Spanish Department

SPAN 111 - Beginning Spanish I

In this language course, students will develop essential listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in Spanish. Spanish grammar instruction is supplemented with study of cultural materials from Spanish-speaking countries

SPAN 112 - Beginning Spanish II

This language course continues the development of essential listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills begun in SPAN 111. Students will learn enough language to handle a meaningful conversation, read short literary texts, and speak and write about their experiences, thoughts, and opinions. Spanish grammar instruction is supplemented with study of cultural materials from Spanish-speaking countries

SPAN 211 - Intermediate Spanish I

The primary goal for this course is to increase students' fluency in both spoken and written Spanish, while introducing them to the study of literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world. The course offers a systematic review of Spanish grammar and numerous opportunities for students to develop their speaking and writing skills

SPAN 212 - Intermediate Spanish II

The primary goal for this course is to increase students' fluency in both spoken and written Spanish. The course continues the systematic review of Spanish grammar begun in SPAN 211, yet places more emphasis on the spoken and written analysis of literary and cultural texts from the Spanish-speaking world. Students who complete SPAN 212 will acquire the necessary fluency to take advanced literature or film classes in Spanish, or to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country

SPAN 312 - Advanced Language and Culture: Spanish Migrations

The category of speculative fiction refers to a diverse set of nonrealist approaches to narrative, including science fiction, horror, fantasy and the fantastical, utopia and dystopia. In this course, we will discuss how speculative fiction in the Spanish-speaking Americas draws from and hybridizes a number of robust regional genres (e.g., magical realism, the Latin American fantastic, horror, and cyberpunk). We'll consider how authors and filmmakers use these genres to critique and reimagine many facets of modernity, including repressive political regimes, digital technologies, neoliberalism, and ecological catastrophe. Alongside this thematic focus, this course is designed to refine and enhance language skills. It includes a focused consideration of problem areas of Spanish language and an introduction to various rhetorical forms. In addition to oral practice in class, students will write numerous short essays

SPAN 321 - Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literature

This course is designed to give students a theoretical, historical, and cultural framework for the more advanced study of Spanish and Spanish American literature. It will include considerations of genre, reception, and critical theory. Students will be responsible for undertaking close readings of the texts as well as research projects

SPAN 343 - Don Quixote and Narrative Theory

This course will consist of a close reading of Cervantes's masterpiece in conjunction with the works of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gyorgy Lukács, Anthony Cascardi, and Mary Malcolm Gaylord, who have written about Don Quixote in the development and exploration of their various "theories of the novel." To better understand the context of Don Quixote, we will begin with a careful consideration of political, cultural, and historical aspects of the Spanish Golden Age. During the final weeks of the semester we will read texts by Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster that exploit narrative conventions found in Don Quixote. We will end the semester with student presentations that focus on adaptations and appropriations of Don Quixote in modern narrative. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for Spanish credit will meet in extra sessions.

SPAN 344 - Visual Art in Spanish Baroque Literature

This course studies the relationship between visual art and literature in early modern Spain. In an epoch in which the production of images has attained unprecedented cultural importance, literature redefines its aesthetic agenda, both modeling itself after and rivaling visual art. Considering various plays, poems, and novellas alongside relevant paintings, emblems, architectural works, and sculptures, we reflect upon how the interactions among these different art forms serve to mobilize audience emotion and comment on gender and class tensions. Also discussed are mounting anxieties about the role of art in a society marked by political crisis. In particular, we think about how the celebration of iconocentric culture is undercut by critical views of images as dangerous vehicles of moral and sexual depravity. Authors and artists studied include Teresa of Avila, Cervantes, Zayas, Calderón de la Barca, Guillén de Castro, Velázquez, Titian, El Greco, and Rubens. Conducted in English.

SPAN 361 - Decentering the Human

This course provides an introduction to what has been called the nonhuman turn, an umbrella term that refers to various schools of thought (such as posthumanism, critical race theory, animal studies, new and vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and affect theory) that call for an integral redefinition of the human and thus question, critique, and/or move beyond human exceptionalism and the ontological dualities (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, mind/body, self/other, subject/object, etc.) that constitute it. The course combines interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with a focus on how the relation between humans, nonhumans, and the environment has been represented, questioned, and problematized in cultural productions from the Hispanic world. The course ultimately asks students to think critically about what it means to be human today, if, that is, we have indeed ever been human. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for literature credit will read cultural texts in translation and write in English. Students taking the course for Spanish credit will read cultural texts and write essays in Spanish.

SPAN 366 - Federico García Lorca: Theater and Poetry

When Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he was already, at age 38, an internationally recognized author, highly admired within Spain and abroad. This course examines Lorca's creative output, focusing mainly on his theater and poetry but also considering his visual art and work as director of La Barraca, a traveling theater company whose mission was to bring theater to rural areas. In our study of the author's work, from Andalusian "folklore" poetry and early dramatic farces, to avant-garde works influenced by surrealism and cubism, to his trilogy of tragedies focusing on existential problems confronting women in rural Spain, we will examine how Lorca engages with artists like Salvador Dalí, film director Luis Buñuel, composer Manuel de Falla, and the critical debates of the early twentieth century. We will also consider theories of artistic practice like "duende" (in this context, artistic emotion) or the "cante jondo" (Andalusian "deep song" that is incorporated into flamenco music) that Lorca presents in published lectures and essays. Readings may include selected poems from the Romancero gitano, Poeta en Nueva York, and Diván del Tamarit, and the dramas Mariana Pineda, La zapatera prodigiosa, Bodas de sangre, Yerma, La casa de Bernarda Alba, and El público.

SPAN 368 - Jorge Luis Borges: Fiction and Criticism

This course studies the writings of one of the most important authors of the twentieth century through various critical approaches that have been applied to his work: structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and sociocriticism. Emerging from this corpus are two opposing views: one that associates Borges with the Argentinean literary system, foregrounding his participation in national aesthetic and cultural debates, and one that emphasizes the cosmopolitanism, skepticism, and sense of unreality marking his literature. Also considered will be emerging critical studies that accentuate the historical and political relevance of Borges's oeuvre. Along with these lines of inquiry, a series of theoretical categories and themes that are key for the comprehension of Borges's writing will be discussed: avant-garde ultraism; criollismo; metaphor and metonymy; Argentinean tradition; reading, misreading, and translation; authorship and figures of the author; canon and literary genealogy; history, memory, and forgetting.

SPAN 372 - Documentary Resistance in Latin America and Spain

What makes a documentary a form of resistance? What defines this genre or mode? What elements and techniques characterize these documentary films? The course focuses on documentary films from Latin America and Spain that represent struggles for social justice and function as a cultural form of protest and resistance. By discussing the films in their historical and political contexts, the course examines the strategies, genres, and techniques that filmmakers use to address and participate in social change, as well as ethical and aesthetic questions about representation and production. We will watch and discuss films by Patricio Guzmán (Chile), Fernando Solanas (Argentina), Mario Handler (Uruguay), Lourdes Portillo (Mexico), Claudia Llosa (Peru), and Xapo Ortega and Xavier Artigas (Spain), among others.

SPAN 374 - Sublime and Strange in Latin American Literature

In this course we will study how modern and contemporary Latin American fiction represents figures of the unknown (e.g., landscape, Other), and the various narrative attitudes of fear, astonishment, and awe that accompany them. Even if this dynamic has been present in the region's cultural production since colonial-era travel narrative, we will examine how literary texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries work within and beyond this paradigm. We will read works from the genres of magical realism, the fantastic, science fiction, gothic, and "new weird," analyzing how they depict the strange and incomprehensible in ways that challenge, reinforce, or expand dominant worldviews. In addition to theoretical and secondary texts, literary authors may include César Aira, Alejo Carpentier, Liliana Colanzi, Yuri Herrera, Ramiro Sanchiz, and Samanta Schweblin. Course conducted in Spanish, with some readings in English.

SPAN 375 - Memory and Image in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Art

This course focuses on memory and image, two categories that have acquired great relevance since the 1980s, in ethical, political, juridical, epistemological, and aesthetic domaines. The terms "subjective turn" and "iconic turn" used by cultural critics reflect this phenomenon. A corpus of theoretical works (Plato, Aristotle, Agustine, Nietzsche, Bergson, Halbwachs, Nora, Bazin, Marin, Barthes, Sontag, Didi-Huberman) will familiarize the student with the main debates and relevant categories and will enrich their understanding of the literary and visual art works under examination. Together with testimonies and other non-fiction works will be thus examined and contrasted with practices (literature, performance, visual arts) that use aesthetics to engage with the past. Particular attention is paid to the presence of the imaginary, the anachronistic, obsolescence, and the emptying of objects. Parallel to the ethico-political dimensions of memory, the function of forgetting will be discussed. Included are works by: Patricio Guzmán, Albertina Carri, Rodolfo Walsh, Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño, Cynthia Rimsky , Margo Glantz, Juan Carlos Onetti, Ricardo Piglia, Leon Ferrari y Doris Salcedo. Conducted in Spanish.

SPAN 377 - Art after Dictatorship: Post-Franco Literature and Culture

What happens to a culture when released from systematized repression? This course examines the creative explosion in literature and film produced in Spain after 1975, the year in which Francisco Franco died and his totalitarian regime ended. Conference discussion will concern transformations that characterize the post-Franco era: the recuperation (or not) of historical memory, the emergence of a fluid conception of gender, and the creation of new forms of popular art. Particular attention will be given to the "movida," the disruptive social and cultural transformations celebrated in the films of Pedro Almodóvar and others. Films and readings will include works by Almodóvar, Ventura Pons, Carmen Martín Gaite, Rosa Montero, Juan Marsé, and Eduardo Mendicutti.

SPAN 380 - Drugs, Gangs, and Aliens

In this course, we will address and think critically about the interrelated nature of irregular immigration to the U.S., the drug trade and the "War on Drugs," and the expansion and criminalization of gangs throughout the Americas. We will examine how cornerstones of state sovereignty such as the rule of law, the care and control of space and population, and the monopoly on violence are being challenged by these phenomena, as well as analyze, question, and discuss their representation and problematization in Latin and North American literary works, essays, chronicles, and films in relation to theoretical concepts and processes such as sovereignty, violence, neoliberalism, border, immunity/community, and globalization.

SPAN 382 - Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Critical Theory

This course focuses on how Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx critical theorists, philosophers, writers, and artists have themselves imagined, conceptualized, and understood Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. as geographical, cultural, social, and political spaces. Topics will include race, ethnicity, gender, and indigeneity in the Americas, as well as concepts and theoretical discourses such as indigenismo, mestizaje, hybridity, latinidad, négritude, liberation philosophy, and postcolonial, decolonial, and borderlands theory, among others. Readings will include theoretical and literary works, as well as essays and films.

SPAN 384 - Latin America's Revolutionary Century

Throughout the twentieth century, Latin America was one of the epicenters of insurgent and revolutionary struggles in the world. These represented, regardless of their ideological differences, the entry of the equality principle in national spaces that had mostly imagined and structured themselves as two-tiered societies in which a large segment of the population-Indians, minorities, and even women-had been, for all practical purposes, systematically excluded. By focusing on the cultural production (novels, films, essays, etc.) related to four revolutionary constellations-the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions, the Central American guerrillas, and the Zapatistas-this course aims to explore and analyze the languages of insurgency and counterinsurgency, the figure of the revolutionary and guerrilla fighter as a political subjectivity, and the relation between politics and aesthetics. Primary texts will be supplemented with historical and theoretical readings.

SPAN 386 - Decolonial Theory and Practice in Latin America

The decolonial project emerged primarily from Latin America. It posits that coloniality is constitutive of modernity and thus aims to analyze, challenge and dismantle the lasting effects of colonialism that still permeate all aspects of our lives: subjectivity, knowledge, epistemology, language, race, gender, etc. In this course we will examine decolonial theories and practices advanced by, mostly, Latin American indigenous and non-indigenous scholars, activists and artists that (1) analyze the discourses and historical processes that help produced, sustained and reproduced the colonial matrix of power; (2) reject Western European epistemological and ontological dominance; and (3) attempt to propose, rediscover, renew and/or validate other ways of thinking, being and living that have been forgotten, marginalized or discredit by the forces of coloniality/modernity and racial capitalism. Part of the syllabus will be developed in class by the students themselves by suggesting texts, practices and case studies as the course proceeds.

SPAN 470 - Thesis

SPAN 481 - Independent Reading