Fall 2020 Courses

Pedagogy Across the Spanish Curriculum  

SPAN 606-301

Prof. María Victoria García-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. 

 

Don Quijote 

SPAN 648-301  

Prof. Michael Solomon

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This seminar explores Don Quixote as a massive cultural phenomenon in the visual and performative arts that emerged from Cervantes' 17th-century work.  More specifically, we will approach Cervantes' work as an archive from which readers, illustrators, filmmakers, creative and performative artists, and scholars have extracted discrete pieces from the work and represented them as what I will call Quixotic attractions. 

Inevitably, we will explore theoretical polemics surrounding adaptation and the pesky question of fidelity, while considering more recent theoretical concepts of remediation, re-articulation, and re-imagination and their bearing of the visual presentation of Cervantes' novel. 

This graduate seminar assumes that students have previously read Don Quixote either in high school or as undergraduates.   Although we will spend the first two weeks mapping plot points, describing characters, noting digressions and adventures, and contemplating the role of intercalated episodes and stories, the remainder of the seminar will be dedicated to visual and performative remediations of Don Quixote from the publication of the Part One in 1605 to the Present.  

 

Spanish Lyric of the 20th Century. The Avant-gard and its Discontents  

SPAN 693-301

Prof. Ignacio López

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La vanguardia es el punto de referencia básico en el desarrollo de la lírica desde 1870, cuando los -ismos comienzan a aparecer en el París posterior a la Comuna. Hasta finales del siglo XX, la lírica se va a definir por la posición que los autores adoptan respecto a la vanguardia. Este seminario supone una lectura histórica y canónica del movimiento y su legado; y, a la vez, un ejercicio en el análisis del verso usando distintos modelos que incluyen la Estilística (Ortega y Gasset, Carlos Bousoño, Amado Alonso, Materia y forma en poesía) el Formalismo ruso (Osip Brik, Tynianov, Jakobson), el Existencialismo (Sartre), el Estructualismo y la Semiótica (Michael Riffaterre, Yuri Lotman). En cuanto a los textos, estudiamos las corrientes de la poesía pura siguiendo la l’Abbé Bremon (JRJ, Guillén), el neogongorismo y la poesía del 27 (Dámaso Alonso, Lorca); el movimiento posterior de poesía impura y la influencia de Neruda en España (Miguel Hernández, Vicente Aleixandre) y la rehumanización que, en España, corresponde al momento de la guerra civil y la postguerra (Emilio Prados). Seguiremos con la poesía postguerra y el entendimiento de la poesía como algo instrumental, o como arma de combate (Celaya), la poesía social (Blas de Otero, José Hierro), el énfasis en la comunicación del medio siglo (Claudio Rodríguez, Atencia), seguido del reencuentro con la vanguardia y los movimientos que recuperan la vanguardia en el 68 (los novísimos, Gimferrer, Carnero, Rosetti). Pasamos a la poesía de la experiencia (García Montero, Felipe Benítez), que escribe una poesía para el hombre de la calle inspirada en ideas procedentes del marxismo (Althusser, Juan Carlos Rodríguez). Y concluimos con el neo-liricismo de Chantal Maillard. Además de los poetas mencionados, leeremos, entre otros, textos de Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Ezra Pound, Unamuno, Guillén, Lorca, Valente, Gloria Fuertes.  Los requisitos dependen grandemente de cómo podemos hacer la clase, por lo que serán establecidos en el futuro.

 

Caribbean Thought 

SPAN 697-401

Prof. Odette Casamayor

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A thorough study of the most relevant theories seeking to conceptualize national, regional, and racial identities in the Spanish, French, and Anglo-speaking Caribbean, through the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Readings include theoretical and literary texts by authors such as Antonio Benítez Rojo, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Rafael Confiant, René Depestre, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Franz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, José Lezama Lima, Nancy Morejón, and Derek Walcott. 

 

Latin American Literature and the Agrarian Question  

SPAN 697-402

Prof. Ericka Beckman

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Examines how works by authors such as Rómulo Gallegos, José María Arguedas, Juan Rulfo, and Rosario Castellanos imagined rural transitions to capitalism in 20th-century Latin America, especially surrounding forced labor on large estates, land reform, and urban out migration, on levels of both content and aesthetic form.