Magical Realism and Questions of Power
Starting just before and lasting beyond the AP® exams, this unit will be slower-paced (with potential for “last-minute” review for the May exams) and center strictly around one reading: Lawrence Thornton’s award-winning novel Imagining Argentina. Set during Argentina’s la Guerra Sucia (1976-1983) and told through a first-person perspective that layers the relation of events, this novel re-imagines historical events through fictional characters. The unit, its reading and the discussion questions that accompany it, surveys the many literary tools learned throughout your time in various literature courses and used by Thornton in the telling of his story. Among the themes explored are the means by which people deal with deep personal strife and questions of individual responses to governmental abuse of the rights and freedoms of its citizens. You will be encouraged to relate the themes of the book to other books that if you have not read, you are encouraged to read as an accompaniment to Imagining Argentina: namely, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, 280 pp.), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949, 300 pp.), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, 311 pp.), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2003, 250 pp.), Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994, 350 pp.), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013, 500 pp.), or some other dystopian or magical realism book that you’ve heard of and that you run past me for approval.