bonsai" by Alejandro Zambra, among others. -
ILAC161Win2012-13
From independence to the present. Topics include romantic allegories of the nation; modernism and postmodernism; avant-garde poetry; regionalism versus cosmopolitanism; indigenous and indigenist literature; magical realism and the literature of the boom; Afro-Hispanic literature; and testimonial narrative. Authors may include: Bolivar, Bello, Gómez de Avellaneda, Isaacs, Sarmiento, Machado de Assis, Dario, Marti, Agustini, Vallejo, Huidobro, Borges, Cortizar, Neruda, Guillon, Rulfo, Ramos, García Márquez, Lispector, Bolaño.
