Spanish and PortugueseMedieval Fable: Exemplarity and the Brief Narrative in Medieval Spain
SPAN 630-301
Prof. Michael Solomon
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This seminar explores the process of assemblage and the effects of codification on brief narratives such as fables, exempla, historical anecdotes, myths, miracles, marvels, and ballads. Working with various theories of narratology and exemplarity, we investigate the role of framing and ordering mechanisms in producing meaning and generating interpretations. Collections covered in this seminar include El conde Lucanor (don Juan Manuel), El libro de buen amor (Juan Ruiz), Las Cantigas de Santa María (Alfonso X), Llibre de meravelles (Román Llull), El Archipreste de Talavera (Alonso Martínez de Toledo), La vida de Esopo, and El romancero viejo. The seminar is taught in English, but most primary sources will be in Spanish.
The Franco Years (1939-1975): The Making of an Alternative Culture
SPAN 686-301
Prof. Ignacio Lopez
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In this seminar we study examples of narrative, drama, film and poetry published between 1939 and 1975, during Franco’s dictatorship. The works we study belong to the established cannon of the twentieth century in Spanish literature. The common denominator of these works is that they were always understood as a form of resistance against the totalitarian regime. Literature and the arts were profoundly changed by the Spanish civil war (1936-39) and even more by the thirty-five years of the Franco regime (Franco died in November 1975). The civil war (1936-9) and the repression and the hard-living conditions that followed the conflict (i.e., «the post-war») had an enormous impact on artists and on their production. The avant-garde movements that characterize the roaring 20’s and 30’s were replaced by a view of literature as human testimony and political commitment. Authors living in Spain were subject to the state’s censorship; authors living in exile were separated from their native audience. But both, in Spain and abroad, literature became expression of a counter-cultural phenomena that established the parameters of public discourse outside of the values established by the dictatorship. Culture was practiced as a form of resistance and it was understood as a contribution to political struggle, and to social and individual liberation. We will review methodological aspects that are commonly used to study this period. This includes conceptualizations that have become standard in the study of post-war Spanish literature from the 40’s to the 80’s, including terms such as «tremendismo, realismo social, posibilismo/imposibilismo, realismo crítico, culturalismo, novísimo, apertura, espíritu del 68,» etc. We have a pretty ambitious reading list for this seminar. Primary authors include novels by Cela (Pascual Duarte), Sánchez Ferlosio (Jarama), Martín Santos (Tiempo de silencio), Martín Gaite (El cuarto de atrás), Goytisolo (Señas de identidad), Mendoza (La verdad sobre el caso Savolta); films by Buñuel (Nazarín); dramas by Buero Vallejo (El concierto de San Ovidio), Martín Recuerda (Las salvajes en Puente San Gil), and Sastre (Escuadra hacia la muerte); and, poetry excerpts by Celaya (La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro), Hierro (Cuanto sé de mí), Blas de Otero (Pido la paz y la palabra), Claudio Rodríguez (Don de la ebriedad), Gil de Biedma (Moralidades), Gimferrer (La muerte en Beverly Hills), María Victoria Atencia (Marta & María), and Carnero (Dibujo de la muerte). Our reading list is completed with critical writings by, among others, Adorno, Lukács, Guy Debord, López Aranguren, Fernando Savater, and Villanueva.
Visual Technologies
SPAN 690-301
Prof. Ashley Brock
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How does literature teach us to see? Conversely, how can poetic language mark the limits of what can be apprehended visually? This course traces techniques and technologies of visual representation (e.g., cartography, photography, ekphratic description) in Latin American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some topics to be explored include: the role of visual description in Enlightenment thinking, the natural sciences, ethnography, and costumbrismo, colonial ways of seeing and their legacy in the inauguration of national literatures, the impact of photography and cinema on avant-garde poetics, invisibility and opacity as representational strategies in times of trauma and dictatorship, challenges to ocularcentrism in new theories of the senses and of landscape, and recent debates over the merits of returning to description through critical methods such as surface reading. Theoretical readings will be paired with visual and literary texts. The class will be conducted in Spanish. The ability to read in Spanish and English is required, and the ability to read in Portuguese is helpful.
Introduction to Colonial Latin America Studies
SPAN 692-301
Prof. Jorge Téllez
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In this seminar, we will examine the emergence and development of the field of colonial Latin American studies through the reading of key texts from the colonial period, and contemporary criticism and theory. We will consider notions such as colonial discourse, coloniality of power, decolonialism, as well as postcolonial theory, to study recent interdisciplinary approaches that aim to revise the colonial canon and the ways we understand it. At the core of this seminar, there is a question about the current position of colonial Latin American studies within the larger context of the humanities, and about its relevance to reflect on contemporary artistic, economic, social, and political issues. Primary sources include, but are not limited to, Hernán Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, Chimalpahin, Motolinía, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Catalina de Erauso, and Úrsula de Jesús.