Spanish and PortugueseSpan 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. McMahon
This course is 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 655-301
Representations of Gender and Power on the Early Modern Spanish Stage
Prof. Quintero
This course will concern itself with plays that enact the convergence of gender, sexuality, and political power. The topics include: the subversion of the ideals of containment and silence in the presentation of powerful women on stage (including the enactment of imagined gynocracies); the crisis of masculinity implicit in the honor plays; and the rewriting of history to produce a nationalist discourse. In addition to plays by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro, and María de Zayas (among others), we will consider sixteenth and seventeenth century treatises by Juan Luis Vives, Luis de León, Juan de Mariana, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, and Pedro de Rivadeneira. Finally, the course will examine of the usefulness of contemporary theoretical approaches—including feminism, psychoanalysis, and theories of performance—as tools in understanding the early modern Spanish stage.
Span 670-301
Spanish Romanticism
Prof. López
In this seminar we study the evolution of Romanticism in Spain. We begin with the study of the reaction against the past moving later on to study the aesthetic and ideological transformations brought by Romantic authors. Aspects that we will explore in class include the innovation of ideas, the daring transformation in poetics, and the social changes that the Romantic generation facilitated through the press and through political activism. We will conclude with a study of the reactionary transformation that ultimately tamed the initial revolution and that transformed Romanticism into the “national” tradition. Among others, the authors we will cover in this course include Espronceda, Bécquer, Zorrilla, Rivas, Alarcón, and Larra. At least one class presentation, a critical bibliography and a research paper will decide final grade.
Span 690-401
Latin America and Literary Canon Formation
Prof. De la Campa
This course will take up key debates surrounding Latin American literary canon. The course will have three specific aims. First, it will look at major works that frame a Latin American literary canon based on major periods such as Modernism, the Boom, and new writing. Secondly, it will look at various contemporary attempts to define the literary canon from a national perspective, specifically Cuba, Mexico and Argentina. Lastly we will look at texts that aim to question the notion of a literary canon and the idea of Latin America from which it ensues.
Span 697-401
Voice and Subjectivity in Digital Media
Prof. Laddaga
Digital technologies have made possible for individuals to develop novel ways to make themselves public and reach others; they also force a deep revision of prevailing notions of what a human subject is. Objects that talk as if they had selves, subjects whose talk seems selfless; these figures appear again and again in the most interesting productions of digital media. This course will examine the transformations of the voice (as sound and as inscription of an individual's singularity) in the digital domain, through the analysis of recent works by writers, artists, designers and musicians.