Spanish Courses: Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Spanish Courses

Spanish Language

Spanish 101-1 – Elementary Spanish

For students who have studied Spanish less than two years. Communicative method. Development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills, as well as knowledge of Hispanic culture, through context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program twice a week.

Prerequisites: None

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 101-2 – Elementary Spanish

For students who have never studied Spanish or studied Spanish less than two years in high school. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills in a cultural context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-1

Spanish 101-3 – Elementary Spanish

Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-2 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 115-1 – Accelerated Elementary Spanish

For students with some previous experience in Spanish. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills in a cultural con-text. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program. Offered winter and spring.

Prerequisite: sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Spanish 115-2 – Accelerated Elementary Spanish

Prerequisite: SPANISH 115-1 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 121-1 – Intermediate Spanish

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through emphasis on cultural content and functional use of Spanish language. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program twice a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 101-3, SPANISH 115-2, or Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 121-2 – Intermediate Spanish

Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-1, or sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Spanish 121-3 – Intermediate Spanish

Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-2, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 125-0 – Accelerated Intermediate Spanish

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through readings and short films. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video. Offered in fall only.

Prerequisites: AP score of 3 or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 127-0 – Accelerated Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Language Learners

Prerequisites: AP score of 3 or Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 197-0 – Language in Context: Latinos, Language and Culture

For Heritage Language Learners. Development of written and oral discourse by studying sociopolitical and linguistic richness of Spanish-speaking countries and Spanish-speaking communities in the United States.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-3, SPANISH 125-0, SPANISH 127-0, AP score of 4, or sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Spanish 199-0 – Language in Context: Contemporary Spain

An introduction to the culture and sociopolitical issues of contemporary Spain in the basis for review of some problematic grammatical patterns and for skill-building in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-3, SPANISH 125-0, AP score of 4 on the Spanish Language and/or Literature, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 199-0 – Language in Context: Contemporary Spain

An introduction to the culture and politics of contemporary Spain in the basis for review and further development of some of the most problematic grammatical patterns in Spanish.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 121-3, SPANISH 125-0, or AP score of 4 on Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 201-0 – Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America

First course of a sequence designed to develop speaking strategies and structures through analysis of modern (20th- and 21st-century) Latin American culture. Emphasis on accurate informal conversation. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 199-0 or departmental sufficient Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required

Spanish 203-0 – Individual and Society through Written Expression

First course of a sequence that develops writing skills and structures through examination of the relationship between the individual and society. Emphasis on textual analysis and development of descriptive, narrative, and argumentative essays.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 201-0, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required.

Spanish 204-0 – Reading and Writing the Art of Protest

Second course of a sequence designed to develop writing skills and structures through analysis of socially-committed art. Emphasis on cultural analysis and development of longer essays. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 203-0 or SPANISH 207-0

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required.

Spanish 205-0 – Spanish for Professions: Health Care

Advanced course to develop communication skills in Spanish for healthcare purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the medical field, specialized terminology and vocabulary, and cultural nuances.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 201-0 or AP score of 5.

Spanish 206-0 – Spanish for Professions: Business

Advanced course for developing communication skills in Spanish for business purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the global marketplace: specialized terminology; writing; comprehension of cultural nuances in the Spanish-speaking business world. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 201-0 or AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 207-0 – Spanish for Heritage Speakers

For heritage speakers that emphasizes on writing, syntax, and formal modes of the language. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 197-0, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 208-0 – Spanish and the Community

Development of advanced Spanish communication skills and of a thorough and personal cultural knowledge of the Chicago-area Hispanic community through readings, discussions, writing, and required volunteer commitment (15 hours/quarter).

Prerequisite: SPANISH 203-0, SPANISH 207-0 or equivalent.

Spanish 280-0 – Introduction to Spanish Linguistics

An introductory course designed to present students with an overview of the phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements specific to Spanish language.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent.

Spanish 281-0 – Spanish Phonetics and Phonology

This course will cover the theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. We will learn about articulation and production, classification and description, combination and syllabification, sonority sequencing, prosodic features, and prevalent dialectal variations. Students will also improve their orthography and pronunciation, learn to collect phonetic data, and learn to identify the origin of Spanish speakers. This course fulfills a formal studies requirement.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 302-0 – Advanced Grammar

Advanced course designed to polish Spanish usage through in-depth study and development in grammar, focusing on items most problematic for nonnative speakers.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent.

Return To Top

Spanish Literature

Spanish 105-6 – First-Year Seminar: ¡Revolución! Activists, Intellectuals and Print Culture in Latin America 1900-40

In the early twentieth century, Latin American cities were a hotbed of leftist political and social activism, from nudism and healthy eating to class uprising and utopian societies. Activists and intellectuals from Havana and Guayaquil to Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires proposed radical departures from perceived rigidity and hierarchy of Latin America's nineteenth century. Growing literacy rates, booming urban populations, and close contacts and collaborations between intellectuals and workers led to these movements' challenging nationalism, thinking of themselves in a global frame, and advocating for the equality of women and racialized others, like Afro-descended and indigenous peoples. The principal forum through which these Latin Americans organized and intervened in their surroundings was print culture such as newspapers and books, in the form of short stories, novels and plays, but also poetry and essay. While a number of the most prominent writers during the period have garnered critical attention, the breadth and variety of the period's literary production has mostly been forgotten. We will try to recapture that richness by examining key figures such as Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Oswald de Andrade, Roberto Arlt, Luisa Capetillo, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Patricia Galvao, Enrique Gil Gilbert, Raul Gonzalez Tunon, Ricardo Flores Magon, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Tristan Marof, and Julio Antonio Mella, among others. Secondary texts from a range of critics - Beverley, Cairo, Duchesne Winter, Lukacs, Prieto, Meira Monteiro, Monasterios, Sarlo, Voloshinov, and others - will afford us the theoretical tools in order to better understand the period's cultural production.

Spanish 105-6 – First-Year Seminar: Women At The Border: The Marginalization Of Latinas In The U.S.

Latina immigrants to the U.S. often leave intolerable circumstances and brave life-threatening border crossings in pursuit of the American dream. Yet, those who succeed in crossing the geographic border almost inevitably find that the marginalized existence they hoped to leave behind takes on an equally powerful form in their new world as they confront economic, political, racial, and cultural barriers 'north' of the border. Immigration has become one of the 'hot' buttons of contemporary social and political dialogue. Through the prism of the Latina experience in the United States, this class will explore causes and consequences of global migration in the 21st century, analyze the marginalization of third-world immigrants in first-world society, and seek to develop an understanding of the evolving 'face' of America. Students will further examine how their own ancestral experiences have helped shape their perceptions of this new world order.

Spanish 220-0 – Introduction to Literary Analysis

Introduction to textual analysis and to topics such as genre, narratology, prosody, and figurative language, aiming to prepare the student to read, discuss, and write analytically in Spanish about literature and culture.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0

Spanish 220-0 – Introduction to Literary Analysis

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or AP 5 in Spanish Language AND Literature.

Spanish 223-0 – Cervantes

Taught in English

Study of Don Quixote and other selected works with attention to the historical and cultural context of the 17th century.

Spanish 231-0 – The "New" Latin American Narrative

Taught in English

So, what's "new" about the New Latin American Narrative? The course approaches this question by considering several major trends in Latin American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels, short fiction, and testimonial writing, we will study representative works from the pre-Boom (1940s-1950s), Boom (1960s to early 1970s) and post-Boom (1970s & beyond) decades in Latin American literature. Although the new narrative is often identified with the Boom era--when Latin American literature "exploded" onto the world stage--and with Boom novels, we will take a broader view to consider the diverse types of texts that represent important new currents in the region. Focus on works by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Rosario Ferre, Carlos Fuentes, Rigoberta Menchu, Manuel Puig, Ana Maria Shua, or Luisa Valenzuela.

Prerequisite: None. Reading and discussion in English. This course may count for the major or minor in Spanish; consult with an advisor. No P/NP

Spanish 250-0 – Literature in Spain before 1700

This survey course offers an introduction to the most influential Spanish literary and cultural works of the Middle Ages and Golden Age periods. From the first manifestations of the written romance language (Glosas del monasterio de San Millan de la Cogolla, Xth c.) to the mester de juglaría and the Poema del Cid and the mester de clerecia of Gonzalo de Berceo to the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, this course also studies the origins of Spanish in "vulgar" latin in conjunction with religion and history.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (Can be taken concurrently), or with teacher permission if 220 hasn't been taken.

Spanish 260-0 – Literature in Spain before 1888

Survey of literature and history of colonial Latin America. Students will read indigenous, Hispanic and mestizo authors and texts. We will analyze narrative genres, going beyond their aesthetic qualities, to understand their political impact. We will balance close readings of chronicles, letters, poems and histories with discussions of larger issues, such as the problematic meanings of discovery and conquest, the textual construction of identities, and the translation process of indigenous languages into Spanish. These discussions aim to foster a critical approach to the studied materials as well as to strengthen the students' oral and written Spanish skills.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (can be taken concurrently)

Spanish 261-0 – Literature in Latin America since 1888

Survey of the modern period, including modernismo, the historical avant-garde, the "Boom," and recent literary trends. Authors such as Delmira Agustini, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Ruben Dario, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Marti, Pablo Neruda, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (may be taken concurrently).

Spanish 310-0 – Origins of Spanish Civilization

Introduction to Spanish civilization from its origins to 1453. Focus on the Roman, Visigoth, and Muslim conquests and their differences, the Christian reconquest, and the evolution of Spanish from Latin.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 321-0 – Golden Age Drama

This course offers a general introduction to drama during Spain's Golden Age period (sixteenth to early seventeenth century). This course will study the origins of drama, the anonymous Auto de los Reyes Magos, and the plays of such great dramatists as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca.

Prerequisite: 1 course taken before or concurrently from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0, or teacher permission if none of those have been taken.

Spanish 331-0 – Realism in Spain: The Problem of Representation

Theories and practices of realist authors in modern Spanish literature. Issues of literary representation and mimesis. Aesthetic and ideological foundations of realism in the 19th century and in 20th century variants such as social realism, antirealism, and postmodern documentarism.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 348-0 – Readings in Latin American Short Fiction

Some critics have suggested that the Latin American short story in the twentieth century might have made an even more significant contribution to world literature than the celebrated novels of the Boom (1960s-1970s). For example, the argument goes, it is Jorge Luis Borges’ short fiction that actually initiates the “new” narrative currents with which Latin American literature has become identified since the sixties. Likewise, one might argue that it is Julio Cortázar’s short fiction--even more than his “revolutionary” novels--that will stand the test of time. Indeed, these and other well-known writers associated with the “género fantástico” (e.g., Horacio Quiroga, Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferré) are among the “masters” of the Latin American short story who have taught us new ways to read and think about narrative more generally. Within the context of the Latin American tradition, we will focus on the short story as it has been written and theorized by Latin American writers, considering as well proposals from beyond the region and reading models offered by literary critics and theorists. Emphasis will be on close reading and analysis throughout the course.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 350-0 – Visual Culture in Latin/o America and Spain

History and materials of Latin American, Spanish, or US Latino visual cultures. Possible topics: photography, exhibitions, video practice, and visual production in popular culture.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 361-0 – Latin America: Studies in Culture and Society

Analysis of the history of culture in Latin America with an emphasis on the intersection of politics, society, and literature and on the relationship between literary and visual culture. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 220-0

Spanish 380-0 – Latin American Film: Poetics and Politics of the Third World

This course will allow students to explore a series of critically acclaimed contemporary Latin Americanfilms from the 1980s to the present. The films, from countries that include Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia, will be accompanied by theoretical and historical readings (by authors such as Carlos Monsivais, Deborah Shaw, Fernando Coronil, and Paul Julian Smith) that provide a framework for their analysis, as well as fictional texts that provide further context. Among other topics, our discussions of the films and texts will cover subalternity and the Third World; sexual and racial politics; urban violence; postcolonial poetics; genocide; cultural hybridism; dictatorship and populism; and technologies of power.

Spanish 395-0 – Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures

Advanced study of topics in the literary traditions of either Latin America or Spain. Possible topics include intellectual history, transatlantic exchanges, literature of the fantastic, feminist traditions, hybrid cultures, and history and fiction. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 395-0-1 – ZONAS TRANS _ Trans national, transcultural, transgender

In this seminar we will explore the critical potential of aesthetic expressions, practices, and bodies trans. Trans-Zones are those which open up a new kind of space, one that is not inter or intra, in between or inside, but that generates a new territory, "un mas alli de" beyond and thus a new epistemological field. The Trans-Zone we will traverse question and undermines essentialist, oppositional and binary ideas of culture, identity and gender giving expression to a complex lived experience. They also allow us to overcome the fixed, the territorialized, the confined in order to explore the contaminated, porous, adulterated contents, where the limits imposed by certain disciplines disintegrate giving way to transdiciplinarity and the inclusion of new subjects and forms of knowledge emerging from trans-subjectivities. We will initially reflect and conceptualize the notion of Trans, with the aide of feminist critical theory. Then, we will pay especial attention to the trans-expression in contemporary Latin American culture: in art and literature, in social practices and movements, in the self-representations that contests the forms of identity, class, race and gender created by the paradigms of the national and heteronormativity. The course will be taught in Spanish.

Spanish 395-0-2 – Ways of Lying: Fiction and Parafiction in Contemporary Latin America

In 2009, Carrie Lambert-Beatty coined the term “parafiction” to talk about artistic practices that had an act of deception at its core. As a consequence, the products of these practices (objects, projects, situations, subjects) were experienced as real and, often, unrelated to art. This course studies the phenomenon in contemporary Latin America and explores the specificities of lying, through art, in the region. Is there a particular Latin American relationship to deception? In which ways can fiction alter what we experience as real? How does art complicate the boundaries between fiction and reality and why is that complication productive? We will analyze an eclectic group of artists including, among others, Roberto Jacoby, Mario Bellatin, Pablo Helguera, Pedro Manrique Figueroa, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez Peña.

Spanish 395-0-2 – Contemporary Representations of Colonial Latin America

This course explores contemporary renderings of key events and characters of Latin American colonial history in novels, comics, films, and television programs to address these key questions: What was/is colonialism? How does postcolonialism address the links between past and present? How does ‘high-brow’ and popular culture products revisit, criticize, legitimize, justify or reframe long misunderstood, vilified or simply ignored chapters in the history of colonial Latin America? How does history and stereotype interact in popular culture?

Spanish 395-0-1 – Ways of Doubting: Borges and García Márquez

This course studies what are perhaps the two most influential Latin American writers of the 20th Century, to explore how each of them performs, narrates, cultivates, and grapples with doubt as structural for epistemology. Some of the questions that we will explore are: What is the role of doubt in knowing and discovering? How is doubt experienced and how does it affect the relationships between characters? What are the effects of doubt in the fictional worlds constructed by these authors? Can those effects leave the book? Can doubt be trusted?

Spanish 395-0-2 – Beyond Frida: Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

This survey course explores some of the main visual trends, movements, and concerns that were discussed and performed in Latin America during the 20th and 21st Centuries. The class is structured around clusters of visual and literary production that had women artists at their core. We will devote each week to an in-depth study of one female artist and the ripple effects that her work and ideas produced in their spheres of influence—from visuality to politics. We will consider questions like: How did women artists inhabit the artistic space as one of emancipation and critique? How did Latin American artists incorporate and transform the artistic influences coming from Western Europe and North America? How did artistic practices influence and reflect local and regional contexts? How do these women engage with conceptualism and how does this engagement affect their work?

Spanish 395-0-1 – Contemporary Representations of Colonial America

This course explores contemporary renderings of key events and characters of Latin American colonial history in novels, comics, films, and television programs to address these key questions: What was/is colonialism? How does postcolonialism address the links between past and present? How does 'high-brow' and popular culture products revisit, criticize, legitimize, justify or reframe long misunderstood, vilified or simply ignored chapters in the history of colonial Latin America? How does history and stereotype interact in popular culture?

Spanish 397-0 – Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and Iberian Literatures and Cultures

Taught in English

Aspects of the literatures and cultures of Latin America and Spain. Possible topics include postcolonial criticism and its reception in Hispanic cultures, notions of translation, theories of poetics, orality and oral culture, the memoir, and travel writing. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Spanish 397-0 – Queer Theory in Latin America

What do we mean by queer? How is it different or new? If queer has been thought as unfixed and unsettling, then how can we furtherly understand this concept from a Latin American perspective? In this sense, Latin America has been a prominent producer of queer art, literature and culture that contributes to the understandings of queer resistance, movements, and sexualities. This course explores (dis)encounters between the production of queer theory in the Global North and Latin America, while also unpacking tensions between dominant structures of power and disempowered identities in 20^th and 21^st century Latin America literature and visual culture. Students will be introduced to film, narrative, photography, and performance from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile and Mexico along with Latin American theorists such as Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Epps, Giorgi, Quiroga, Molloy, Gómez-Barris, Sifuentes-Jàuregui, among others.

Spanish 397-0 – Race in Latin America Across Time

This seminar will track both the shifts and continuities in racial ideologies operating in Latin America since the colonial period, following the work of historians and anthropologists. The course will consider their impact on subject formation by reviewing their progression over time through theoretical arguments and evidence from case studies. Because race has been central to the forms of power and authority that first undergirded the colonial system and later birthed the many Latin American nations, we can trace a continued line of transmission of racialized ideologies that structure inequality in the region. Using a cultural and linguistic anthropological framework, we will approach these racial categories as composites of markers of otherness that include skin color, clothing, kin affiliations, occupation, among others. The course moves progressively from research about the early colonial period and forward chronologically until the 20th century, with a final discussion of migrant trajectories to the US. Topics covered will include variations in how race is defined and invoked in context, identity as a performative effect, coloniality as an ongoing process, and the role of historical memory in post-colonial Latin America.

Spanish 397-0 – Sexual Dissidence & Activism in Latin America: AIDS as Critique

Taught in English

The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s produced a new body and subjectivity. While the Global North experienced loss, mourning and activism for retroviral therapy, in the Global South too there was an emergency for viral knowledge and political recognition/inclusion. This course looks to situate the AIDS epidemic in the Latin American historical context while, at the same time, introducing its aesthetic manifestations.

Return To Top

Graduate

SPANPORT 415-0 – Studies in 19th Century Literatures & Cultures

Analysis of the discursive models of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin American and/or Iberian literary and cultural production. Topics vary. May be repeated for credit with a different topic.

SPANPORT 425-0 – Exile and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Film

This course will explore how the experiences of exile and diaspora (both political and economic) have helped shape Caribbean literature. We will examine a diverse array of texts – poetry, novels, short stories, films and critical essays – produced in both Spanish and English both in the Caribbean and in the United States by writers of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban origin. As we read, we will use exile and diaspora as lenses through which to interrogate other aspects of Latinx-Caribbean literature. How are these experiences portrayed, and what role have they played in the construction of identities, both personal and collective? How have these situations shaped the development of Caribbean communities (both physical and literary) within the continental U.S.? Should exile and diaspora be seen as patterns connected to globalization, thus serving to complicate our idea of what is Caribbean, or can they in fact be seen as fundamental to the construction of Caribbean-ness? We will look at how these movements affect the treatment of race and gender in these works, and we will analyze the role of nostalgia and humor in the navigation of different cultural and geographic spaces.

Readings will be drawn from the work of the following authors: Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Stuart Hall, Christina Sharpe, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Ana Lydia Vega, Pedro Pietri, Reinaldo Arenas, Manuel Ramos Otero, Mayra Santos Febres, Aurora Arias, Josefina Báez, Pedro Cabiya, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Rita Indiana Hernánez, Frank Báez, and Urayoán Noel, among others. Cinematic texts will be drawn from the work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Coyula, and Alejandro Brugués.

Readings will be in English and Spanish. Class discussion will be in Spanish.

SPANPORT 450-0 – Topics in Cultural Studies

Analysis of specific topics and debates within cultural studies and visual culture in Latin American and/or Iberia. Theme focus vary. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

SPANPORT 450-0 – Topics in Cultural Studies

Making the Sunflower Sing: Medicinal Plants in Songs and Poems from Wallmapu-Chile

The course explores the presence of knowledges of different validations and origins about medicinal plants in a combination of Mapuche and Chilean poetic and musical texts from the 20^th and 21^st century. These texts range from ritual chants to hip-hop and from Gabriela Mistral to collections of poems that have been recently published (such as Malú Urriola, Elvira Hernández, among others). By initially setting our attention on the healing plants and their aroma, the aim of this course is for students to be able to reflect and write about the relationship between, nature, writing and gender, mixing literate, country and ancestral knowledges in a sort of “ecology of knowledges” that increases the appreciation for the subjectivities that have historically produced the knowledge on medicinal plants: women, peasants, indigenous.

Textbook: The professor will provide an anthology and music playlist to the class.

Hacer cantar la maravilla: plantas medicinales en canciones y poemas Wallmapu-Chile

El curso explora la presencia de saberes de distinta validación y procedencia en torno a las plantas medicinales en un conjunto de textos poéticos y musicales, mapuche y chilenos del siglo XX y XXI que van desde los cantos rituales al hip-hop, desde Gabriela Mistral a poemarios de reciente publicación (Malú Urriola, Elvira Hernández, etc.). Se persigue que, a partir de poner la atención en las plantas sanadoras y su aroma, los estudiantes puedan reflexionar y escribir sobre la naturaleza, la escritura y el género, combinando saberes letrados, campesinos y ancestrales en una suerte de “ecología de saberes” que incremente la valoración por las subjetividades que históricamente han elaborado los conocimientos sobre las plantas medicinales: mujeres, campesinos, indígenas.

Textbook: Se presentará una antología y playlist a la clase

SPANPORT 450 – Topics in Cultural Studies: Dangerous Bodies in Turn-of-the-Century Latin America

Analyzes representations of different sexualities in Latin American fictions and visual culture from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the ways that these texts and images use the body to reveal the contradictions and complexities in the construction of the national culture. Graduate seminar (taught in Spanish).

SPANPORT 455 – Comparative Studies in Latin American Cultures: Comparative Studies in Latin American Cultures Literatura and Anthropology: Brazil and France

In his Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Levi-Strauss refers to Jean de Lery\'s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) as the "breviary of the anthropologist." Since then, accounts of the native cultures of Brazil (often nostalgic and melancholic) have played a central role in Western epistemologies, as well as in the construction of the modern Brazilian nation and aesthetics. This course is intended as both a thematic survey of Brazilian lettered culture and an investigation of the development of modern ethnography (largely in France). Firstly, we will discuss the role of European accounts of encounters with the Brazilian landscape and indigenous peoples in the development of modern ethnography; then we will analyze how the Brazilian lettered elite responded to the image of Brazil that was constructed by Europeans as an exotic space, and how they incorporated it into their projects of nation building (from 19th-century Romanticism, to Modernist avant-gardes and beyond). Finally, we will discuss how indigenous cultures remain a heterogeneous space in the national and global imagination, and the political consequences of this contradiction in contemporary societies. Readings will include travel narratives, novels, poems, essays, ethnographic accounts and films. Essays by Montaigne, Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Frank Lestringant, Michel de Certeau, Silviano Santiago, James Clifford, Krupat, Walter Mignolo, V. Crapanzano, Vincent Debaene, Viveiros de Castro, among others.
NOTE: Reading knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish and/or French desired but not required

SPANPORT 480-0 – Topics in Latin American Literature and/or Iberian Literatures & Culture

This seminar course explores Iberian and Latin American cultural and political issues in relation to particular representational techniques, prominent literary traditions, subject-and national-making practices, and varied forms of writing literary texts. Topics vary.

SPANPORT 480-0 – Topics in Latin American Literature and/or Iberian Literatures & Culture

Anarchisms and Marxisms in the Andes

In the late nineteenth century, anarchist and Marxist thought filtered into the Andes through two principal avenues: radical political activists and elite intellectual circles. While the initial points of entry of these socio-critical discourses were the region’s ports and cities, they quickly found their way to the most recondite parts of the region. This course proposes to investigate the shape that anarchist and Marxist thought took upon its contact with Andean societies through to its later development among various actors and at diverse sites, from 1890-1950. Already in the work of the Peruvian Manual González Prada in the 1890’s, an anarchist critique of property is retooled in order to address local semi-feudal land-owning regimes. Over the course of the first decades of the 20^th century, a slew of intellectual-activists take up powerfully influential Marxism in order to tailor it to local contexts and histories. Some examples include the works of Miguelina Acosta Cárdenas, José Carlos Mariátegui, César Vallejo, Raúl Haya de la Torre, and Manuel Seoane, in Peru; Jorge Icaza, Enrique Gil Gilbert, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Manuel Agustín Aguirre, and Joaquín Gallegos Lara in Ecuador; and Tristán Marof, Arturo Urquidi Morales, Gamaliel Churata, and José Antonio Arze in Bolivia. At the same time, both in contact with intellectuals and independently, urban and indigenous activists such as Carlos Condorena, Ezequiel Urviola, Domitilia Pareja, and Luis Cusicanqui developed their own hybridizations of critical Marxist and anarchist discourses that sought to suture urban revolutionary movements with longstanding indigenous rejections of a colonial status quo.

In order to understand both the processes of transmission of these discourses and the particular transformations they underwent in the Andes, the seminar highlights the exceptional diversity of forms that these interventions took, from essay and chronicle to novel and poetry, from broadsheets and working-class press to public protest and violent rebellions, across the linguistic registers of Spanish to the region’s indigenous languages. How did basic notions of class, commodity, and revolution, shift when faced with realities of indigenous social formations and history? What transformations were introduced into received Marxism and anarchism when they were transmitted into oral, regional Spanish as well as Aymara and Quechua? How did Marxists and anarchists conceptualize semi-feudal societies and their economies? How did they engage indigenous social formations and cultures? What modifications did working-class and indigenous activists introduce into the new critical discourses they encountered? Finally, the seminar will consider the reflection on European critical-theoretical traditions that their reception and immediate modification in Latin America constitutes.

SPANPORT 495-0 – Practicum in Scholarly Writing & Publication

Workshop intended to help students to design, research and write a scholarly article. Required for all graduate students in their second year.

SPANPORT 496-0 – Dissertation Prospectus Writing Workshop

This course seeks to impart to students the knowledge necessary to answer the questions: what is a dissertation, and how do I write one? In the spirit of a workshop, we will work as a group to foster and cultivate the skill sets necessary to formulate and articulate an organizing question adequate to the charge of a significant, independent, multi-year research project. We will call this first stage the prospectus, and we will figure out what it is and how best to write it. We will try to distill multiple and often conflicting statements, expectations, and/or fears about what the dissertation is so we can effectively undertake its preparation and writing.

SPANPORT 499-0 – Independent Study

Independent reading under supervision. Consultation with director of graduate studies required.

SPANPORT 570-0 – Teaching Assistantship and Methodologies

Tutorial, taken on a ungraded basis, arranged between individual students and faculty, which include attendance at advanced undergraduate course lectures and service in teaching assistantships.

SPANPORT 590-0 – Research

This course is intended for students to conduct preliminary dissertation research while on fellowship

Return To Top