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 proficient in Spanish. Comparative sociolinguistic and interactive approach to communicative competence emphasizing pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure, and patterns of spoken and written Portuguese.
Portuguese 303-0 Short Stories and Narratives in Portuguese
In this course, the students will deepen their knowledge of Portuguese language by studying Narratives in Portuguese. From Chronicles to Brazilian literary short stories, students will have an understanding of the structure of a story, especially from a Semiotic point of view, where cultural signs and practices emerge. We will analyze the structure of narratives according to the narrator's voice, timeline, settings and the construction of the main characters. Based on their readings, at the end of the course, the students will write their own short story or a script for a short movie.
Portuguese 396-0 x Spanish 397-0 x Comp_Lit 301 “Where Memory Dwells”: The Memory Debate within Contemporary Latin America
This class will introduce students to the various roles that memory, as a concept, has played in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American politics and society. To consider such roles, this class will address a range of sociopolitical contexts, such as Argentina’s and Brazil’s authoritarian regimes and Guatemala’s civil war. At the same time, it will not be limited to instances of state-sponsored violence but will interrogate broader systems of repression to explore how memory is constructed and what its limits are. While this class will focus on a range of primary sources, it will focus primarily on feature films, novels, and sites of memory.
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.
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.
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.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-1, or sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam.
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 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
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.
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.
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 or AP 5 in Spanish Language AND Literature
Spanish 261-0 Literature in Latin America since 1888
This course provides an overview of some of the major trends in Latin American literature and culture since 1888, while at the same time offering opportunities to improve students’ oral and written Spanish. The course will emphasize various literary styles and ideological constructions that, in different ways, reflect the complexity of Latin American cultures. While introducing students to the social and historical context in which the works were written, the course will focus on the following issues: the cultural and political dimensions of literature; the representation of class, gender, and race; the formative impact of nationalism and internationalism; and the concern for finding autochthonous modes of expression.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (may be taken concurrently)
Advanced course designed to polish Spanish usage through in-depth study and development in grammar, focusing on items most problematic for nonnative speakers.
We will read representative texts by classic authors from the Golden Age of Spanish letters (16TH-17th century), including Garcilaso de la Vega, Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de León, Quevedo, and short works by Cervantes (not Don Quijote). Students will become acquainted with the historical, artistic, cultural, and religious context, including the music of great composers and the art of world-renowned artists like Velazquez and El Greco.
Prerequisite: 1 course from SPAN 250, 251, 260, or 261.
Spanish 395-0 Spectacular Masculinities in Latino America
Recent critical inquiries into the notion of masculinity have had an enormous impact, weakening sexual hegemony and the consequent reproduction of the binary of gender. That is, the redefinition of the concept of masculinity—and its extension to masculinities—has systematically dismantled the illusion of male anatomy as the sine qua non of the body. The insight that masculinity is just one more performance of gender has had repercussions on the materiality of sex, such that the masculine body is now understood as cosmetic, excessive, and prosthetic matter that is changeable, mutable, and malleable. Masculinity, however, was not always understood as the status quo of the body. Masculinity was invented and, with it, the idea that the male body corresponds to the place of the original, the beginning of materiality, or the first skin. This illusion of naturalness forms part of a group of performative operations of citationality and repetition that have become naturalized over a very long time. As such, the exploration of gender and its performance are necessary critical platforms for tracing the production of the illusion of gender’s naturalness. We will study texts, movies, drag king performances, music, essays, among other materials, that question hegemonic notions gender in Latin/o America.
Spanish 395-0 Ways of Doing: Art to Change The World
Ways of Doing: Art to Change the World is a course that studies the multiple ways in which artistic practices can change the world and enhance the real. We will analyze a variety of theories in an effort to explore the different attempts to respond to the questions “what can art do?” and “what should art do?” Theories will be coupled with case studies from Latin America to allow students to analyze and experience how artists and artist-like-minded individuals translated these theories into artworks and interventions that exerted an impact on reality beyond the boundaries of the art world.
Students will be required to develop a semester long project that will conclude in a piece or intervention, in the media of the student’s choosing, that uses art as a tool to create or change the world.
Spanish 395-0 Latin American Feminism and Latinx Feminism
This course aims to encourage students to recognize two different ways of intellectual work produced by women from Latinx Communities in USA, Nuestramérica/Abya Yala. Through the readings of some of the seminal works of Anzaldúa, Lugones, Sor Juana Inés, Rosario Castellanos, and others, students will recognize how different feminism is depending on its social localization. The second part of the course will be an overview of ideas, discussions and recent debates of feminism and women's social mobilizations from Bravo River to Patagonia. The main aim is showing some of the most representative works done about/by indigenous and black women.
(The class will be taught in Spanish but students with intermediate Spanish are welcome.)
Spanish 397-0 x Comp Lit 383 Jewish Argentina: From Jewish Gauchos to Contemporary Culture
So…what’s “Jewish” about Argentina? This seems an odd question to ask about a predominantly Catholic Latin American country--even though its small Jewish population is the largest in Latin America and the third largest in the Americas overall. Yet this seemingly homogeneous nation is more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural than one might suppose. Indeed, the story of the Jewish presence in Argentina is a surprising--and yet surprisingly familiar--story. We will explore episodes in this story through works of literature and film that will also push us to think about identity and difference, memory and history, testimony and truth, immigration and assimilation, among other topics. Our close readings and analyses will focus on four writers and one film maker: Alberto Gerchunoff (1884-1950), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Jacobo Timerman (1923-1999), Ana Maria Shua (1951- ), and Daniel Burman (1973- ). Secondary materials will include essays and documentary films about history, culture and literature.
Spanish 397-0 x Port 396-0 x Comp_Lit 301-0 “Where Memory Dwells”: The Memory Debate within Contemporary Latin America
This class will introduce students to the various roles that memory, as a concept, has played in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American politics and society. To consider such roles, this class will address a range of sociopolitical contexts, such as Argentina’s and Brazil’s authoritarian regimes and Guatemala’s civil war. At the same time, it will not be limited to instances of state-sponsored violence but will interrogate broader systems of repression to explore how memory is constructed and what its limits are. While this class will focus on a range of primary sources, it will focus primarily on feature films, novels, and sites of memory.
SpanPort 420-0 Indigenismos and Indigeneities in Latin America
This course explores the intersections, connections, and contradictions between the literature of indigenismo and a theoretical and critical corpus that turns on notions of indigeneity. We will review the long production of lettered indigenismo, from the 19th century to the present, and will select works from a variety of countries, such as Bolivia, Peru, México, Guatemala, and Brazil. Critical sources will include selections from scholarship on indigenismo and indigeneity, as well as significant interventions from related fields, such as subaltern studies and testimonial studies.
SpanPort 425-0 Poetics of the Archive: Reading in and against the Archive in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Documents, files, photographic albums, found footage, forensic evidence, dockets, briefs, letters: we propose the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both the texts as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that archive our present. All these forms of archival materials and its contemporary availability through digitalization have incited new forms of experimentation in artistic and literary practices. In this seminar, we reflect critically on the politics of archive construction and the uses of archival documents by leading Latin American artists and writers to rethink the meaning of history, memory and loss, technology and subjectivity. Following Derrida’ s Archive Fever and his lead on the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, we delve into art and literature engagements that erode of the archive’s former boundaries, stability, function and meaning and perform political interventions and subversions that proves increasingly recombinant and generative.
Readings include critical essays by Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Taylor, Enzewor, Rolnik; literary texts by Borges, Bolaño, Cabezón Cámara, Fonseca, Dillon and artworks by Muñoz, Restrepo, Rennó, among others.
SpanPort 495-0 Practicum in Scholarly Writing and Publication
This required seminar focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of scholarly writing and publication. Reading and discussion, as well as writing assignments, aim to help students become more familiar with different ways in which they will be able to engage with other scholars and critics in their respective fields and areas of specialization. Students will take up the mechanics of scholarly publication, modes of scholarly research and reading, and genres of scholarly writing. The primary goal for each student will be to produce a draft of a publishable scholarly article, based on a paper written for a previous course. Other requirements include: a book review linked to the seminar paper; a formal abstract of the seminar paper; and written feedback on other students' writing. Seminar meetings will combine group discussion and oral presentations, workshop sessions focusing on written assignments, and, as needed, individual-tutorial meetings.
