Spanish and PortugueseSpanish 609-401
Language Teaching/Learning
Prof. Kathryn 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 686-301
Giraffes Aflame: Salvador Dali and the Surrealist Imagination in Spain
Prof. Ignacio Lopez
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In this seminar we will study the historical evolution of Surrealism in Spain through the art of Salvador Dalí, arguably the most famous representative of the movement in Spain. We begin considering the historical origins of the Surrealist revolution as initially stated by André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto. We follow with a detailed analysis of the paranoiac-critical method Salvador Dalí put forward as an alternative to Breton's automatism. As we progress in the historical analysis of the movement, we will explore Salvador Dalí's dismantlement of the avant-garde once the painter encountered great success in the United States and he realized the enormous marketability of scandal. When we consider the avant-garde movement in post-war Europe and America, we will go over the different forms Dalí offered as alternatives to Surrealism: digestive art, double image, art pompier, pop art. In addition to painting, our primary texts will combine film (Dalí and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or, Manjeant Garotes and Tristana), autobiographical writings (Dali's My secret Life and Diary of a Genius), theoretical work (Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, Dalí's Le mythe tragique de «L'Angelus» de Millet, Freud's Three Essays on the History of Sexuality), and criticism on the life and work of the painter (Quest, Quest on Dalí; Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí). Class discussions and active participation, oral reports and a written paper will decide final grade.
Spanish 690-301
Minor Literature in 19th-Century Latin America
Prof. Marie Escalante
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In this course we will analyze short literary genres that aim to represent fragments of 19th century daily everyday life in contrast with more canonical and encompassing forms like the novel. These genres include costumbrismo articles, fantastic tales, political discourses, tradiciones, among others. We are going to discuss the aesthetic and ideological implications of this rejection of totality of these literary genres and their contribution or deviancy to the nation building project. We will read works by Pardo y Aliaga, Palma, Mansilla, Holmberg, Gorriti, Heredia, Montalvo, Roa Barcena along with literary theory authors like Dennis Mellier, Jacques Ranciere, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Derrida.
Spanish 692-301
Colonial Literature of Spanish America
Prof. Jorge Tellez
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This seminar aims to study the act of reading in colonial times from a twofold perspective. First, we will reflect on reading as a historical practice, drawing our attention to topics such as literacy, printing, reading communities, private and public libraries, authorship, book trade, and cultural markets. The course will include texts by Christopher Columbus, Diego Mexía, Bernardo de Balbuena, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Fray Joaquín Bolaños, Juan Pablo Viscardo y Gúzmán, among others. Second, we will frame the study of primary texts within current theoretical debates on the act of reading, from hermeneutics, phenomenology, and aesthetic of reception, to more current methods such as thin, distant, and surface reading.
Spanish 694-401
Modern Spanish American Narrative
Prof. Michael Solomon
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Historians of world cinema have traditionally underrepresented Spain and Latin America. This Pro-seminar is designed to provide a graduate-level survey of the history and evolution of cinematic creation in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, starting with the arrival of the first Lumière operators and extending roughly to 1980. The seminar privileges breadth over depth as we attempt to map the history of major film movements, the rise of new genres, the nature of national spectatorship, and the antagonism between commercial (escapist) cinema and socially engaged works. Special attention will be paid to medium specificity (in relation to literature), the formal aspects of cinematic production, and the less studied genres such as short cinema and animation. Additionally, students will become familiar with pedagogical and presentational strategies including the appropriate software for manipulating film images in the form of stills and clips. The goal of the seminar is to prepare graduate students in Spanish and Latin American literature programs to incorporate film effectively and thoughtfully into their research and future course offerings.
Spanish 698-301
Workshop on Scholarly Writing
Prof. Roman 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.