Spanish and PortugueseMLA Proseminar: Looking for Don Quixote
SPAN 528-640
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.
Pedagogy Across the Spanish Curriculum
SPAN 606-301
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 to talk about and reflect on their teaching in an effective and professional manner.
Looking for Don Quijote
SPAN 648-301
Prof. Michael Solomon
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As Cervantes looked toward the prevailing genres of the late medieval and early modern past to create his characters and to plot their adventures, we will look toward the way the Don Quixote was subsequently recreated, recast, adapted, remediated, and rearticulated by readers, editors, illustrators, musicians, song writers, and filmmakers following the novel’s publication in the early 17th century. By looking for don Quixote “back and forth” the seminar hopes to lay bare the highly participatory engagement that accounts for the novel’s phenomenal success over the ages.
The seminar combines an initial reading of Don Quixote (first four weeks) with subsequent sessions dedicated to overviews of illustrators (Doré, Scafati, Dubout, Rep, Jou...), cinematic adaptations (Pabst, Gil, Escrivá, Gavaldón, Kovinstev, Hiller, Welles, Yates, Serra, Gilliam...), musical and operatic commemorations (Massenet...), literary sequels and representations (novels, short stories, versified versions...), tourism (“la ruta de don Quijote...”), video games, commemorations (statues and monuments), and commercial paraphrenia (Don Quixote mugs, plates, keychains...).
The course is taught in English, but all participants must have a reading knowledge of Spanish; many articles, films, and primary sources are not available in translation.
Seminar requirements include weekly participation, two in-class presentations, and a final research paper.
Literary Theory
SPAN 682-301
Prof. Román de la Campa
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This course will focus on leading critical issues pertaining to literary and cultural studies today. One emphasis will be on clarifying paradigms as much as possible, outlining their historical evolvement through various spheres of dissemination and codification in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course will then trace Latin American theoretical production within these strands and debates, leading to some analysis of specific literary and cultural texts.
The list of issues and questions will include the following:
Mappings and Periodization: How do current notions of World Literature, New Republic of Letters, Coloniality, Transatlantic, Queer Theory and Affect Theory, among others, address the current moment of disciplinary articulation and dispersal.
Textual Revolution and Latin American Modernisms: How does the concept of modern literature unfold from structuralist and post-structuralist modes of close reading and understanding? Do differing Latin American modernist and Caribbean Poetics constructs respond and challenge this tradition?
Neoliberalism, Culture and Citizenry. Is there such a thing as a neoliberal aesthetic? Can it be studied critically? Does post-autonomy literature play a role in it?
Postcolonial and Subalternity. Are the profound differences between the British and Hispanic legacies of colonialism in the Americas highlighted or erased through these discourses? What are the claims of diasporic, post-nationalist and post-humanist forms of writing and reading?
Performativity. What are the key notions surrounding this general trope, from speech acts to gender theory, as well as the idea of creativity, autobiography and culture brokering prevalent in the pull towards techno-mediatic globalization and cultural studies? What is the work of literature and digital humanities in this sphere?
Formas de Vida: Subjetividad/Neoliberalismo/Producción Estética- Contp Ibérica
SPAN 686-301
Prof. Luis Moreno Caballud
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This seminar will explore the intersection of a macro-politics of neoliberalism -its historical genealogy, geopolitical tensions, crises, opposing macro-political systems- and an “existential” dimension of neoliberalism -its capacity to create ways of life, subjectivity-. We will look at the Iberian case in connection with global trends, particularly in relation with recent historical developments in Latin America and the Mediterranean region (we will jump back and forth around the sequence of the economic crises of the 21st century, the attempts at “progressive” government, the waves of social movements of 2011 and further). We will also pay particular attention to the dynamics of hyper-codification, desensitization, instrumentalization, and quantification that neoliberalism imposes on life, and to the aesthetic consequences and and ressistances that are opened by this imposition. Feminist practice and thought, experimental poetry and narrative, anti-capitalist activism and theory will be some of the foci of our research.
Latin American Marxisms
SPAN 697-401
Prof. Ericka Beckman
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This course will revisit a century of Marxist thought in Latin America (Spanish America and Brazil), from the 1920s to the present. We will be concerned with tracking major debates in this tradition (the indigenous and agrarian questions, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, foquismo, dependency, among others), as well with evaluating the specific contributions of Latin America to Marxist thought more generally. From the vantage of the present, we will also engage ongoing attempts to rethink the relevance of Marxism in the region.
Workshop on Scholarly Writing
SPAN 698-301
Prof. Ericka Beckman
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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.