2022-2023 Course Descriptions

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

PORTUGUESE 115-2: Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

Sequence to Port 115-1, Portuguese 115-2, continues to introduce students proficient in Spanish to concepts and usage of Portuguese in comparison and contrast to Spanish. Comparative sociolinguistic and interactive approach to develop communicative competence with emphasis on pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure in patterns of spoken and written Portuguese. In Port 115-2, students will deepen their knowledge in Portuguese as they learn usages and differences in the application of the Subjunctive. They will study sociological and historical aspects of Portuguese speaking countries other than Brazil. Prerequisite: Placement or PORTUGUESE 115-1

PORTUGUESE 201-0: Portuguese Reading and Speaking

‘Reading and Speaking' is an intermediate course in Portuguese designed to offer instruction in reading and speaking in various modes, with vocabulary - expansion activities, in-class presentations, roundtable discussions and systematic grammar reviews. The course proposes to expand mastery of Brazilian Portuguese for oral expression and comprehension through the discussion of select themes. The discussions will be based on readings of literary 'cronicas', short stories by and Brazilian well-known writers, videos, audio, as well as current events in periodicals and the Internet. The students will also participate in an Interactive Project with Brazilian college students from major universities in Brazil, with whom they will discuss about the themes proposed in this course. Prerquisite: Placement or PORTUGUESE 115-2.

PORTUGUESE 202-0: Reading and Writing Portuguese

Instruction in reading and writing expository and narrative prose. Emphasis on vocabulary, linguistic skills, and syntax appropriate to formal written Portuguese. Analysis and development of written skills in different types of discourse genres. This course counts toward the Minor in Portuguese. Prerequisite: PORT 115-2, PORT 121-3, or sufficient score on placement examination.

PORTUGUESE 210-0: Icons, Legents, and Myths in Brazil

Representations in graphic materials, documentaries, film, theater, folklore, narrative fiction, and popular music of historical, literary, and popular figures in the national imagination. May include English or Portuguese discussion sections. Prerequisite: PORT 201-0, PORT 202-0, or sufficient score on placement exam. Prerequisite for English section: none.

PORTUGUESE 303-0: Topics in Advanced Portuguese

Students will enhance their knowledge of the Portuguese language and their intercultural communicative skills as they read, discuss and analyze journalistic and literary works in Brazil, Portugal and lusophone countries, such as Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde.

PORTUGUESE 396-0: Topics in Lusophone Cultures: Contemporary Jewish Fiction of the Americas

Describing his upbringing as a child of Eastern European immigrants, the Jewish Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011) once said, “At home, you speak Yiddish, eat gefilte fish and celebrate Shabbat. But in the streets, you have soccer, samba, and Portuguese. After a while you feel like a centaur.” Scliar’s fictional explorations of Jewish identity have led the literary scholar Nelson Vieira to observe that the Brazilian writer’s stories “are reminiscent of work by Canadian-Jewish writer Mordecai Richler and the American novelist Philip Roth, both of whom struggle to capture the perplexing and exasperating paradoxes of people who live between two worlds.” This course will take Vieira’s remark as a critical point of departure to read contemporary Jewish literature of the Americas comparatively. Building on critical/theoretical readings, we will explore selected post-WWII novels and short stories published by Jewish writers across North and South America. While such fiction is often framed solely as part of a national tradition, we will look beyond national borders to understand some of the convergences and divergences of Jewish literary discourses which have emerged in different national contexts of the Western Hemisphere. Over the term, we will examine ways in which modern and contemporary Jewish fiction writers have approached themes of religion, culture, assimilation, diaspora, race, gender, sexuality, the legacy of the Holocaust, and other key concerns. (Taught in English)

SPANISH 101-1: Elementary Spanish

First course of a three-quarter sequence in introductory Spanish, designed for students who have never studied Spanish or studied Spanish less than two years in high school. Students will learn Spanish in order to use it beyond the classroom in meaningful and authentic ways at the Novice level of proficiency.

SPANISH 101-2: Elementary Spanish

Second course of a three-quarter sequence in introductory Spanish. Students will learn Spanish in order to use it beyond the classroom in meaningful and authentic ways at the Novice High-Intermediate Low level of proficiency. Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-1.

SPANISH 101-3: Elementary Spanish

Third course of a three-quarter sequence in introductory 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. Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-2.

SPANISH 105-6-4: First-Year Seminar: Don Quixote's World

Don Quixote's World What do we do about a world that doesn't conform to our expectations? Do we set out to mold reality to our vision or accept it as it is? How do we forge ahead with our dreams if others do not share our values or goals? Cervantes' Don Quixote tackles these big questions in ways that are both moving and funny as it narrates the adventures of the bedraggled hero--a man driven mad by reading too many fantasy novels--and his earthy sidekick Sancho Panza. The novel contains themes that resonate with our lives today, exploring not only what it means to write--and read--fiction but also asking us to evaluate what kind of person we want to be in the world. In our class, we'll read the novel closely and debate how its essential questions can shape our personal choices moving forward.

SPANISH 115-1: Accelerated Elementary Spanish

First course of a two-quarter sequence in introductory Spanish designed for students with previous experience in Spanish. Students will learn Spanish in order to use it beyond the classroom in meaningful and authentic ways at the Novice High-Intermediate Low level of proficiency. Offered in winter. Prerequisite: Spanish Language Placement Exam.

SPANISH 115-2: Accelerated Elementary Spanish

Second course of a two-quarter sequence in introductory Spanish designed for students with previous experience in 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. Offered in spring. Prerequisite: SPANISH 115-1.

SPANISH 121-1: Intermediate Spanish

First 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. Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-3, 115-2, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

SPANISH 121-2: Intermediate Spanish

Second 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. Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-1.

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 at the Intermediate Mid proficienty level. Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-2.

SPANISH 125-0: Accelerated Intermediate Spanish

Accelerated course in Intermediate Spanish. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through readings and films. Offered in fall only. Prerequisite: AP of 3 or Departmental Placement.

SPANISH 127-0: Accelerated Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Language Learners

The main purpose of this course is to build upon the language knowledge that students bring to the classroom and advance their proficiency of Spanish for multiple contexts. The course content will generate opportunities for students to hone their oral and written skills, to become acquainted with more formal registers of Spanish and to deepen their sense of pride in their linguistic and cultural heritage in order to communicate more effectively and more confidently in the target language. Offered in fall only. Prerequisite: AP of 3 or sufficient score on Spanish Language Placement Exam.

SPANISH 200-0: Advanced Spanish for Heritage Language Learners

This course prepares students for upcoming advanced Spanish courses. Current topics in the Spanish-speaking world will serve as an entry point for students to explore how past events have shaped the current circumstances of Latin America, Spain, and the Latinx community in the U.S. Students will develop a critical awareness of their language abilities. There will be an emphasis on reading and writing skills for Spanish heritage learners who have acquired Spanish listening and speaking skills at home and in their communities. Students will broaden their personal histories as Latinxs, literacy skills, and registers of use. Prerequisite: Spanish heritage learners who have completed SPANISH 127-0, AP of 4 or Departmental Placement.

SPANISH 201-0: Advanced Spanish I: Current Topics through Media

This course is designed to develop all communication modes in Spanish as students progress towards the advanced-low level of proficiency, through the interpretation and analysis of current topics in Spain and Latin America. The analysis of media will serve as an entry point for students to individually explore how past events have shaped current circumstances of Spanish-speaking countries. Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-3, 125-0, 199-0, Departmental Placement or AP of 4.

**SPANISH 204-0: Advanced Spanish II: Artivism in Times of Political Change**

This course is designed to develop all communication modes in Spanish at the advanced-low level of proficiency, through the exploration, interpretation and analysis of multimodal texts centered around politically and socially engaged art. The course will explore the role that the creative arts played in the political and social sphere in 20th-century Spain and Latin America while connecting these movements to current times. Prerequisite: SPANISH 197-0, 200-0, 201-0, 203-0, 207-0, Departmental Placement or AP of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam.

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 197-0, 200-0, 201-0, Departmental Placement or AP of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam.

SPANISH 206-0: Spanish for Professions: Business

Advanced course to develop communication skills in Spanish for business purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the global marketplace: specialized terminology, comprehension of cultural nuances, analytical writing skills and project-based assignments. Prerequisite: SPANISH 197-0, 200-0, 201-0, Departmental Placement or AP of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam.

SPANISH 208-0: Spanish and the Community

The main objective of this course is the development of advanced Spanish communication skills, as well as a thorough and personal cultural knowledge of the Hispanic communities in the Chicagoland area, through readings, discussions, writing, and interviews. Prerequisite: SPANISH 200-0, 201-0, 203-0, 207-0, Departmental Placement or AP of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam.

SPANISH 210-0: Queer Icons of Spain

In this version of Spanish 210 we will focus on queer icons of the 20th and 21st century, which became so based on their work in different artistic and political realms: literature, visual arts, performance art, cabaret, television, activism, and cinema among others. We will discuss several queer theories produced in Spain in the context of other international authors of queer thought, to explore the evolving notion of queerness, to historicize it, and to examine what makes particular figures an icon, a referent, or an influencer. We will also study a rich archive of queer artists and public personalities, from which students will pick one to do research. Methodological tools will be provided to analyze a wide range of artistic and activist manifestations. This course may include visits to local museums and galleries to attend exhibitions of queer art and history. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or AP of 5.

SPANISH 223-0: Cervantes

Don Quixote, one could argue, is a novel about how not to write and how not to read. The author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, pens the work in order to demonstrate the absurdity of chivalric romances, the bestsellers of his day. The protagonist, Don Quixote, is incapable of understanding the difference between the fictions he reads and the real world around him. While all this happened some four hundred years ago, reading and writing are still central to our everyday lives. In the spirit of Cervantes, we will study his famous text with a focus on the practices of reading and writing—how and why did people read and write in 17th-century Spain? How were different forms of writing connected to class, gender, race, and religion? What did literacy mean in the early modern world and what implications does this have for us today? We will employ different methods of reading (close, distant, collective, etc.) and different forms of writing (analytical, creative, etc.) to gain a better understanding of this key text. The class will be taught in English.

SPANISH 232-0: Discovering Jewish Latin America

“Jewish Latin America”: An oxymoron? Well, yes and no. Aren’t Latin American countries, in fact, Catholic? Well, yes and no. If the region is Catholic, what can possibly be “Jewish” about Latin America? Well, that’s what we’re going to “discover” in this course. Indeed, as it turns out, Latin America--and especially Argentina and Brazil (our focus), but also somewhat Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, for example--is much more heterogeneous than you might have thought. The story of the Jewish presence in Latin America is a surprising--and yet surprisingly familiar--story that begins with Jewish emigration/immigration in the late 19th -early 20th centuries and beyond (e.g., after the Holocaust), and continues to unfold to the present day. In reading some parts of that story in works of narrative fiction and film, and in reading about that story in secondary sources, we’ll also be pushed to think about--and interrogate--topics such as identity and difference, memory and history, testimony and truth, immigration and assimilation, and so on.

SPANISH 250-0: Literature in Spain before 1700

This course will offer a panorama of Spanish literature from the Medieval period to the end of the Golden Age. Our literary readings will be the baseline for understanding the social and historical context of the transformations that the Spanish empire endured throughout the centuries. We will pay especial attention to the Arabic and New World’s influence on the cultural production of Spain. In doing so, we will delve into the significant developments brought to literary form by the Spanish authors.Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 251-0: Literature in Spain since 1700

This survey course will offer a panorama of Spanish Literature of the 18th — 21st Centuries through prose, theatre and poetry to show the evolution of Spain and its drastic changes in political, social and cultural terms, identifying key literary movements (neoclassicism, Romanticism, realism, modernism, and others), and exploring key literary genres and authors. The course will explore these changes through the works of authors like José Zorrilla, Mariano José Larra, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Carolina Coronado, Santiago Rusiñol, Carme Riera, Najat El Hachmi, among others. Prerequisite (may be taken concurrently): SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 260-0: Literature in Latin America before 1888

This course provides a survey of major Latin American literary works, from pre-Columbian traditions to the era before the emergence of modernism in the late 19th century. We will take a critical approach to the idea of “literature” by analyzing, for example, poetic and dramatic texts alongside historical, legal, and religious documents. Key themes will include the articulation, transformation, and preservation of identity; the tensions and contradictions of the colonial era; and the uneven emergence of republics. While the primary language of the class will be Spanish, we will also consider the linguistic diversity of Latin America through translations of works in Indigenous and European languages. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 261-0: Literature in Latin America since 1888

This course explores the modern and contemporary period of Latin American literature. We analyze literary production in relation to major historical and cultural events of the 20th century and we conclude with reflection of current trends in contemporary cultural production. We begin with modernismo and the avant-gardes, the emergence of poets like Mistral and Neruda, and we move to mid-century and the “Boom” and its well-known authors like García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes. We also explore literary figures marginal to this canon, like Manuel Puig and Clarice Lispector and we conclude with the “new latin American boom” and contemporary female writers of the gothic tradition. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 277-0: Introduction to Latinx Literature

Is there such a thing as Latinx literature? If indeed there is such a thing, how can we define it and what are its characteristics? This class explores these questions through a diverse corpus of literary texts that do not necessarily reflect but rather invent Latinx identities and ways of being in the world. We will begin by studying Chicano and Nuyorican literary texts from the 1960s and 1970s and will conclude with work by newer voices Justin Torres, Carmen Maria Machado, and Xochitl González. Our readings will represent various literary genres, voices, and discourses that exemplify the various styles of writing created by a diverse group of national, ethnic, racial, and gendered subjects. We will emphasize historical continuities since the 1960s and 70s, while also exploring the relationship between genres and emerging social issues. By the end of the semester students will have a historical overview of the heterogeneous literary voices and aesthetics that constitute US Latinx literature as well as an awareness of the internal debates around the creation of a Latinx canon in the US.

SPANISH 280-0: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics

An introductory course designed to present students with an overview of the phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements specific to Spanish language. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 281-0: Spanish Phonetics and Phonology

Introduction to the theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. Articulation and production, classification and description, combination and syllabification, sonority sequencing, and prevalent dialects. Introduction to basic principles of ethnographic research, data collection, and analysis. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 302-0: Advanced Grammar

An advanced course designed to polish and improve language usage through in-depth study and development of grammar knowledge and skills, focusing on items most problematic for non-native speakers of Spanish. Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0.

SPANISH 310-0: Origins of Spanish Civilization

Was medieval Spain a land of Three Faiths? This course examines the cultures of al-Andalus and Christian Iberia, focusing on the period between the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and the forced conversions and expulsions of 1492. It is structured around readings of different facets of the interaction between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities. It will juxtapose the study of archetypal texts such as the Cantar de Mío Cid or the Libro del Buen Amor with an examination of contemporary Iberian Arabic and Hebrew poetry, travelogues, philosophical texts or religious polemics.

SPANISH 340-0: Colonial Latin American Literature: Rewriting the New World

This course focuses on colonial Latin America in the late 16th and early 17th century. Within this period, we will examine narrative and poetic works by Indigenous and European authors in which the nature and implications of the recent history of the “New World” (in particular, the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese) is contested, rewritten, and reimagined. We will be especially interested in the different ways that these works engage with both local and transatlantic influences. Key terms and questions to be explored include polemics, prophecy, hybridity, plurality, extirpation, preservation, and translation. While the primary language of the class will be Spanish, sources will include texts originally written in multiple Indigenous and European languages (provided in translation in Spanish or English). Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

SPANISH 342-0: Race and Representation in Latin America

An exploration the 20th century Latin-American avant-gardes through a transnational and intersectional lens focusing on five crucial threads: language, subjectivity, gender, technology, and geopolitics. We will cover both foundational and less known groups and artists, pondering the interplay between gender, aesthetics, politics, and power, that avant-garde practices and artifacts put forth and develop intensively. In one hand, we discuss the rich connections and mixtures of written and visual language, as well as the sustained spillover of artistic practice and subjectivity into public space. In the other, we will challenge historicism and the dichotomy between text and context, among other counterproductive preconceptions. We will cover a diverse corpus of poems, paintings, photographs, happenings, books, book covers, artist’s books, interventions, essays, and narrative texts.

SPANISH 343-0: Latin America Avant-Gardes

This course explores the 20th century Latin-American avant-gardes through a transnational and intersectional lens focusing on five crucial threads: language, subjectivity, gender, technology, and geopolitics. We will cover both foundational and less known groups and artists, pondering the interplay between gender, aesthetics, politics, and power, that avant-garde practices and artifacts put forth and develop intensively. In one hand, we discuss the rich connections and mixtures of written and visual language, as well as the sustained spillover of artistic practice and subjectivity into public space. In the other, we will challenge historicism and the dichotomy between text and context, among other counterproductive preconceptions. We will cover a diverse corpus of poems, paintings, photographs, happenings, books, book covers, artist’s books, interventions, essays, and narrative texts. Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

SPANISH 346-0: Testimonial Narrative in Latin America

What is testimonial narrative and how are we supposed to read it? Should we read testimonial texts as historical documents? Or as literary texts? Or as both? And what about testimonial cinema? Does that category refer only to documentary film? Or can feature films also be read, as it were, as testimonial narrative? What's the difference between one way of reading or seeing and the other? What do we expect--or even demand--by reading one way or the other? As it turns out, these are the sorts of questions that Latin American testimonial narrative--which has been among the most prominent (and also controversial) currents in Latin America since the "post-Boom" era--urges us to pose, even if we can't come up with definitive answers. Moreover, the testimonial genre pushes us to think more broadly--that is, about how we understand the term “literature”; how we think about "the author"; how we read texts or view films as “telling the truth” (or not); and more. Together, we will consider such questions and concepts in our reading/viewing of well-known works representing different models of testimonial narrative. Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

SPANISH 347-0: Literature and Revolution in Latin America

This course explores different forms of revolutionary practice in Latin American literatures as well as literary representations of revolution. We will read texts by Mariano Azuela, Nellie Campobello, Roque Dalton, Magda Portal, José Carlos Mariátegui, Ernesto Cardenal, Oswald de Andrade, and Patricia Galvão. We will also read and reflect around concepts covering the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and history.

SPANISH 361-0: Urban transformations and social change

We will explore two of the more violent and fascinating cases in the urbanization and modernization of the Latin American continent and its culture: Mexico and Venezuela. Our journey will start with Mexican Revolution and Gomecismo and will end with the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Our discussions will emphasize the intersections of aesthetic forms and the material history of modernity and urbanization—that is, we will put cultural production in dialogue with demographic changes and migrations, the appearance of Latin American megalopolis, urban reforms, revolutions and revolts, the rise of new political subjects, and the dominance of technology and capitalism. To this end, we will study a heterogeneous corpus of essays, films, visual art works, poems, novel chapters, chronicles, architectural projects, among other materials. Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0, SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

SPANISH 364-0: Cultural Borders/Border Culture

The notion of border implies a series of categories around which life is organized in contemporary societies, namely ‘nation’, ‘territory’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘identity’ among others. Although our interaction with them is constant, we become aware of them precisely when their apparent stability is challenged by fluctuations and displacement of people, nature, resources, and money. In this course we will approach modern and contemporary issues regarding border and migration in the Americas from a literary and visual culture standpoint. We will draw from authors like Gloria Anzaldúa, Valeria Luiselli, and Yuri Herrrera. Although we will focus mainly on the experience of the US-Mexico border, our hemispheric approach will help us to address some of the contemporary border issues in Central and South America. Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 220-0, SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

SPANISH 380-0: Topics in Film: El legado del Cinema Novo y el Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano

In this class we are going to study the main trends in Latin American Cinema from the 60s. Our aim is to understand how the manifests of “Cinema Novo” and “Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano” responded to the sociopolitical context of the moment in Latin America and managed through the technical and aesthetic challenges faced by the industry at the time. As we advance through the quarter, we are going to explore the production of later generations of filmmakers and how they place their work aesthetically and politically in an industry shaped by the influence of Hollywood and the European film festivals.

SPANISH 395-0: Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and Iberian Literature and Cultures

This course is a deep dive into Venezuelan 1960s as a decade of hope, revolt, violent conflict, transformation, and political anxiety in connection with the geopolitics of the times. We will focus studying how the flourishing of numerous artistic collectives during those years intersects and interacts with accelerated social change regarding political and ideological views, modernization and urban reform, social control, poverty, state violence, worker struggles, oil production, consumer culture and gender norms.

SPANISH 397-0: Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and Iberian Literature and Cultures: Topics in Lusophone Cultures: Contemporary Jewish Fiction of the Americas

SPANISH 397-0: Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and Iberian Literature and Cultures: Medieval Sepharad: Language, History and Memory of the Jewish Communities of Medieval Iberia

This course provides a broad introduction to the legacies and histories of medieval Spanish Jewish communities, from their late Roman origins through their eventual conversion and expulsion in the 15th century, and their subsequent global diaspora during the early modern period. It follows a mixed chronological and thematic approach, allowing students to think comparatively in historical, literary or philosophical terms about the Iberian Jewish tradition. It will invite students to reflect on how we study pre-modern Jewish communities, and more broadly minority groups in medieval Spain and the Mediterranean basin, and address questions of agency, visibility, textuality or identity of these groups. The course will challenge students’ understanding of what is distinctively ‘Spanish’, ‘Jewish’, or ‘Medieval’ about these collectives. It will also discuss the legacy of Jewish culture and philosophy in Spain, and historiographical models that underpin the study of these groups, especially the rise of anti-Judaism, and the impact of neo-lachrymose accounts of the Iberian past in Jewish studies. (Taught in English)

SPANPORT 410-0: Topics in Modern Literatures and Cultures

Keywords in Early Colonial Latin American Literature: This class offers an advanced survey of the literary and cultural production of early colonial Latin America--with a focus on Brazil, Mexico, and Peru--alongside a discussion of key theoretical and disciplinary approaches to the period. The course is structured around readings of major figures, works, and episodes in the early colonial period (1492-1695). We will read course materials in light of and against scholarly takes on critical keywords (such as archive, discourse, mestizaje, and sensorium) and frames (e.g., colonial, viceregal, transatlantic, and hemispheric). Required course readings will be in Spanish and English, with some optional readings in Portuguese. The class will be taught in English.

SPANPORT 415-0: Studies in the 19th Century Literature and 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: Studies in Contemporary Literature and Cultures: Staging Immigration: 1991-2016

This seminar will explore three decades of theatrical responses to mass immigration in Spain to analyze and critique the role of theatre as a sociopolitical platform. Why is theatre the genre that has most prolifically discoursed with this phenomenon and what problematics does that present? What types of migrants appear on stage? How do these plays allow us to understand a changing Spain? Students will read a variety of plays and theoretical texts in order to answer these questions. The final assessment for the course will be a conference presentation or a final exam.

SPANPORT 450-0: History and Theory of the Avant-Gard

Theory and historiography of avant-garde and modernist movements around the globe, encompassing literature, visual arts, and performance arts. Conceptual approaches including the process of unmaking sense, the challenging of traditional modes of production and perception, the relationship with the literary/art markets, the relation between art and politics, the paradoxes of destruction and conservation. Guest speaks and museum visits. Collective project of timeline construction and individual research projects.

SPANPORT 455-0: Comparative Studies in Latin American and/or Iberian Literatures & Cultures

This seminar engages as a point of departure with Derrida's reflections on photography in Droit de regards 1985 (Right of Inspection) and his engagement with Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes — two key philosophers of the image in the 20th century— to interrogate photography, photographic practices and photographic archives in their role as constitutive forms of contemporary regimes of visibility. We will explore photography and representation — its singular capacity to relate to the real and instituting truth claims—; photography and memory, material trace and the politics of archives; photography and inscription, death and practices of mourning; photography and techné, repetition and dissemination, and the ways in which photography works to open itself to alterity and non-self-identity. Working through conceptual account as well as closely reading photographic images, we reflect on this medium as conditioning our access to contemporary aesthetic experience and its ethicopolitical futurity. A fundamental question we explore throughout: If Aesthetics has historically been the realm of thought where universalizing claims of political and self-determined subjecthood posed the threshold of the human subject in and of their representation, how have unfreedom, subjection, and social injustice have administered visibility and recognition? What conceptual instrument contemporary thinking of photography and photographic practices provide us to de-naturalized the way these regimes have taught us to see.

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 560-0: Foreign Language Teaching: Theory and Practice

This course is designed for graduate students who will be teaching Spanish or Portuguese as a Second Language at Northwestern University, and undergraduate students who are planning to become Spanish/Portuguese instructors. The course provides an overview on traditional and current foreign language teaching methods and pedagogical trends to approach the language-learning process. The theoretical background will be applied to the development of second language learners' intercultural communicative competence. The course will present students with the components of effective teaching tools, such as lesson planning, student needs analysis, classroom management, materials design and evaluation. In sum, students will acquire the pedagogical tools and metalinguistic awareness that they need to become successful second language instructors.