DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese 115-2 is the sequence of Portuguese 115-1. For students proficient in Spanish. Comparative sociolinguistic and interactive approach to communicative competence emphasizing pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure, and patterns of spoken and written Portuguese.

Prerequisite: AP 4 or equivalent on the Spanish Language Placement Exam.

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

Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-2 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

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

Prerequisite: SPANISH 115-1 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

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. No P/N. Attendance at first class required

Second course of sequence designed to develop speaking strategies and structures through examination of culturally related topics in the Spanish-speaking world. Emphasis on formal conversation and specialized vocabulary. Three class meetings a week. This course may not count toward the major/minor in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 201, AP score of 5, or Spanish Language Placement Exam. Attendance at first class is required.

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. No P/N. Attendance at first class required.

For heritage speakers, the course emphasizes writing, syntax, and formal modes of the language.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 197, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. Three class meetings a week. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

This course is a survey of the most influential literary works of the Spanish Middle Ages and the early Golden Age, periods that impacted not only the present culture of Spain but also that of much of Latin America. From the first manifestations of the written romance language (Xth c. Glosas del Monasterio de San Millan de la Cogolla) to the mester de juglaria (Poema del Cid) and the mester de clerecia of Gonzalo de Berceo to the Archpriest of Hita to the Marquis of Santillana to the Coplas de Jorge Manrique to Garcilaso de la Vega, the course outlines fundamental cultural phenomena, such as the evolution of Spanish from “vulgar” Latin and the establishment of Christianity and its literary manifestations.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220 (Can be taken concurrently or with teacher permission if SPANISH 250 has not been taken)

This is a foundational linguistics course that introduces students to the theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. Offered in spring only. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

This class will provide an overview of debates surrounding the meaning of “justice” and “resistance” in contemporary Latin America. It will also interrogate how these terms have been used and, in some instances, appropriated for political purposes. While this class will focus on late-twentieth and twenty-first century acts of resistance and searches for justice, it will also situate those acts and searches within historical conversations surrounding the meaning of democracy, politics, and protest. These debates and conversations will be addressed through a range of primary sources, including but not limited to feature film, documentary film, photography, truth commission reports, and testimonial narratives. Student assignments will be workshop and project based and will form part of a larger final quarter project.

Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

This course reviews some of the most important ideas and arguments produced in Latin American Philosophy and Critical Theory. Latin American Philosophy was born out of aims to understand how geopolitical conditions produced intellectual coloniality –understood as the impossibility of reaching an age of majority due to dependence on western thinking. Most recently, Latin American critical theorists —such as Santiago Castro-Gómez, Rita Laura Segato, Verónica Gago, and the Zapatistas,—have asked : What discourses of power lie behind the understanding of Latina American as otherness to Europe? What is the relation between war and the increase of femicide? How do aesthetic practices, social movements, and the exercise of memory change politics? How can those practices be understood as part of a "potencia feminista”? With which theoretical sources should we understand Latin American experiences such as "zapatismo" and its political principle of “governing obeying”?

In this course, we will understand how the Philosophy of Liberation, and other Latin American productions, form part of a “knowledge dispositive” (a term in dialogue with the French philosopher Foucault) engaging the political needs of colonial and colonized nations. Students who have enjoyed the study of foundational critical theorists such as Marx, Nietszsche and Freud (and frameworks such as historical materialism, genealogy and psychoanalysis) will encounter authors in critical dialogue with these methodologies. This is a creative dialogue, given that theories produced in western traditions do not always attend to the current realities of Latin American countries. We will consider how gender-based critique has formed an important part of recent Latin American critical theory and address the role of race, gender, and class intersectional critique in this context.

Thus, the course moves from Anibal Quijano’s critique of coloniality of power to María Lugones’ critique of this category in light of her parallel account of a modern gender system. We will study projects to overcome intellectual coloniality by concentrating on the debate, and differences, between Dussel and Santiago Castro-Gómez, and their respective theories of a philosophy of liberation and a genealogy of coloniality. Further keywords from this course on decoloniality and critical theory include gore capitalism, coloniality and transmodernity, potentia/potestas, endebtedness, and baroque identity.

This course will explorehow the experiences of exile and diaspora (both political and economic) have helped shape Caribbean literary and cinematic production. We will examine a diverse array of texts –poetry, novels, short stories, films and critical essays –produced in both Spanish and Englishboth in the Caribbean and in the United Statesby 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 thesesituations 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, Sylvia Wynter, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Pedro Pietri, Reinaldo Arenas, Manuel Ramos Otero, Aurora Arias, Josefina Báez, Pedro Cabiya,Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Rita Indiana Hernández, Frank Báez, and Urayoán Noel, among others.Cinematic texts will be drawn from the work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Coyula, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, and Alejandro Brugués.

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