Spanish and PortugueseSpanish 528-640
MLA Proseminar: Looking for Don Quixote
Prof. Michael Solomon
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This MLA seminar combines a reading of Cervantes’ novel with an exploration of the extensive attempts to illustrate this celebrated 17th-century work of fiction and adapt it to cinema and the performing arts.
Following a four-week introduction, overview and reading of the novel, the seminar turns to illustrations from early woodcuts and engravings to modern graphic novels and book sketches, including the works of French, English, Argentine, and Spanish artists such as Gustave Doré, Albert Dubout, Louis Jou, Luis Scafati, Bernard Buffet, and Salvador Dalí.
The latter part of the course investigates many of the 160 cinematic adaptations from feature-length films to cartoons, shorts, sequels, and spinoffs; we examine the early musical adaptations such as G.W. Pabst 1936 operatic feature-length film; Ub Iwerks and Francisco Delgado’s animated shorts; Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam frustrated attempts to bring Don Quixote to the screen; Soviet adaptations including Grigori Kozintsev’s Don Kishot and Albert’s Serra’s minimalistic Catalan Honor de the Knights.
The seminar is taught in English. All required readings will be in English although students with a knowledge of Spanish will be encouraged to read the text in its original form.
Spanish 543-401
Environmental Humanities
Prof. Bethany Wiggin
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Environmental Humanities: Theory, Methods, Practice is a seminar-style course designed to introduce students to the trans-interdisciplinary field of environmental humanites. Weekly readings and discussions will be complemented by guest speakers from a range of disciplines including ecology,
atmospheric science, computing, history of science, medicine, anthropology, literature, and the visual arts. Participants will develope their own research questions and a final project, with social consideration given to building the multi-disciplinary collaborative teams research in the environmental humanities often requires.
Spanish 606-301
Pedagogy Across the Spanish Curriculum
Prof. Victoria Garcia-Serrano
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The aim of this seminar is to prepare graduate students in Hispanic Studies to teach a wide range of courses typically offered at North American universities and colleges –from the elementary Spanish language level to upper-division seminars– while familiarizing themselves with current approaches and methodological trends in foreign language instruction. By designing a content-based syllabus, including selecting and sequencing of reading materials and choosing the appropriate learning outcomes and assessment methods, graduate students will gain a greater awareness of curricular planning and development and acquire skills that will significantly ease their future teaching endeavors such as using a backward design model, incorporating their own research interests into their lessons and courses, or taking advantage of the resources available to language learners on campus. By the end of the course, graduate students will be able talk about and reflect on their teaching in an effective and professional manner.
Spanish 686-301
Negotiations of Gender and Power on the Early Modern Spanish Stage
Prof. Cristina Quintero
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This course will center on the theatrical production of Spain in the early modern period (the so-called Golden Age), particularly plays that deal with the dynamics of gender, sexuality and power. We will look at plays by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro, and María de Zayas; as well as treatises by Juan Luis Vives, Juan de Mariana, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, and Pedro de Rivadeneira. We will examine the comedia’s creation of nationalist and imperialist discourses, the crisis of masculinity implied in its obsession with honor, the apparent subversion of ideals of femininity through the dramatization of the rule of women, and the manipulation of language as a tool to interrogate systems of power and control. In addition, we will explore contemporary critical approaches (feminism, psychoanalysis, and theories of performance) as applied to Spain’s classic drama.
Spanish 690-301
Anything But Quaint: Experimental Fictions of the Regional
Prof. Ashley Brock
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In the wake of the Latin American “Boom,” literary regionalism is often dismissed as retrograde: an ideologically heavy-handed and aesthetically unsophisticated precursor to literary modernity. This course takes Argentina and Brazil as its primary case studies to interrogate the opposition between regionalismo and vanguardismo, as well as the underlying assumption that rural life and its literary representations are by definition traditional, backwards, and untimely. We will consider experimental literature and film from the early twentieth century to the present, paying particular attention to the role of disruptive formal innovations in reconfiguring how we, as readers and viewers, experience the temporality of regional spaces. Moving beyond historical understandings of regionalismo and vanguardismo, we will explore the potential as well as the limits of avant-garde poetics as means of affecting a politically significant paradigm shift: challenging the national origins myths, the nostalgic pastoral fantasies, and the triumphant tales of progress that would displace regional life into an archaic past.
Spanish 697-301
Surplus Populations
Prof. Ericka Beckman
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In our current era of unrelenting capitalist crisis, vast portions of humanity have been ejected from formal labor markets at the same time as they remain dependent upon access to a wage for survival. In dialogue with recent theorizations of surplus populations, un- and under-employment, disposable life, and necropolitics, we will examine Latin American literature in relation to wider histories of capital and state. Focusing on three historical moments-- mid-twentieth-century transitions from rural-agrarian to urban-industrial economies, Cold-War-era scorched earth campaigns, and neoliberal austerity policies from the 1990s onward-- we will study how literary texts represent the social relations at work in the production of surplus populations, as well as how they gesture toward possibilities for overturning those relations. Primary texts by José María Arguedas, José Revueltas, Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane, Yuri Herrera, Evelio Rosero, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, among others; secondary texts by Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Jean Franco, Sayek Valencia, Achille Mbembe, Joshua Clover, Mike Davis and Margarita Serje, among others.
Spanish 698-301
Workshop on Scholarly Writing
Prof. Roman de la Campa
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This course aims to develop awareness about what constitutes effective scholarly prose in Spanish. It proposes to hone the student's handling of writing as a vehicle for the expression of intellectual thought, but also to develop a consciousness of the rhetorical strategies that can be used to advance a critical argument effectively. Extensive writing exercises will be assigned; these will be followed by intense and multiple redactions of the work originally produced. The ulitmate goal is to make students develop precision, correctness, and elegance in written Spanish. Students will also work on a class paper written previously, with a view to learning the process of transforming a short, limited expression of an argument into a publishable article.