Spanish and PortugueseSpan 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. McMahon
Span 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
Early Modern Iberian Frontiers: Bodies and Values
Prof. Burshatin
This course examines the frontier imaginary in the early modern period as site of cultural conflict and exchange, as well as its role in staging the circulation of values and desires. We will pay special attention to key figures (captives, renegades, heretics, and wondrous bodies) and ethnicities (moriscos and conversos) who locate the shifting limits of self and other in the transition from frontier to empire.
Span 680-301
Spain’s conflicted modernization through literature and film (1939 to present)
Prof. Moreno Caballud
This seminar will explore the relations between Iberian artists and the complex process of modernization that took place in the Spanish state during the second half of the twentieth century. We will examine how writers and filmmakers dealt with the fact that it was under Franco’s dictatorship that Spain changed from a mostly agrarian and traditional society to an urban and “modern” one. We will analyze documental approaches, testimonial practices, avant-garde experimentations, realist poetics, and “postmodern” fictions that contend with the exclusions and dislocations produced by Spain’s accelerated and uneven modernization. For this we will combine the analysis of works by artists such as Miguel Delibes, Juan Marsé, Luis Mateo Díez, Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, and Montxo Armendáriz with the study of historical narratives, oral sources, audiovisual archives, and other cultural interventions.
Span 690-401
Art and Literature in Latin America in an Age of Globalization
Prof. Laddaga
The course will propose a conceptual framework for the description and analysis of Latin American texts, films and artworks of the last quarter of a century. We will discuss the works of, among others, César Aira, Mario Bellatín, Roberto Jacoby, Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Reygadas, and Lucrecia Martel. The course will be taught in English.