Approaches to Teaching Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman

Manuel Puig's 1976 Kiss of the Spider Woman, translated into English in 1979 and adapted as an Academy Award-winning film, expanded the idiom of the novel (mixing cinema, fiction, romance, and song) and challenged the third-person narration that was dominant in Latin American Boom fiction. Students are drawn to the conversational style of the novel and the melodramatic seductions of the tale, but they need guidance to appreciate the novel's richness as a work of literature. This volume…