Current Courses
The Spanish Department offers a variety of courses in the Spanish language at all levels, and in Hispanic literature and culture, visual arts, cinema, politics, history, and religion. Language courses combine the development of oral, grammar and writing skills with discussion of films, theatre, short stories, poetry, art, and newspapers.
Advanced courses are taught in both Spanish and English. Those taught in English are cross-listed as Spanish (SPAN) and Literature (LIT) and offer the opportunity to read and discuss the materials in Spanish for those taking the class for Spanish credit. Below you will find the list of current courses Fall 2022/Spring 2023.
Fall 2022
SPAN 110 First-Year Spanish
Two unit yearlong course; one unit per semester. A balanced study of written and oral aspects of Spanish. Includes an introduction to reading. Conference.
SPAN 210 Second-Year Spanish
Two unit yearlong course; one unit per semester. An intermediate-level study of grammar, composition, and conversation. Emphasis on reading: essays, theatre, short stories, and poetry. Prerequisite: equivalent of one year of college Spanish. Conference.
SPAN 321 Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literature
One unit semester course. 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. Prerequisite: Spanish 210 or equivalent. Conference.
SPAN 368 Jorge Luis Borges: Fiction and Criticism
One unit semester course. 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. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
SPAN 373 Religion and Modernity in Latin American Culture
One unit semester course. In this course we will discuss figures and concepts from the major religious traditions of Latin America as they appear in short stories, novels, poetry, and drama from the twentieth century. We will consider the definition of modernity as a “disenchantment of the world,” and ask what that means in a region that through the present day boasts vibrant indigenous traditions and a strong Catholic presence with origins in colonialism. . The course will focus on the use of religious thought as a critical tool for examining social and political issues, such as racial and economic inequality, sectarian violence, and national identity. We will consider whether religion is a unique way of knowing, the influence of theology and belief on political systems, and what role literature has in redrawing the boundaries between politics, culture, and tradition. Conducted in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or consent of instructor. Conference.
Spanish 470 - Thesis
Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.
Spanish 481 - Independent Reading
Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.
Spring 2023
SPAN 110 First-Year Spanish
Two unit yearlong course; one unit per semester. A balanced study of written and oral aspects of Spanish. Includes an introduction to reading. Conference.
SPAN 210 Second-Year Spanish
Two unit yearlong course; one unit per semester. An intermediate-level study of grammar, composition, and conversation. Emphasis on reading: essays, theatre, short stories, and poetry. Prerequisite: equivalent of one year of college Spanish. Conference.
Spanish 312 - Advanced Language and Culture: Representations of Childhood in Hispanic Literature and Cinema
One unit semester course. This is an advanced Spanish course that takes up and deepens the study of important grammatical and stylistic categories within a specific thematic framework. A corpus of stories and two films, one Latin American and the other Spanish, whose plot revolves around childhood, will allow addressing different sociocultural and political issues. The children's imaginary will open a different perspective on issues such as racial discrimination, poverty, political violence and gender inequalities, among others. Within this broad thematic framework, the student will be able to exercise and develop both oral and written expression. Prerequisite: Spanish 210 or equivalent with the consent of instructor. Conference.
SPAN 351 Saints and Sinners: Women in the Early Modern Transatlantic World
One unit semester course. Targets, on the one hand, of criminalizing or pathologizing discourses that called for their exclusion from the public sphere, women were also key agents of hegemonic power in the Spanish colonial world. This course reflects on the generation of mutually conflicting female subjects in a context obsessed with the fight against religious and cultural otherness: the sinning body prone to sexual temptation and demonic possession and the saintly body, exemplary imitator of Christ’s suffering. Considering a varied corpus of Inquisition trials, spiritual autobiographies, wifely conduct manuals, mystical poetry, novellas, chronicles, paintings, and printed images from Spain and its American colonies, we think about the contradictions inherent in global Counter-Reformation gender politics and the myriad ways in which female writers and fictional personae co-opt or resist the stringent corporeal and mental discipline imposed on them. Students will, in addition, gain an understanding of the rich web of associations between religious confessional culture and emergent fictional genres. Authors studied include St. Teresa of Avila, Fray Luis de León, Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, María de Zayas, St. Rose of Lima, Sor María de Agreda, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Conducted in English. Prerequisite for Spanish credit: Spanish 321 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 351.
SPAN 378 Space and Power
One unit semester course. What is space? How is it perceived, experienced, produced, and reproduced? And what is its connection with power and relations of domination/emancipation? Drawing from spatial, urban, political, feminist, and critical race theory, this course aims to explore and analyze these questions in relation to the representation and problematization of domestic, urban, national and border spaces in, mostly, Latin American novels and films.
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. Prerequisite for students taking the course for Spanish credit: Spanish 321 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 378.
SPAN 381 Literature and Culture of Argentina from Independence to the Present
One unit semester course. In the framework of an Argentinean cultural history, this course analyzes the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics. A series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, both fictional and nonfictional, will serve to trace the trajectory from a political use of literature to the emergence of an autonomous intellectual sphere. The course is organized around the topics of “civilization and barbarism”; gauchos, frontiers, and “the desert”; the Generation of 1880 and immigration; Peronism and anti-Peronism; and militarism and democracy. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
Spanish 470 - Thesis
Two-unit yearlong course; one unit per semester.
Spanish 481 - Independent Reading
Variable (one-half or one)-unit semester course. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.