Spanish and PortugueseSpan 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. McMahon
This course is 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 686-301
The Return of the Commons: Neoliberal Crisis, Public Sphere, and Cultural Practices in Contemporary Spain
Prof. Moreno Caballud
This seminar will explore the growing democratization of the production of social discourse in contemporary Spain. In parallel with the global “digital revolution,” Spain has experimented in last decades the rise of “participative cultures” that are displacing the traditionally assumed passivity of mass-consumers, as well as the preeminence of the figures of the author and the intellectual as creators of social discourse. The battle for access, information, and freedom in the Internet is at the epicenter of the configuration of a new social sphere; one that is not exactly public, nor private, and that some have already called “the new digital Commons.” In a sort of postmodern reenactment of the “enclosures” of common land that saw the birth of agro-capitalism, the neoliberal regulations of the Internet are trying to impose a sense of scarcity and competition that clashes with the widespread experience of immaterial goods as a collaborative and infinitively reproducible flow. This seminar will study literary, audiovisual, and performative cultural practices that are at the crossroads of these tensions and debates in contemporary Spain.
Span 689-301
The Other Cervantes
Prof. Velázquez
Modern readers are surprised to learn that Miguel de Cervantes did not consider Don Quijote to be his crowning achievement, and instead he placed his hopes for literary greatness in a work that has long puzzled critics, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, historia septentrional (1617). Cervantes’ ambition, as declared to an eager fan of Don Quijote in the prologue to Persiles, was less to be the “delight of the muses” (to have authored a “funny book”), than to take up full citizenship in the republic of letters. In this course we will delve in Cervantes’ prolific narrative and dramatic output other than Don Quijote, in order to examine how these works contribute to central debates regarding the functions of imaginative fiction. We will thus consider questions of exemplarity, the relationship of language to character and community, the tension between convention and innovation, the marvelous and the real, and the place of poetry in relation to history. This course will also serve as an introduction to the major genres of the period as we read Cervantes’ experimentation with pastoral in La Galatea, romance and epic in Persiles, different forms of short narrative in Novelas ejemplares, dramatic interlude (Retablo de las maravillas, and El viejo celoso), and hagiographic drama (El rufián dichoso).
Span 690-301
Aesthetics and Ideology in Latin American Romanticism and Realism
Prof. Escalante
Latin American Romanticism has been mostly studied in relation to theories of nation building. Through this theoretical approach, literature is mostly perceived as reflection or allegory of political and ideological projects. In this course we will read romantic texts regarding them not only as political discourses, but also as historical, scientific, aesthetic and geographical ones. In addition, we will discuss the topic of imitation vs. originality in Latin American Romanticism. Is the political reading of Latin American Romanticism texts the reason why they are accused of lack of originality?
We will study works by Servando Teresa de Mier, D. F. Sarmiento, Roa Bárcena, Ricardo Palma, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Eduardo Wilde, along with literary theory authors as Foucault, Todorov, De Man, Ranciere and Anderson.
Span 694-401
Cinema Transgresivo: Paracinema from Spain and Latin America
Prof. Solomon
This seminar is designed to provide an overview of significant movements, traditions, and periods in Spanish and Latin American cinema by focusing the way specific films, genres, and practices break with or stand against prevailing artistic and ideological imperatives. Paracinema is used as an expanded and elastic category that not only refers to what Jeffrey Sconce identifies as seemingly disparate subgenres such as “badfilm', splatterpunk, 'mondo' films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography” (“Trashing the Academy 371); in this seminar the term also points to understudied, overlooked, marginalized and forgotten films and filmmakers who stand “along side” of academically acclaimed works from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. We focus on films that transgress or move beyond established paradigms of Spanish and Latin American Cinema.
Each week is dedicated to one movement or period, one or more feature films, and a cluster of shorts and clips from relevant works. Beginning with Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomón and his departure from the “Cinema of Attractions” practiced by filmmakers such as George Méliès, the seminar ends with the explosion of micro-short digital cinema and the rise of a new participatory culture. Between these cinematic moments, we will interrogate the phenomenon of the 1931 film Limite by Brazilian filmmaker Mario Peixoto and the way it breaks from European avant-garde cinema and the work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel. The seminar moves on to explore the technological innovations of Spanish filmmaker Val de Omar and his non-narrative opposition to the hegemony of narrative cinema in Francoist Spain. Returning to Latin America, we review the Brazilian udigrudi (underground) and cinema do lixo (garbage cinema) movements and the works of Ze Mojica (Coffin Joe), Rogelio Sganserla and Julian Bressane that challenge to the ideas of Cinema Novo in Brazil. The seminar looks at the metacinematic work Arrebato (1980) by Iván Zulueta and its break from politically engaged New Spanish Cinema (NCE) that flourished in the final years of Franco’s dictatorship. In the wake of the Tlatelolco crisis in Mexico, we explore the rise of provocative filmmakers such as Rafael Corkidi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Juan Moctezuma who provide a paracinematic alternative to the state sponsored New Mexican Cinema of Casals, Ripstein, and Hermosillo. Returning to the Iberian Peninsula, the seminar evaluates the Barcelona School and the works of Pere Portabella and Jacinto Esteva including Esteva’s manifesto film Dante no es unicamente severo (1967). We continue exploring 1970 horror cinema in Spain followed by an interrogation of rise of low-budget narcocinema that exploits and contests the longstanding tradition of Mexican border cinema. The seminar ends with an overview of short cinema and the rise of micro-short, electronically disseminated, digital cinema in Spain and Latin America.