Spanish and PortugueseSpan 528-640
Landmarks in Spanish and Latin American Cinema
Prof. Solomon
This seminar offers an introduction to Spanish and Latin American cinema. Focusing on key shorts and feature-length films from the late 19th century to the present, each session will be dedicated to discussing the technical, thematic, and artistic elements that made the selected work a landmark in Spanish and Latin American cinema. The readings, lectures, and class discussions will help students contextual these films, illustrating how each work emerged from a specific cultural, political, and artistic moment. We will examine the way these cinematic works promoted and contested notions of Spanish and Latin American nationalism while learning about the major movements and developments in Spanish and Latin American cinema such as “Cinema Novo” from Brazil, “Imperfect Cinema” from Cuba, “New Latin American Cinema” from Argentina, and “Neo-realism” and “Movida” cinema from Spain. Key films include, Hotel Electric (Segundo de Chomon), An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí), Death of a Cyclist (Juan Antonio Bardem), Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos), White Devil, Black God (Glauber Rocha), Lucia (Humberto Solás), The Young and the Damned (Luis Buñuel), The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice), The Law of Desire and All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar), Cows (Julio Medem) Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas), and Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu).
This seminar is taught in English. All readings will be English and all required screenings will be available with English subtitles.
Span 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 630-401
The Literature of Love in the Age of Pestilence
Prof. Solomon
This seminar explores the hygienic, pathological, and epidemiological underpinnings of late medieval and early modern works on love that emerged shortly before the advent of the plague 1348 to the outbreak of the syphilis epidemic in the early sixteenth century. We will read literary works such as El libro de buen amor, El Arcipreste de Talavera, Celestina, and La lozana andaluza while investigating medical treatises on love and human sexuality, including the anonymous Speculum al foderi, Arnau de Villanova’s De amore heroico, Nuñez de Coria’s Tratado del uso de la mujer, and Ruy Diáz de Ysla’s Tractado sobre el mal serpentino.
The course will be taught in English, but all students are required to have a strong reading knowledge of Spanish.
Span 682-401
Literary Theory
Prof. de la Campa
This course will cover the field of contemporary theory through its most productive paradigms of the past few decades. These will include the following: a) various models of deconstructive work, b) new approaches to literary communities and comparative literature, c) debates around coloniality and subalternity, d) transatlantic mappings. The special focus will be on how these paradigms apply and at times define Latin American and Hispanic literary and cultural areas. In that pursuit, we will look at three modes of instantiation: theoretical sources as such, specific works of criticism, samples of literary and cultural production.
Span 686-301
Precarious Lives. Post-dictatorship and Neo-liberalism in Spain (Cultural Practices, Media, Activism)
Prof. Moreno Caballud
Through hallmarks such as entering in the European Union in 1986, or hosting the Olympic Games in 1992, recent Spanish culture has been about celebrating the shinny face of “democracy” and “modernity”, while at the same time paying extremely high social costs for global neo-liberalism’s periodic readjustments. From the 1973 oil crisis to the recent economic meltdown in 2007, a strand of precariousness in many aspects of life has affected Spanish citizens through their supposedly triumphal processes of “transition to democracy” and “normalization”. This seminar will study contemporary Spanish culture following that strand of precariousness, which connects those excluded from the elite pacts of the “transition to democracy” (workers, youth, grass-roots movements) to those suffering the dire consequences of recent neo-liberal austerity measures (unemployed, immigrants, low-income people). The concept of precariousness has become at the same time a mark of injustice and an identity for those resisting it. We will focus on written and audio-visual documents that deal with this ambiguity, including novels, essays, films, journalism, documentaries, visual art, and activism.
Span 692-301
History and Fiction in Colonial Latin American Literature
Prof. Escalante
The relationship between fiction and history can be considered a philosophical problem but also a rhetorical one. In the specific case of colonial literature, we will consider other equally important relationships, for instance, the relationship between history and myth and history and memory. Considering that myths are often judged as fantasies or even as mere lies and memory as unstable and lacking the truth normally associated with history, both of the relationships between history and myth and history and memory can be studied as variations of this basic relationship between history and fiction. In this course, we will analyze the connections between history and fiction in colonial chronicles and Baroque literature. We will read works by Fray Ramón Pane, Fernández de Oviedo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Ercilla, José de Acosta, Concolorcorvo, Sigüenza y Góngora, among others, along with theoretical authors like Paul Ricoeur, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Le Goff, Michel de Certeau.