Spring 2021 Class Schedule
Spring 2021 class Schedule
Spring 2021 course descriptions
PORTUGUESE 101-3: Elementary Portuguese
Portuguese 101-3 is an elementary level language course designed for students in the beginner level of Portuguese. Based on the communicative approach, the course highlights the acquisition of basic language skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, emphasizing grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of Brazil Portuguese in meaningful cultural contexts. In Portuguese 101-3, the contexts are structured around the theme "Os passatempos", "As festas e tradições", e "O mercado de trabalho". The course also offers insights into the history and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries in Europe, Africa and America. Focusing on the mastery of the language, it is important to emphasize that Portuguese is the language spoken for instruction and interaction among students.
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.
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.
SPANISH 101-3: Elementary Spanish
Spanish 101-3 is the third course of a three-quarter sequence in Elementary Spanish. Students will learn Spanish in order to use it beyond the classroom in meaningful and authentic ways at the Intermediate low level of proficiency. This means that students will be able to communicate messages on everyday topics that affect them directly. Class is taught in Spanish.
Prerequisite: Spanish 101-2. No P/N
SPANISH 115-2: Accelerated Elementary Spanish
Spanish 115-2 is the last course of a two-quarter sequence designed for students with previous experience in Spanish. Development of proficiency in speaking, listening, writing, and reading in a cultural context at the Intermediate-Low level. Offered in spring.
Prerequisite: Spanish 115-1. No P/N
SPANISH 121-3: Intermediate Spanish
Third course in a three-quarter sequence in Intermediate Spanish. Further development of communicative proficiency with an emphasis on the functional use of Spanish and cultural content and reflection. Three synchronous class meetings a week with additional asynchronous language contact.
Prerequisite: 121-2. No P/N
SPANISH 199-0: Language in Context: Contemporary Spain
An introduction to the culture and sociopolitical issues of contemporary Spain is the basis for reviewing and solidifying communicative functions that pose certain challenges to Spanish learners, and for fully integrating all language skills in Spanish.
Prerequisite: 121-3, 125-0, AP score of 4 on the Spanish Language and/or Literature, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N
SPANISH 201-0: Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America
This course is designed to develop speaking and writing skills in Spanish through the question of human rights in Latin American during the 20th and 21st centuries. This question will be addressed through readings, analysis and discussions of articles, literary and historical texts, as well as films. A special focus will be on countries in the Southern Cone and on accurate informal and formal conversation.
Prerequisites: 199 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N
SPANISH 203-0: Individual and Society through Written Expression
First course of 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: 201, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N
SPANISH 204-0: Reading and Writing the Art of Protest
Second course of a sequence designed to develop advanced writing skills and structures through analysis of socially committed art. Emphasis on cultural analysis, close readings and the development of longer essays.
Prerequisite: 203 or 207. No P/N
SPANISH 207-0: Spanish for Heritage Speakers
Third course in a sequence for heritage language learners. Focuses on the development of writing skills and communicative abilities in a formal, academic register through the study of academic and literary texts that examine current issues related to the Spanish-speaking world and in particular, the Latinx community in the U.S.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 197-0, AP score of 5, or sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N
SPANISH 220-0-2: Introduction to Literary Analysis
This course offers students an introduction to both literary analysis and Spanish and Latin American literary traditions. While our primary object of study is literature—that is, different literary forms (e.g., narrative, drama, poetry) and individual literary texts—we will also consider other forms of cultural production (e.g., feature films and music). When “reading” our primary sources, we will practice a range of methods so as to learn how to approach those sources from different historical, cultural, and critical perspectives. This course aims to strengthen students’ analytical and written skills at the same time that it works to foster their interest in Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. All course materials will be available via our Canvas site.
Prerequisite: Span 204.
SPANISH 220-0-3: Introduction to Literary Analysis
This class will provide an introduction to literary analysis in Spanish. We will study primary works drawn from different regions, historical periods, and genres. Our methodologies will range from close reading and poetic scansion to creative reinterpretations. We will also discuss the role of contextual factors—for instance, autobiographical, ideological, historical, and cultural—in shaping our analysis of literary texts. The aim of this class is to prepare students to read, discuss, and write analytically in Spanish about literature and culture.
Prerequisite: Spanish 204-0. No P/NP
SPANISH 260-0: Literature in Latin America before 1888
This course provides an overview of Latin American literature and culture before the modernismo movement of the late nineteenth century. We will study a range of historical contexts and perspectives to consider how early literary texts and narratives shaped the formation of the so-called New World. Our readings will cover topics including colonization, class, gender, and race and will grapple with questions surrounding the meanings of discovery, conquest, and identity. Together, we will consider not only the history of knowledge production in Latin America but also how that history highlights the limits of representation. With these goals in mind, we will explore distinct narrative forms, including but not limited to chronicles, letters, poems, illustrations, and forms of record keeping.
Prerequisite: Span 220 taken prior to or concurrently with this course.
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.
SPANISH 395-0-2: Trans*Cultures in Latin America
This course is an introduction to the literary history of queer women and transmasculinities in the Latin American long fin-de-siècle (1890-1930), with particular attention to modernista and avant-garde cultural productions. Recent scholarship on representations of deviance in Latin America argued that gender and sexual abnormalities were nineteenth-century medical constructs that identified queerness as a monstrosity. We will explore how queer women and early forms of transmasculinities, pejoratively called marimachos in the vernacular culture, came to embody dissident identities that disputed gender binaries and late nineteenth-century concepts of womanhood, decorum, and maternity. Drawing from a variety of methodological approaches, the course will illuminate the specificity of practices carried out by a rich plethora of female and transmasculine subcultures in Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Southern Cone: soldaderas (women soldiers), llaneras (rural women), cuchilleras (knife fighters), arrabaleras (tango singers), marimachos (tomboys), suffragists, and other iconic figures of the turn of the century. Some of the topics covered include notions of Greek love, primitivism, teratology, and sexual inversion, as well as why first-wave feminism caused a crisis in the traditional ways of representing women in Latin American literature and print culture. The course will engage with major topics within gender, disability, and trans* theories, including intersectional approaches, transfeminist and queer studies.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0
SPANISH 395-0-3: Latin American Avant-Garde Battle Grounds
This seminar offers a revision of three decisive and foundational battlegrounds in which 20th century Latin American avant-garde ventured and got entangled: technology, geopolitics, and gender. Avoiding the dichotomy between text and context, emphasis will be made in the concrete analysis of the relationship between material history, experimental and belligerent aesthetics, language, and power relations. We will deepen in the study of experimental and avant-garde visual and literary production and practices, as well as learn important concepts from global modernism, technology, environmental and gender studies. Finally, throughout the quarter we will constantly exploring transversal insights that connect this apparently separate battleground.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0
SPANISH 397-0-2: Jews and Muslims in Contemporary Spain
(combined with ANTHRO 390-0-26, JWSH_ST 390-0, and MENA 390-6-20)
This undergraduate seminar examines the shifting place of Jews and Muslims in contemporary Spain. Together, we will explore several interrelated questions: (1) How have “Spain” and “Europe” variously been defined as modern, white, Christian, or secular by figuring Jews and Muslims as others? (2) How have these terms and the forms of life and history that they purport to represent changed over time? (3) What are the similarities and differences between the “Jewish Question” and the “Muslim Problem”? (4) How do Jews and Muslims understand themselves in relation to Spain, Europe, and to each other? At a time when racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and right-wing populist movements are ascendant in Spain and across Europe, we will work collaboratively to not only answer these questions, but to formulate new ones. To do so, we will consult scholarship in anthropology, history, cultural theory, and philosophy as well as on fiction, film, and journalism as resources. Throughout the term, we will be especially attuned to the forms of inclusion and exclusion that have affected Jews and Muslims in Spain, always with an eye toward how such abstractions come to matter in everyday life.
SPANISH 397-0-3: Rice Across Time in Latin America
(combined with ANTHRO 390-0 and LATIN_AM 391-0-21)
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 impact of these ideologies 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.
SPANPORT 401-0: The Letter in Latin America
(combined with COMP_LIT 488-0 and LATIN_AM 401-0-20)
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the modern period. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in three different, and crucial, historical moments: the post-revolutionary 19th century and its responses both to Independence and an emerging neocolonial order; the frenetic 1920s and 30s and the articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture; and the late 20th century, which has witnessed an attempt to reckon with the repercussions of the revolutionary projects of the mid-century. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production’s influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity and coloniality inflect the region’s intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with optional supplements from other sources.
SPANPORT 410-0: Oralities and Literacies in Early Colonial Latin America
Early colonial Latin American literature is brimming with different forms of orality—songs and colloquies, speeches and sermons, to name a few—but we often study this corpus through texts bound up with alphabetic literacy—annotations and transcriptions, written letters, reports, recollections, and so on. How do these varied forms of orality and literacy shape and distort colonial encounters and conflicts? How do they continue to inform the field of colonial Latin American studies today? How can we push at the seams of this classic conundrum by thinking about visual literacy, mediascapes, sensoria, and embodied knowledge? Taking these questions as our point of departure, this class will examine colonial Latin American literary and cultural production through the lens of oralities and literacies. We will read primary texts drawn from a range of contexts in the colonial world alongside theoretical and critical works from within and beyond colonial Latin American studies.
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. One 3-hour class meeting a week. Outside of the classroom, students will observe three classes of Spanish language courses taught at Northwestern University.
Prerequisite:
- Being a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
- If undergraduate, having taken SPAN 204 or equivalent at Northwestern University.
No P/N