Spanish and PortugueseSpan 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. McMahon
Span 609 is a course required of all Teaching Assistants in French, Italian, and Spanish in the second semester of their first year of teaching. It is designed to provide instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively, and builds on the practicum meetings held during the first semester. The course will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition. Students who have already had a similar course at another institution may be exempted upon consultation with the instructor.
Span 630-301
Medieval Media & Alfonso The Learned
Prof. Solomon
This seminar explores Alfonso X (1221-1284) monumental and opulent Codice Rico manuscript of Las cantigas de santa Maria. Drawing on recent concepts from media studies including connectivity, remediation, recursion, augmented space, and the relation between visual sensation and graphic information we will examine the 200 miracles stories and songs, and the more than 1200 image panels in this monumental manuscript. Throughout the course we will consider Alfonso’s notion of a Marian Monarchy in which he positioned himself as the prime mediator between the Virgin Mary and Christendom. All students will learn to read medieval Galician-Portuguese, the language Alfonso used to compose the Las cantigas. As a prerequisite, students must have a strong reading knowledge of one Romance language or Latin. The course will be taught in English.
Span 680-301
The Narrative of a Failed Revolution: the Spanish Ideological Novel (1875-1880)
Prof. López
Traditionally, critics have understood the Spanish Realist novel as a product of the liberal revolution of 1868. This view is historically inaccurate. It also fails to provide a valid conceptual framework for the understanding of the first body of narrative of Spanish Realism: the ideological novel published at the beginning of the Restoration in 1875. Moreover, by promoting later novels, and specially those following the publication of La desheredada in 1881, critics have reduced the earlier ideological novels to a mere preliminary step in the development of the Spanish national narrative. In this course we will take an alternative view. First, we will study the ideological novel with an innovative historical perspective: we will read them, not as the product of the revolution, but rather as a meditation on its failure. Then, we will approach these narratives as part of a well-defined genre that is historically bound to the beginning of the Restoration. The novels we will cover in the course appeared between 1875 and 1880; the authors studied (and their titles) include Valera (Pepita Jiménez), Alarcón (El escándalo, El Niño de la Bola), Galdós (Doña Perfecta, Gloria, La familia de León Roch), and Pereda (Don Gonzalo, De tal palo tal astilla). Oral reports, bibliography, written essay-type paper, and class participation will decide final grade.
Span 682-401
Introduction to Literary Theory
Prof. Laddaga
The course will provide an introduction to some of the central problematics of contemporary literary and critical theory. We will read and analyze essays by, among others, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, and Franco Moretti.
Span 689-301
Proseminar on Iberian Cinema
Prof. Solomon
This proseminar explores the current state of Spanish Cinema Studies. We will review cinematic periods, movements, and genres with the intent of evaluating the specificity and validity of these categories and their representative films. We consider current theoretical and critical approaches to Spanish cinema while reviewing longstanding and new paradigms for approaching the cinemas of Spain, Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia. The seminar will also require student to examine questions of pedagogy and the technical aspects of creating and editing clips, stills, and other tools for teaching films.
Span 690-301
Nature, Representation and Aesthetics in Latin American Modernismo
Prof. Escalante
In this course we will examine the aesthetic, political and sociological implications of Nature in Modernismo’s discourse: the relation between natural and artificial; the concept and representation of the sublime; allegoric and symbolic meanings of Nature; the impact of scientific discourses in Modernismo’s conception of Nature; the relation between Nature and the crisis of representation at the end of 19 th century. We will read works by José Martí, Julián del Casal, Asunción Silva, Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga and Manuel Zeno Gandía, along with literary theory authors like Lyotard, Derrida, Schor, Nancy, Ranciere.