DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Winter 2016

Winter 2016 Undergraduate Course Schedule

SPANISH-LANGUAGE COURSES

Spanish 101-2 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.

Spanish 105-6 First Year Seminar 

Zombies: A Brief Cultural History (section 1)

Course Description:Zombies seem to be everywhere lately: in comic books, in numerous films and television series, even in video games. The “walking dead” phenomenon is not just a North American fad; zombies have appeared in literature and films in countries as diverse as Cuba, Norway, and India. Despite their current popularity, zombies have actually been around for some time, although their story has changed significantly. This course will explore the history of the zombie and its insertion into pop culture. We will explore the zombie’s origins as a figure of Haitian folklore, and its introduction to English-language audiences through North American involvement in the Caribbean region. We will watch some of the earliest Hollywood zombie films, which make use of the zombie’s Haitian origins, and we will read some examples of early pulp fictions that include zombies. The second half of the course will look at the re-configuration of the zombie story through the films of George Romero, and the films and parodies that have followed. We will end by examining the current globalization of the zombie figure and its transnational transformations. As we trace the zombie’s history in popular culture, we will explore the figure’s connections to slavery, colonialism, environmentalism, and consumerism. We will ask what the zombie as metaphor explores – or exploits – in today’s cultural production.
Restrictions: Reserved for First-Years and Sophomores
Offered: TTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Emily Maguire

The World in the Camera: Latin American Culture through Photography (section 2)

Course Description:This seminar will explore the photographic representations of major social and historical events in Latin American from the late 19th century throughout the 20th century. We will look at how photography became a medium of visual expression in the culture of Latin America; questions of the construction of a shared Latin American identity; and how different kinds of photographs (journalistic, ethnographic, territorial survey, artistic) work as cultural interpretive tools. We will also learn how to speak and write critically about photographs, learn who major photographers were and how their images were produced and have circulated. We will put emphasis on the study of photographic themes that are singular to the Latin American experience: colonialism, revolution, native society, modernization, violence and oppression, politics and self-determination.  

Spanish 115-1 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 two or three times a week. Offered winter and spring. 

Spanish 121-2 Intermediate Spanish

Course Description: Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through readings in modern prose. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video lab twice a week.

Spanish 197-0 Language in Context: Latinos, Language and Culture

Course Description: For heritage learners with prior formal training in Spanish. Introduction to socio-political and linguistic richness of contemporary Spanish speaking countries. Emphasis on writing, syntax, and formal modes of the language.

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, AP score of 4, or Spanish Language Placement Exam
Restrictions:  No P/N; First class required
Offered:  MWF 10am, 12pm, 1pm
Course Coordinator: Elena Lanza
Instructor: Elena Lanza

Spanish 201-0 Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America

Course Description: First course of sequence designed to develop speaking strategies and structures through analysis of modern (20^th- and 21^st- century) Latin American culture. Emphasis on accurate informal conversation. 

Prerequisites: 199 or Spanish Language Placement Exam
Restrictions:  No P/N; First class required
Offered: MWF 10 am, 11am, 2pm
Course Coordinator: Penny Nichols
Instructor: Penny Nichols

Spanish 203-0 Individual and Society through Written Expression

Course Description: First course of sequence designed to develop writing skills and structures through examination of the relationship between the individual and society. Emphasis on short texts and essays.

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
Restrictions:  No P/N; First class required
Offered:  MWF 9am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm
Course Coordinator: Denise Bouras, Anna Diakow, Maria Moran

Instructors: Denise Bouras, Anna Diakow

Spanish 205-0 Spanish for Professions: Health Care

Course Description: An advanced course for developing communication skills in Spanish for health care purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the medical field, specialized terminology and vocabulary, and cultural nuances in the Spanish-speaking world.

Spanish 280-0 Intro to Spanish Linguistics

Course Description: An introductory course designed to present students with an overview of the phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax and sociolinguistic and pragmatic elements specific to the Spanish language.

Spanish 302-0 Advanced Grammar

Course Description: 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:  204-0 or equivalent.
Offered: MWF 1pm
Instructor: Elisa Baena

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: Nathalie Bouzaglou, Elisa Marti-Lopez

Spanish 223-0 Cervantes

Course description: Introduction to Don Quijote and other selected works, with attention to the historical and cultural context of the 17th century. Why did Dostoevsky call Don Quixote "the final and greatest utterance of the human mind," and Cervantes "the great poet and seer of the human heart"? Why did George Washington buy a Don Quixote on the same date the U.S. Constitution was approved and keep the book on his library's table? Why has Cervantes impacted film, art, music and language so deeply? How does Don Quixote examine Historical and Religious issues (the sixteenth and seventeenth century struggle between Christianity and Islam), Philosophy (Does human freedom exist?), Politics (What is a Just War?), Economics (Is government intervention in the market beneficial?) and the nature and value of literature? Why has Don Quixote been voted by both critics and novelists as the most important work of fiction ever written? Join teaching-award winner professor Dario Fernandez-Morera to try to answer these and other questions in a course open to all students.

Prerequisites: None
Offered: MWF 10am
Instructor: Dario Fernandez-Morera

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.

Prerequisite: 220
Offered: TTh 11am-12:20pm
Instructor: Lucille Kerr

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. This course is taught in Spanish.

Prerequisite: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261
Offered: TTh 2-3:20pm
Instructor: Maria Uslenghi

Spanish 361-1 Latin America: Studies in Culture and Society - Cultures of Modernity in the Andes

Course Description: This seminar explores the various and peculiar expressions that Andean artists, intellectuals and other cultural producers have used to represent and negotiate the transition from traditional rural societies to modern and overwhelmingly urban ones over the course of the 20th century.  We will focus on literature, visual culture, and music, with attention to the ways in which these cultural manifestations' circulation and political and social affiliations inflect their outlook on what it means to be modern.  As such, this seminar will give special consideration to the roles that race, class, gender, regional identity, and autochthony play in the articulation of modernity in the Andes. This course is taught in Spanish.

Prerequisite: 220
Offered: TTh 9:30-10:50am
Instructor: Jorge Coronado

Course Description: In this course we examine the work of some of the most original film directors in Spain from the neorrealista movement of the 1950's and 1960's to contemporary filmmakers such as Alejandro Amenábar, Cesc Gay, and Isabel Coixet. We will pay special attention to the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel, the melodrama comedies and dramas by Pedro Almodóvar, and the magical imagination of Julio Medem, among others. We will also discuss some of the films made by the new generation of directoras (such as Icíar Bollaín, Mar Coll) and young film makers (Jaume Balagueró, Juan Antonio Bayona. We will analyze the narrative and visual structure of the films, as well as their relation to main political and cultural issues in Catalan and Spanish societies

Prerequisites: 201 or 202; 203 or 207; 204; and 1 other 200-level literature or culture course
Offered: MWF 11am
Instructor: Elisa Marti-Lopez

Spanish 395-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures:

Citizenship and Urban Violence

Course Description: 

Among the common and recurring associations with Latin America is the violence that underlies all phases of its history, particularly the history of its cities. We will investigate manifestations of this connection from different moments in Latin American history, with a focus on the present moment. We will also examine the border city as the site of complex symbolic and literal crossings. Through a corpus that includes fictional and theoretical texts, films, videos, music, cartoons, and the visual arts, we will reflect on the variations, components, and implications of this urban, violent projection. 

Spanish 395-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures:

Latin American and Latina/o Science Fiction

Course Description: This course offers an introduction to science fiction literature and film produced in Latin America and by Latina/o writers in the United States. Beginning with a critical definition of the genre (and the ways in which it differs from "magical realism" and the fantastic), we will examine some early examples of science fiction in Spanish language literature, read some now-classic texts that can be considered science fiction, trace the shift from science fiction to cyberpunk, and end by looking at the ways in which recent Latin American and Latina/o writers and directors have expanded on and experimented with the genre. As we read, we will explore how science fiction navigates the divide between "popular" and "elite" literature, its function as a form of social criticism, and the ways in which writers have used science fiction to interrogate social categories such as race, class, and gender. Readings will include the work of authors such as Eduardo Holmberg, Eduardo Urzaiz, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan José Arreola, Angélica Gorodischer, Pedro Cabiya, and Sesshu Foster.

Prerequisite: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261
Offered: TTh 12:30-1:50pm
Instructor: Emily Maguire

PORTUGUESE-LANGUAGE COURSES

Portuguese 101-2 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.

Portuguese 115-1: 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.

Portuguese 380: Contemporary Brazil:  Literature and Film

Course Description: This course will explore selected themes and aesthetic trends in Brazilian literature and film (but mostly film) produced in the 21^st century. We will be particularly interested in discussing how in the last decade both literature and film have blurred the boundaries between fiction and documentary, with an increasing emphasis on social and historical issues.  We will first pay close attention to the key moments of social realism in the literature of the 20th century. We will then trace the development of documentary film making, particularly after the 1990’s. Although we will pay some attention to film techniques, our major concern will be with narrative strategies and ideological content. There will be intense viewing of (subtitled) Brazilian films. Class discussion in a seminar format. Among the films, we plan to see  Barren Lives; The Hour of the Star; City of God; Playing; News from a personal war; Santiago; Bus 174 Estamira; Wasteland; 5 X Favela. We will also read short novel, among which The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector. (trans. Benjamin Moser)

Instructor: Cesar Braga-Pinto