Spanish and PortugueseSpanish 609-401
Language Teaching and Learning
Prof. McMahon
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Spanish 609 is a course required of all Teaching Assistants in French, Italian and Spanish in the second semester of their first year of teaching. It is designed to provide instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively, and builds on the practicum meetings held during the first semester. The course will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition. Students who have already had a similar course at another institution may be exempted upon consultation with the instructor.
Spanish 630-301
The Medieval Iberian Songbook
Prof. Solomon
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This seminar examines two monumental songbooks from the Iberian middle ages; Las cantigas de Santa María, Alfonso X’s enormous collection of miracles stories (often scandalous) and praises to the Virgin Mary, and the Libro de buen amor, Juan Ruiz’s compendium of love songs, fables, amorous advice, and reflections of “good” love. We explore the ways these authors/compilers manipulated preexisting narrative and lyrical material so as to establish expectations and promote political, social and personal agendas. We examine the theoretical underpinning of bringing this material “into book,” and how the concept of the songbook—libro-- subtends the content of the individual literary works contained therein. Special attention is paid to the function of layout, the design of the codex, the use of images, and various ordering schema exploited in these large compendia.
The seminar is conducted in English. Primary Readings are in Galician-Portuguese and Medieval Castilian. Secondary readings are in English, Spanish, and Galician-Portuguese. To participate in this seminar, students are required to have an advanced level of a modern Romance Language: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or French.
Spanish 682-301
Ontology vs. Signification: Debates in New Humanities
Prof. de la Campa
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This course will enter the space of theoretical debates in the Humanities at this point in time with a particular interest in literary studies. Beyond theoretical texts from various parts of the globe we will focus on some Latin American critical and literary texts.
Framing the course as the scene of ongoing debates between ontology and signification aims to highlight a moment in which the linguistic turn--historically associated with a string of related concepts that run from structuralism to post-structuralism, including the hermeneutics of Marxism and Freudianism, or epistemology proper—is now yielding to forms of reading, thinking and writing inspired in what could be called a new focus in ontology at times imbued by various theories such as affect, trauma, reparative and new forms of conceptualizing materialism and textualities in an age of digital and environmental potentialities. The course will specifically explore the degree to which these two terrains diverge and complement each other.
This class will be taught in Spanish but many of the readings are in English. Students may write their papers and make presentations or ask questions in either language.
The readings for the first class are short or anecdotal but they will provide a basis for beginning our conversation. All of them are attached or on Canvas. Please bring your comments and questions on each piece.
Giorgio Agamben: “Elements for a theory of Destituent Power”
Bruno Latour: “On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus more than a few complications.” (Pages 8-14 in particular)
Lauren Berlant: “Affect in the End of Times”
Alain Badiou“: 15 Theses on Contemporary Art”
Jean-Jacques Lecercle: “Return to the Political”
Spanish 686-301
Introduction to Contemporary Iberian Cultural Studies
Prof. Moreno-Caballud
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This seminar is an attempt to approach the vast and complex project of "modernization" that has driven the last two centuries of bourgeois revolutions, industrialization, urbanization and capitalist expansion, as well as some of the languages, practices and bodies that the project has left aside in its path. How has this huge process been narrated? Or rather, how this process has allowed us to narrate ourselves? Who has been allowed to narrate and who has not ? What has happened to narration itself?
This seminar will examine literary stories, films, and essays of contemporary Spain, focusing on the relationship between language and power in the context of capitalist "modernization". Immersed in the strains of " modernization ", Iberian writers and filmmakers of the XXth and XXIst centuries dialogue in their artistic productions -explicitly or implicitly- with the changes that occur. In some particularly interesting cases, this dialogue is an attempt to narrate reality from a different framework than the one of "modernization": a sort of attempt to "de-narrate" the modern.
Spanish 697-301
Latin American Fiction and the World System: The Forms of Uneven Development
Prof. Beckman
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Course dedicated to the methods of studying the relationship between historical processes of modernization and literary form in 19th- and 20th-century Latin America. Special focus on the temporal and geographical unevenness of capitalist development in the region—characterized by the coexistence of ‘modern’ and ‘archaic’ modes of production, and by radically different degrees of incorporation into the global market—in relation to literary forms and genres such as the novela de la tierra, indigenismo, the gothic, and marvelous/magical realism.