DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Spring 2018

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: 101-2

Course Coordinator: Susan Pechter

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

Instructors: Denise Bouras 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.

Prerequisites: 115-1

Course Coordinator: Heather Colburn

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: 121-2

Course Coordinator: Jill Felten

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 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 11am, 12pm, 2pm

Instructors: Penny Nichols

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 10am, 11am, 12pm

Instructors: Elisa Baena and Joel Colom-Mena

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

Instructors: Anna Diakow

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 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

Spanish 281-0 Spanish Phonetics and Phonology
Course Description: Theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. Articulation and production, classification and description, combination and syllabification, sonority sequencing, prosodic features, and prevalent dialectal variations. 

Prerequisites: 204-0 or equivalent.

Offered: MWF 2pm

Instructors: Shannon Millikin

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 11am, 1pm   

Instructors: Ana Baez and Casey Drosehn 

Spanish 250-0 Literature in Spain before 1700
Course Description: This survey course offers an introduction to the most influential Spanish literary works of the Middle Ages and Golden Age periods. From the first manifestations of the written romance (jarchas) to the mester de juglaría and seventeenth century Early Modern plays, this course studies major literary developments of the period in conjunction with religious, political and cultural history. We will explore concepts such as genre, social order, courtly love and gender in our approaches to the texts.

Prerequisites: Spanish 220 (can be taken concurrently).

Offered: MWF 12pm

Instructors: Ana Baez

Spanish 260-0 Literature in Latin America before 1888
Course Description: Survey of literature and history in Latin America from pre-Hispanic times up to the beginning of the nineteenth-century. Focus on indigenous, Hispanic and mestizo authors and texts such as Popul Vuh, Huarochirí Manuscript, Hernán Cortés, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Andrés Bello.

Prerequisites: Span 220 (can be taken concurrently).

Offered: MW 9:30

Spanish 341-0 Latin American Modernisimo
Course Description: We will work comparatively with texts from Latin American modernismo and European fin-de-siècle traditions to elaborate on different conceptualizations of the modern imagination. Modernismo characterizes by its strategies of cultural appropriation on one side, and of cultural exhibition on the other, as it marks a moment of intense traffic of symbolic and material goods between metropolitan centers, and at the same time, it claims its cultural autonomy. We explore this system of cultural appropriation and creative transformation in Latin American modernista writers chronicles, poetry and travel writing and we consider the Latin American inflexion on such topics as literature and cosmopolitism; the poetic representation of the street and metropolitan cities; the organization of urban leisure; the woman as objet d'art; the metropolitan fascination with subaltern cultures and debates on the production and consumption of mass urban culture.

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

Offered: TTh 9:30

Instructors: Alejandra Uslenghi

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 SPAN 250, 251, 260, or 261.

Offered: TTh 12:30

Instructors: Alejandra Uslenghi

Spanish 344-0 Borges
Course Description: We will be reading works by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges--primarily his short fiction, but also some of his essays and poetry. The course has three goals: 1) to improve students’ abilities to read, write, speak, listen and think in Spanish, 2) to familiarize students with the work of this major and influential cultural figure, and 3) to encourage students’ to critically think through and with (and sometimes against) the Borgesian text; by the end of the quarter, students should be able to identify, articulate, interrogate and respond to the philosophical questions and political issues at play in a work of literary fiction.

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

Offered: MWF 9:00am

Instructors: Casey Drosehn

Spanish 346-0 Testimonial Narrative in Latin America
Course Description: Testimonial narrative is among the most prominent—and most controversial—currents to have emerged in Latin America since the 1960s-1970s Boom era.  Having quickly achieved canonical status within Latin American literary and cultural studies, testimonial works have generated critical discussion about how we understand the term “literature”; how we think about figures such as the author; how we read texts--as well as testimonial writing specifically--as “telling the truth” (or not).  Moreover, this type of narrative pushes us to consider the relationship between literature, culture, politics, and history both generally and specifically for Latin America.

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

Offered: TTh 11:00am

Instructors: Lucille Kerr

 

Spanish 397-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures: On Debt

Taught in English

Taught by Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor Rocio Zambrana

Debt is a social relation. It has received cosmological, theological, and economic articulation for centuries. Yet, at its core, debt is a form of social binding, hence a social bond. This course will examine debt as an economic, social, and historical relation in order to consider its critical function, thereby exploring the very idea of a critique of debt. We will read texts by Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, David Graeber, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eletra Stimilli, among others. We will also consider ancient and contemporary articulations of debt forgiveness, relief, or cancellation (as articulated, for example, by Strike Debt or the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt). This will give us an opportunity to refer to cases of debt in Latin American and the Caribbean.

Offered: MWF 11:00

Instructors: Rocio Zambrana

Spanish 397-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures: Indigeneity and Gender in Latin América

Taught in English

This course will examine representations of indigenous peoples in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries, with special attention to constructions of race and gender. We will explore topics such as the racial and gendered associations used to construct indigeneity, the exclusion of alternative indigenous gender subjectivities, and the double subordination indigenous women have historically experienced.
Offered: MW 2:00

Instructors: Walther Maradiegue

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 10pm

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 4 or equivalent on the Spanish Language Placement Exam. 

Offered: MWF 1pm

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.

Prerequisite: Port 101-3 or Placement

Offered: MWF 12pm

Instructors: Ana Thome Williams

Portuguese 202-0  Reading and Writing Portuguese
Course Description:

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

Prerequisite: 111-3/112-3, 115-2, 121-3 or sufficient score on placement examination.

Offered: MWF 3pm

Instructors: Ana Thome Williams