Spanish and PortugueseSpan 609-401
Language Teaching and Learning
Prof. McMahon
Spanish 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 650-301
Bodies, Visions, and Desires
Prof. Black
Bodies, Visions, Desires reads texts of the 16th and 17th century through the lens of the body and the discourses of vision (or visions) and desire that are scripted upon it. Throughout the semester, we will read bodies of different sorts: the criminal body and the discourses of discipline and exemplarity that it joins together, the saintly body as a double of the diabolically possessed body and the scripts of ecstasy that differ in their readings but not in the symptoms they manifest, the witch’s body as a site of seductive excess, the body of a married woman as the meeting place of surveillance and subjectivity, the tortured body and its strange alliance with truth, the monarch’s body as a site of power and impotence, the cross-dressed body and the way it exposes the constructedness of gender categories, the Other’s body (Jew, morisco, Amerindian) and the challenges to legibility that it presents, the medicalized or inquired body that at once requires examination (a compulsory cure) and resists diagnosis. We will ground our readings of literary texts by turning also to bodily discourses of a slightly different order: early modern anatomical treatises that place the body at the center of a theater of dissection, political arbitrios that propose cures of various sorts for a national body deemed diseased, maps that chart the globe in terms of a body, Inquisitorial torture manuals, tracts on the disciplining and containment of errant women and the particular threat of sexual contagion (syphillis) that they represent, spiritual exercises, witch-hunting treatises, documents on blood purity, etc. Finally, we will read various critical and theoretical works that take up bodily concerns from different vantage points.
Span 682-401
Workshop on Theory and Practice of Translation
Prof. Ross
This course will be conducted primarily in English, although individual projects may focus on translation into either English or Spanish, and class presentations may be made in either language. Translation from/into Portuguese is also possible. Class exercises will translate from Spanish to English. Alongside this practical work, we will read theoretical essays on translation, and consider what relation theory has to practice in the field. We will discuss cultural factors that influence translation and the role they play in different interpretations of texts. We will also consider the value of translation and think about how best to approach a literary translation: as an imitation? An interpretation? One of many possible readings? A separate creation? A necessary betrayal of the author's "original" text?
Our method for the course will be workshop-discussion in class, with practice in translation and reading assignments for each session. The course aims to develop skills with language(s), theoretical knowledge of the translation studies field, and the ability to critically evaluate multiple translations of the same text.
Span 690-301
Linajes de Jorge Luis Borges
Prof. Laddaga
We will read most of the central works of Jorge Luis Borges (both the books that he wrote alone and the collaborations), paying particular attention to the development of themes, figures, and procedures. We will attempt to describe in as detailed a manner as possible the way the work, over time and responding in multiple ways to the environments in which it was produced, took the form that it ended up taking. The course will be taught in Spanish.
Span 697-301
Caribbean Culture, Literature and Theory: Questions for Mapping the Americas
Prof. de la Campa
This course will look at ways of conceptualizing, defining and situating Caribbean culture. Is it postcolonial or beyond? Has its extraordinary multiplicity and historical diasporas found singular modes of representation? How does one approach its long list of great authors or the question of identity based on the rupture of the nation-state formations to which they speak? Do they offer alternative views on the Americas? The course include texts in Spanish and English but with translations of other linguistic traditions that meet in the Caribbean, a place whose contours often reach beyond the main Caribbean Archipelago to South and North American sites such as Brazil, Colombia, New York, and Miami. We will look at major writers and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Edwidge Dandicat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andres Caicedo, Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Junot Diaz, Aime Cèsaire, V.S. Naipaul, among others.