20th c. Latin American Lit

Question 1

This Argentine short story writer and essayist is best known for his collections Ficciones and El Aleph.

Answer 1

Jorge Luis Borges

Question 2

This Swiss-born Cuban writer pioneered magical realism. His most famous work is 1949’s The Kingdom Of This World.

Answer 2

Alejo Carpentier

Question 3

This Chilean poet’s real name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, although he later came to adopt his better known pen-name as his legal name. He was involved heavily in leftist politics and the Chilean Communist Party.

Answer 3

Pablo Neruda

Question 4

This Colombian author won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982.

Answer 4

Gabriel García Márquez

Question 5

This Chilean poet was the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945).

Answer 5

Gabriela Mistral

Question 6

This Mexican Nobel-winning author was also named Mexico’s ambassador to India in 1962.

Answer 6

Octavio Paz

Question 7

This Chilean author’s first careers were in journalism. She later went on to write The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts.

Answer 7

Isabel Allende

Question 8

This poet was the first to win a clean election in Venezuela in 1948. He was deposed by a coup d’etat nine months later.

Answer 8

Rómulo Gallegos

Question 9

This Rómulo Gallegos novel is considered to be one of the most important works of Latin American literature. The novel’s titular character is a despotic land owner in the Venezuelan plains.

Answer 9

Doña Bárbara

Question 10

This Guatemalan author is perhaps best known for Men of Maize, a title which alludes to the Mayan belief that their flesh was made of corn.

Answer 10

Miguel Angel Asturias

Question 11

This Miguel Angel Asturias novel describes life under a ruthless dictator and is considered to be one of the most premier pieces of the “dictator novel” genre.

Answer 11

El Señor Presidente

Question 12

This Juan Rulfo novel is said to have cured Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writers block prior to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book centers on a man who encounters a ghost town at his birthplace following the death of his mother.

Answer 12

Pedro Paramo

Question 13

This Mexican avant-garde literary movement, founded in 1921, derived its social dimension from the ideals of the Mexican Revolution.

Answer 13

Stridentism

Question 14

This Mexican author is considered to be the first of the “novelists of the revolution” because of his fictional works surrounding the movement.

Answer 14

Mariano Azuela

Question 15

This figure is considered to have created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada in 1922.

Answer 15

Mario de Andrade

Question 16

This novel centers around the Buendida family and their founding of the town of Macondo in Colombia.

Answer 16

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Question 17

This is the town founded in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Answer 17

Macondo

Question 18

This Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel centers around a fictional dictator meant to tell of the disastrous effects on placing power into a single individual.

Answer 18

The Autumn of the Patriarch

Question 19

The title of this Jorge Luis Borges short story collection refers to a point in space that contains all other spaces at once.

Answer 19

The Aleph

Question 20

This Jorge Luis Borges short story collection, along with Labyrinths, are considered to be his most popular works and responsible for his explosion in the literary world.

Answer 20

Ficciones