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Spring 2017

Spanish-Language Courses

Courses on Literature & Culture 

Spanish 101-3 Elementary Spanish

Spanish 220-0 Introduction to Literary Analysis

Spanish 115-2 Accelerated Elementary Spanish

Spanish 261-0 Literature in Latin America since 1888

Spanish 121-3 Intermediate Spanish

Spanish 347-0 Literature and Revolution in Latin America

Spanish 199-0 Language in Context: Contemporary Spain

Spanish 350-0 Visual Culture in Latina/o America and Spain

Spanish 201-0 Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America

Spanish 363-0 Topics in US Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies

Spanish 203-0 Individual and Society through Written Expression

Spanish 395-0 Topics in Topics in Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Literatures and Cultures

Spanish 204-0 Reading and Writing the Art of Protest
Spanish 206-0 Professions: Business

Portuguese-Language Courses


Spanish 207-0 Spanish for Heritage Speakers Portuguese 101-3 Elementary Portuguese
Spanish 208-0 Spanish and the Community Portuguese 115-2 Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
Portuguese 121-3 Intermediate 
Portuguese 303-0 Topics in Advanced Portuguese

*Denotes Class Taught in English


SPANISH-LANGUAGE COURSES

Spanish 101-3 Elementary Spanish
Course Description:
 For students who have studied Spanish less than two years. Communicative method. Development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills, as well as knowledge of Hispanic culture, through context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program twice a week.

Prerequisites: 101-1

Restrictions: No P/N; First class required

Course Coordinator: Susan Pechter

Offered: MWF 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm

Instructors: Benay Stein and Susan Pechter

Spanish 115-2 Accelerated Elementary Spanish
Course Description:
 For students with some previous experience in Spanish. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills in a cultural context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video lab twice a week.

Offered: MWF 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm 

Instructors: Maria Moran, Rifka Cook, Heather Colburn, and Maria Teresa Villanueva

Spanish 121-3 Intermediate Spanish
Course Description:
 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 twice a week.

Prerequisites: 101-3, 115-2, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Offered: MWF 8am, 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm

Instructors: Stewart Adams, Tasha Seago-Ramaly, Asha Naharaj, Raquel Amorese, Anna Diakow, Lidia Aguilera Lora, Jill Felten, and Rifka Cook

Spanish 199-0 Language in Context: Contemporary Spain
Course Description
An introduction to the culture and politics of contemporary Spain in the basis for review and further development of some of the most problematic grammatical patterns in Spanish.  

Prerequisites: 121-3, 125-0, AP score of 4, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Offered: MWF 9am, 1pm

Instructors: Elena Lanza

Spanish 201-0 Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America
Course Description:
 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.

Prerequisites: 199 or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Offered: MWF 9am, 10am, 12pm, 3pm

Instructors: Maria Moran

Spanish 203-0 Individual and Society through Written Expression
Course Description:
 First course of a sequence that develops writing skills and structures through examination of the relationship between individual and society.  Emphasizes textual analysis and development of descriptive, narrative and argumentative essays. 

Prerequisites: 201, AP score of 5, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Offered: MWF 9am, 11am, 12pm, 3pm

Instructors: Elisa Baena

Spanish 204-0 Reading and Writing the Art of Protest
Course Description:
 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.

Prerequisites: 203 or 207.

Offered: MWF 9am, 3pm

Instructors: Anna Diakow

Spanish 206-0 Spanish for Professions: Business
Course Description:
Advanced course for developing communication skills in Spanish for business purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the global marketplace: specialized terminology; writing; comprehension of cultural nuances in the Spanish-speaking business world.

Prerequisites: AP score of 5 or 201-0.

Offered: MWF 10am

Instructors: Benay Stein

Spanish 207-0 Spanish for Heritage Speakers
Course Description:
 For heritage speakers without prior formal training in Spanish. Emphasis on writing, syntax, and formal modes of the language.

Prerequisites: consent of department.

Offered: MWF 1pm

Instructors: Lidia Aguilera Lora

Spanish 208-0 Spanish Spanish and the Community
Course Description
Development of advanced Spanish communication skills, as well as a thorough and personal cultural knowledge of the Chicagoland Hispanic community through readings, discussions, writing and required volunteer commitment. 

Prerequisites: 203-0 or equivalent.

Offered: MWF 11am

Instructors: Maria Teresa Villanueva

COURSES ON LITERATURE & CULTURE

Spanish 220-0 Introduction to Literary Analysis
Course Description:
 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.

Prerequisites: 204 or AP 5 in Spanish Language AND Literature.

Offered: MWF 10am, 12pm    TTh 11am 

Instructors: Casey Drosehn and Dierdra Reber

Spanish 261-0 Literature in Latin America since 1888
Course Description:
 Survey of the modern period, including modernismo, the historical avant-garde, the “Boom,” and recent literary trends. Authors such as Delmira Agustini, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Rubén Darío, Gabriel García Márquez, José Martí, Pablo Neruda, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.

Prerequisites: Spanish 220.

Offered: MWF 11am

Instructors: Emily Maguire

Spanish 343-0 Latin American Avant-Gardes
Course Description:
 This course offers an overview of early 20th century avant-garde movements in Latin America and the historical contexts in which they emerged. In particular, it focuses on main urban centers of vanguard practices in the region: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima. We will pay special attention to how avant-gardist artists and writers negotiated foreign influence and local conditions, and how these movements conceived themselves as profoundly regional while speaking in an international idiom. Emphasis will be made in the analysis of the relations between the visual and the literary works.

Prerequisites: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261.

Offered: MWF 2pm

Spanish 347-0 Literature and Revolution in Latin America
Course Description:
 In 1959, the island nation of Cuba shocked the world when a popular uprising overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a socialist state lead by Fidel Castro. The Cuban Revolution was a divisive event; even as left-leaning political groups around the world heralded it as the dawn of a new world order, thousands of Cubans fled the island, many for the United States. In the nearly six decades since 1959, the Revolution and its enigmatic leader(s) have been the subject of inspiration, imitation, and intense debate. In this course, we will look at how the Cuban Revolution has been portrayed and understood in literary and cultural production. We will read a diverse array of texts – political speeches, films, short stories, scholarly essays, novels, and selections from Cuban blogs -- in an attempt to understand how Cuban writers have addressed questions of political engagement, national identity, and the place of art in the Revolution. We will then look at the effect of the Cuban Revolution on other Latin American writers, such as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. We will end by examining the influence of the Cuban Revolution on other revolutionary movements in Latin America, such as the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Prerequisites: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261.

Offered: MWF 1pm

Instructors: Emily Maguire

Spanish 350-0 Visual Culture in Latina/o America and Spain
Course Description
This course will introduce students to photographic practices in Latin America, from the mid-19th century to the present day.  After reviewing various moments of the invention of photography in Europe and elsewhere, we will be especially interested in thinking about photography in Latin America broadly, especially as it appears in a variety of practices and genres such as landscape, survey, portraiture, snapshot, photojournalism, and art.  As such, topics of interest include the representation of class, race and ethnicity; the visual consolidation of national and regional spaces; photography as a consumer culture; the state's creation of visual disciplinary regimes; the use of pictures as tools of contestation and memorialization; and others. Readings from the fields of history, art history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural criticism.

Prerequisites: 1 course from SPAN 250, 251, 260, or 261.

OfferedTTh 11am

InstructorsAlejandra Uslenghi

Spanish 363-0 Topics in US Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies
Course Description
This course examines the cultural politics of Latinx languages in the United States in the context of the history of U.S. imperialism and the colonial conditions that have framed language use, attitudes, and hybridity among US Latinx communities. We will first study the relationship of language to national imaginaries, the colonial erasure of Spanish and the racialization of Spanish in the US, the English Only Movement in the 1980s, and the colonial violence deployed against the use of Spanish. The second part of the course will focus on practices of linguistic hybridity that combine English and Spanish, both in speech as well as in literature. The course aims to contest dominant notions of Spanish as a global and profitable language, focusing on the cultural politics of English and Spanish among U.S. Latinx speakers, and to exhort students to think critically about the power differentials accorded to languages in the context of the U.S. racial, cultural and linguistic politics.

Prerequisites: 220 or consent of instructor.

Offered: TTh 9:30am

Instructors: Frances Aparicio

Spanish 395-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures: Between Work and Freedom: Representations of Labor in Latin America   This course will study a panoramic representation of work—urban, rural, white- and blue-collar, domestic, professional, agrarian, long-term, temporary—in Latin America, including Brazil and the U.S. border. We will strive for a diversity of region in studying a composite portrait of the representation of contemporary labor. Our principal medium will be film (such as Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad and Gabriel Mascaró’s Boi Neon), though we will include literary texts whenever possible (such as Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra).

Prerequisite: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261

Offered: TTh 2:00

Instructors: Dierdra Reber

PORTUGUESE-LANGUAGE COURSES

Portuguese 101-3 Elementary Portuguese
Course Description: Introduction to grammar and development of listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in Brazilian Portuguese, as well as the history and culture of Portuguese-speaking countries.

Prerequisites: 101-1 or sufficient score on placement test; for 101-3: 101-2 or sufficient score on placement test. 

Offered: MWF 12pm

Instructors: Ana Thome Williams

Portuguese 115-2 Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
Course Description: 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.

Prerequisites: AP 5 or equivalent on the Spanish Language Placement Exam. 

Offered: MWF 11am

Instructors: Ana Thome Williams

Portuguese 121-3 Intermediate Portuguese
Course Description: Based on the communicative approach, Port 121 helps students achieve an intermediate language level of proficiency through furthering development of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.   Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese will continue to be developed through meaningful cultural contexts. The course also offers insights into the history and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries in Europe, Africa and America.

Prerequisites: Port 101-3 or Placement

Offered: MWF 10am

Instructors: Raquel Amorese

Portuguese 303-0 Topics in Advanced Portuguese
Course Description: In this course, the students will deepen their knowledge of Portuguese language grammar and common usage as we study different discourse genres. The main goal of this course is the creation of an online Portuguese language News. For that, we will study language and persuasion from the Classical Rhetoric to Brazilian short stories and current news and advertisements. We will consider the use of the linguistic sign in the oral and written discourses as a carrier of ideology of illocutionary force.

Prerequisites: 202 or equivalent.

Offered: MWF 3pm

Instructors: Ana Thome Williams