DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese Courses

Portuguese Language

Portuguese 115-1 – Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

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.

Portuguese 115-2 – Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

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.

Portuguese 201-0 – Reading and Speaking Portuguese

This intermediate course is designed to expand mastery in reading and speaking Brazilian Portuguese through select cultural videos, readings of literary "crônicas", periodicals, and the Internet. Students will also have the opportunity to communicate online in Portuguese with college students in Brazil. This course counts toward the minor in Portuguese. 

Prerequisite: PORT 111-3/112-3 (currently not offered), PORT 115-2, PORT 121-3 or placement test. 

Portuguese 202-0 – Contemporary Brazil: Literature and Film

Instruction in reading and writing expository and narrative prose. Emphasis on vocabulary, linguistic skills, and syntax appropriate to formal written Portuguese.

Prerequisite: PORT 115-2, PORT 121-3, or sufficient score on placement examination.

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.

Prerequisite: PORT 202-0 or equivalent.

Portuguese Literature

Portuguese 396-0 x Spanish 397-0-2 x Comp Lit 305-0 – Latin American Contemporary Cinemas

Taught in English

Discussion of different trends in contemporary cinema from various regions of Latin America, including Brazil.

Portuguese 396-0 – Topics in Lusophone Cultures

Taught in English

Aspects of the literatures and cultures of Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, Guinea-Bissau). Possible topics include Brazilian modernism, Lusophone African literature and film, race and sexuality in Brazilian literature, travel narrative, literature and ethnography, the Portuguese novel, nation and nationalism. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Graduate

SpanPort 415-0 – Objects of Desire

This course will provide students with a nuanced understanding of topics of fin-de-siecle Latin American culture related to the market, aesthetics, and politics. We will explore the relationship between nineteenth-century cultural productions and material objects, focusing on the circulation and textual description of these objects. The idea is to understand how certain objects-including but not limited to gloves, watches, umbrellas, books, magazines, newspapers,  photographs, albums, cloth, brooms and irons-and parts of the body-including hands, feet, and anuses-revealed an urgent new sensibility regarding material culture and a subsequent reorientation toward objects. 

SPANPORT 420 – 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 420 – Studies in Twentieth-Century Literatures and Cultures

Analysis of movements, trends, and issues in twentieth-century Latin American, Iberian, and/or U.S. Latino literary and cultural production. Topics vary. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

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 425-0 – Masculinities in Latin American Literature and Culture

This seminar will examine representations of masculinity across Latin America. The theoretical readings will offer working concepts in the study of masculinity toexamine Hispanic literature and film in ways that reflect on the construction of gender: the idea of "hegemonic masculinity," the notion of male "wholeness," "homosociality," the effect of a colonial heritage in gender construction, issues of fatherhood, male sexuality, and the role of men in war and in national discourses.

Spanport 450-0 – Exile and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Film

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.

SpanPort 480-0 – Seeing, Saying, Witnessing: Latin American Testimonial Figures

Taught in English

The course will focus on how Latin American testimonial narratives theorize as well as dramatize witness figures and scenes of witnessing that exceed the critical concepts and proposals brought to bear on such works; how specific testimonial texts not only construct but also interrogate their own witnesses. Reading and discussion will be anchored in close reading.

The class will be conducted in English. Advanced reading knowledge of Spanish required (English translations of required Spanish originals will also be available, as needed).

SPANPORT 495 – 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.

Spanport 560-0 – Foreign Language Teaching: Theory and Practice

A foundation of theories and research in second language acquisition and second language pedagogy, along with analysis and practical application for the Spanish language classroom. The course is required of all graduate students in the Department of Spanishand Portuguese before they start teaching language courses in the program. In addition, undergraduate students who are planning to become Spanish instructors can also take this course. One 3-hour class meeting a week.

Registration Requirements: Being a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. If undergraduate, having taken SPANISH 204 or equivalent at Northwestern University.

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.