Spanish and PortugueseSpanish 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. McMahon
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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.
Spanish 650-301
Golden Age Literature: The "Moor" from al-Andalus to Early Modern Iberia and Colonial America
Prof. Altschul
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Literary Maurophilia and the presence of Islam in Early Modern Iberia has a long history that questions the Western Christian periodization of modernity and its attending civilizational timelines. This seminar contextualizes the Moorish presence of Early Modern Spain through an examination of Iberia’s Islamicate and hybridized societies from the 711 Muslim conquest until the morisco expulsions of 1614. Topics of discussion include the hybrid, “Arabized,” and transcultured identities of conquered and conquering populations, the Andalusi beginnings of Early Modern genres like the picaresque, the Mudéjar and Islamicate in Spain and the broader Muslim world. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of Islam in the Spanish American colonies, such as the tapadas of Lima and the manifold identifications of Moorish culture and lifestyles beyond the Atlantic. Early Modern literary readings include Guerras Civiles de Granada, “Ozmín and Daraja,” “El Abencerraje,” and Don Quijote.
Spanish 686-301
Contemporary Spanish Narrative and Film
Prof. Moreno-Caballud
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This seminar will examine literary, filmic, and social narratives of contemporary Spain, focusing on the relations between language and power in the context of capitalist “modernization." Christian Salmon described our media-saturated world as colonized by “storytelling as a machine of fabricating stories and formatting minds." But, is that all there is to “storytelling”? We will depart from classic debates around experience and tradition (Benjamin), social languages (Bajtin) and culture and modernity (Raymond Williams) to analyze the work of writers such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Rafael Chirbes, Luis Mateo Díez and Belén Gopegui, and filmmakers Basilio Martín Patino, Cecilia Bartolomé, Joaquim Jordà, and Neus Ballús.
Spanish 690-301
Nature, Representation and Aesthetics in 19th century Latin American Literature
Prof. Escalante
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In this course we will examine the aesthetic, political and sociological implications of Nature in Romanticism and in Modernismo’s discourse: nature as a symbol of innocence and wealth of the Latin American nations, the relation between nature, barbarism and authoritarianism; the concept and representation of the sublime; allegoric and symbolic meanings of Nature; the relation between natural and artificial; the impact of scientific and philosophical discourses in Romanticism´s and Modernismo’s conception of Nature; the relation between Nature and the crisis of representation at the end of 19th century. We will read works by Hipólito Unanue, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José María Heredia, Mariano Melgar, José Martí, Julián del Casal, Asunción Silva, Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Horacio Quiroga and Cambaceres, along with literary theory authors like Adorno, Lyotard, Derrida, Schor.
Spanish 693-301
From Surrealism to Afro-Realism
Prof. Sacerio-Garí
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Theory and practice at the borders of the Latin American novel: surrealism, the marvelous real, magical realism, afro-realism. These complex traditions often become labels too easily applied to works from Latin America. After discussing issues of periodization and the avant-garde, we will review critical texts and examine the narrative strategies of authors such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Isabel Allende, Alejo Carpentier, Rosario Castellanos, Jorge Luis Borges, Quince Duncan, Lucía Charún-Illescas, and Gabriel García Márquez. Our objective is to explore the encounters that shaped the codes, transitions and limitations of “isms” and the intertextual struggles of cultural identity.
Spanish 698-301
Workshop on Scholarly Writing
Prof. de la Campa
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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.