2015-16 Graduate Courses
Fall 2015
SPANPORT 480-0-20 Special Topics: Phantasmagorias of Progress: Exhibitions, Photography and Literary Writing in Turn-of-the-Century Latin America.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course will explore how visual culture at the turn of the nineteenth-century became a significant source for articulating modern experience and utopian visions of progress. We will examine specific images/objects /texts but also reach beyond them to include a history of vision, visual experience, and its historical construction. We will discuss the theoretical frameworks that have come to shape this period and its relation to literary modernism: phantasmagoria, spectatorship, technological reproduction, exhibitionary complex, mass media and consumer culture. We will read texts by T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, S. Kracauer, J. Crary, G. Didi-Huberman, K. Silverman, J. Rancière, M. Hansen, M. Doane.
Tuedays 2:00 - 4:50
SPANPORT 415-0-1 Studies in 19th Century Lit & Cultures: Adulterated Nation: Illicit Passions in Turn-of-the-Century Latin America
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Cultures: graduate seminar (taught in Spanish). Examines narratives of adultery from late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Latin America that reveal the contradictions and complexities in the construction of the national culture
Thursdays: 2:00 - 4:50
Winter 2016
SPANPORT 455-0 Comparative Studies in Latin American and/or Iberian Literature and Cultures
Literature and Anthropology
Course Description: In his Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss refers to Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) as the "breviary of the anthropologist.” Indeed, since the Renaissance, accounts of the native cultures of Brazil (sometimes utopian, sometimes nostalgic and melancholic) have played a central role in Western epistemologies, as well as in the construction of the modern Brazilian nation and aesthetics. By studying ethnographic and fictional narratives about Brazilian indigenous peoples, this course is intended first, to understand the role played by ethnographic accounts in the construction of nationality in Brazil (and in Latin America in general) and, second to understand the role of the imagination in 20th anthropological writing. We will analyze, for example, how the Brazilian lettered elite responded to the image of Brazil that was constructed by Europeans as an exotic space, and how they incorporated it into their projects of nation building (from 19th-century Romanticism to Modernist Avant-gardes and beyond). In addition, we will discuss how indigenous cultures remain a heterogeneous space in the national and global imagination, and the political consequences of this contradiction in contemporary societies. Readings will include travel narratives, novels, poems, essays, ethnographic accounts and films. Essays by Montaigne, Jacques Derrida, Frank Lestringant, Michel de Certeau, Silviano Santiago, James Clifford, Johannes Fabien, Philippe Descola, Viveiros de Castro, among others. Assignments for the first class will be posted on CANVAS.
Offered: TH 2-4:50pm
Instructor: Cesar Braga-Pinto
SPANPORT 495-0 Practicum in Scholarly Writing and Publication
Course Description: This seminar course explores Iberian and Latin American cultural and political issues in relation to particular representational techniques, prominent literary traditions, subject-and national-making practices, and varied forms of writing literary texts. Topics vary.
Offered: T 2-4:50pm
Instructor: Lucille Kerr
Spring 2016
SPANPORT 415-0 Studies in 19th Century Literatures and Cultures
Course Description: The course will discuss theories and practices of 19th-century European Realist novelists. It will explore the aesthetic and ideological foundations of Realist mimesis and representation. In particular, it will focus on the problematics of desire and the construction of the modern discourse on the city. We will read novels by Honoré Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Narcís Oller, and Émile Zola; Benito Pérez Galdós's journalistic chronicles on the crimen de la calle Fuencarral; and short stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán. All works will be read in their original language whenever possible, or in English or Spanish translations. We will visit the Art Institute to discuss nineteenth-century representations of the city and the urban experience. The course will be taught as a seminar.
Offered: T 2:00-4:50pm
Instructor: Elisa Martí-López
SPANPORT 430-0 Topics in Latino\a Literatures and Cultures
Course Description: This graduate seminar will explore the diverse and multiple significations of the critical concept of Latinidad/es within Latino USA. While referring to a sense of collectivity, Latinidad/es also signals the tensions within, the horizontal hierarchies that structure different national communities of Latin American descent, and the power differentials within our population. We will explore both the fellowships and frictions that the term suggests, as well as the multiple social affiliations as these are inscribed in scholarship, fiction, and memoirs. Readings will focus on the geocultural urban spaces of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, examining interlatino power dynamics and intralatino/a subjectivities.
Offered: Th 2-5:00pm
Instructor: Frances Aparicio
SPANPORT 496-0 Dissertation Prospectus Writing Workshop
Course Description: 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 proposal, 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.
Offered: W 2-5:00pm
Instructor: Emily Maguire