Read short story answer 6 questions
Answer the following questions 2 SEPARATE WAYS – BASED ON THE STORY BELOW
Some intellectual writers from Argentina said that it was because of the Barbarians that the country was in terrible shape and that it was because of them that they had Rosas, the dictator in Argentina, in power.
1.- What do you think of this terms? (base your answer on the reading)
2.- Do you think there is discrimination in this text and why?
3.- why do you think this is consider a Romantic Short Story?
El Matadero
The second section of this course deals with Romantisism in Latin America. It goes from 1810 to 1860 aproximately. The first reading is The Slaughter House (El Matadero), which was written two century ago by the Argentine poet Esteban Echeverria (1809-1851), is included today among the outstanding classics of Latin American literature. It is one of the very earliest works of prose fiction written in America by an American and dealing with American characters and background. A disciple of Byron who resided in Europe during a period of revolutionary upheavals and literary insurgence, Echeverria was a romantic poet and a liberal inspired by the new ideals of democracy. Any form of tyranny enraged him. ‘That is why he hated the Dictator Rosas and his
henchmen, the Federalists.
The Slaughter House is a genre painting reminiscent of Hogarth and Breughel in its grotesque realism and caustic details. But, above all, it is a virulent political diatribe against the Federalists and their Fuhrer Rosas, and, by indirection, a defense of the Unitarians, who championed the democratic tradition to which Echeverria was devoted body and soul.
Even if one overlooks its political and propaganda content, one may still consider The Slaughter House of great significance: it provides a picture, unsavory though it often is, of Buenos Aires in 1830, and it utilizes in its naive style a terse, colorful idiom peculiarly Argentine. But what is perhaps most remarkable is Echeverria’s strange juxtaposition of realism and surrealism, which makes the comparison to Breughel so striking. By way of illustration: into the filth and mire of the slaughter house, so truthfully depicted in the realistic tradition of the Spanish picaresque, suddenly falls the severed head of a child (surrealist surprise) while its trunk propped on a forked pole of the corral spouts blood from innumerable jets. Even the denouement-the undaunted Unitarian congested with anger, bursting like a ripe fruit has much of surrealism in it. In Echeverria, as in Kafka, unreality blossoms from the most mediocre, everyday reality.
EL MATADERO.doc
