Spanish
- LAS 325/ART 381/ANT 325/SPA 397: Muertos: Art and Mortality in MexicoFor two millennia, the peoples of Mexico have lived in close proximity with the dead. When in the 16th century uninvited Europeans arrived in Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City, offering a path to "eternal life", Mexicans were decidedly uninterested. In this course, students will journey down the road to Mictlan, the watery Mexican underworld, to learn from artworks an ancient, alternate approach to understanding the social construction of death. Three quarters of the course will consider arts of the Native pre-Hispanic context, with equal time dedicated to Teotihuacan, the Maya, and the Mexica ("Aztecs").
- SPA 101: Beginner's Spanish ISPA 101 presents the basic structures and vocabulary of the Spanish language at elementary/low intermediate levels of proficiency. Content and language are fully integrated to develop oral and written comprehension and production.
- SPA 103: Intensive Beginner's and Intermediate SpanishSPA 103 is an intensive course that covers the most relevant structures and vocabulary from SPA 101 and SPA 102 in one term. Designed for students who have previously studied Spanish at elementary levels. Language is presented in a cultural context in order to develop the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
- SPA 105: Intermediate SpanishAn intermediate language course that focuses on oral and written communication and the consolidation of listening and reading skills. In this course students will enhance their linguistic skills through the analysis and discussion of various types of texts (literature, film, visual culture, music, interviews, etc.) that focus on global and cross-cultural aspects of Spain and Latin America. In particular, the course will familiarize students with the concept of neocolonialism as a way to bridge language learning with the context in which cultural values and meanings are produced. SPA 105 prepares students for SPA 108.
- SPA 107: Intermediate/Advanced SpanishAn intermediate/advanced language course that consolidates and expands the skills acquired in beginner's Spanish. Students will continue to develop their ability to comprehend and communicate in Spanish while using the four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The course's linguistic goals are achieved in the context of examining the history, cultural production, practices, language, and current reality of the U.S. Latino community. Materials include oral, written and audiovisual texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to express more complex ideas, orally and in writing, with greater grammatical accuracy.
- SPA 108: Advanced SpanishSPA 108 is an advanced language course that aims at strengthening and consolidating comprehension and production of oral and written Spanish while fostering cultural awareness and cross-cultural examination. Students will improve their linguistic proficiency while exploring the various mechanisms that affect how our identity is constructed, negotiated, and/or imposed. Particularly, the course will examine the ways in which gender and national identities develop and consolidate themselves by exploring cultural production (journalism, literature, cinema and the visual arts, etc.) in the Spanish speaking world and beyond.
- SPA 205: Medical SpanishAn advanced Spanish-language course that focuses on medical and health topics in the Hispanic/Latino world. Students will learn and practice specific vocabulary and structures useful for conducting a medical interview in Spanish. Aspects of Latin American and Hispanic/Latino cultures in the health and medical fields are explored by means of examining authentic texts and through the contribution of guest speakers. The course includes a telecollaboration project with students from a Colombian medical school.
- SPA 207: Studies in Spanish Language and StyleSPA 207 seeks to develop advanced language skills and raise cultural awareness by studying language in its contexts of use. An exciting selection of literary and cinematic productions from the Hispanic world provide the basis for a critical discussion of cultural meanings and social relations, while offering the chance to explore difference registers and styles. SPA 207 students tackle original writing assignments that enhance their ability to express complex ideas in Spanish and hone their oral skills with debates, role-plays and projects that encourage independent learning and invite participation and collaboration.
- SPA 209: Spanish Language and Culture through CinemaA course designed to improve speaking abilities while learning about Hispanic cultures and cinema in context. The course aims to provide the students with lexical and grammatical tools to allow them to engage in formal and informal discussion on a variety of topics informed by the films provided. Additionally, there will be several writing exercises throughout the semester that will help students improve their writing abilities. By the end of the course, students should have a better command of all linguistic skills, especially listening comprehension, fluency and accuracy in their speech.
- SPA 220/LAS 220: El Género Negro: Crime FictionThis course is an introduction to crime fiction from early 20th-century "locked room" mysteries to 21st-century narco-narratives. It examines short stories, novels, films and essays about detective and crime fiction in Latin America (some examples from Spain). Topics include the genre's position vis-a-vis "high" and "low" literature, connections to film, relation to contexts such as immigration, state crime, drug culture and globalization. Authors include Roberto Arlt, María Elvira Bermúdez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Ricardo Piglia, and Fernando Vallejo.
- SPA 233/LIN 233/LAS 233: Languages of the AmericasThis course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.
- SPA 241/LAS 241: Borges for BeginnersThis seminar grapples with the question of authorship and meaning in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine writer whose convoluted fictions continue puzzling readers. Borges is a foundational figure. Gabriel García Márquez and Paul Auster, and philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, are all indebted to Borges. Using different perspectives, from philosophy and aesthetics to politics and cultural analysis, we will study Borges's thematic and formal obsessions: time and memory; labyrinths; reading as a form of writing; and the universality of Argentine local traditions such as tango and gaucho culture.
- SPA 250/LAS 250/HUM 251/LAO 250: Identity in the Spanish-Speaking WorldHow are ideas of belonging to the body politic defined in Spain, Latin America, and in Spanish-speaking communities in the United States? Who is "Latin American," "Latinx," "Chino," "Moor," "Guatemalan," "Indian," etc.? Who constructs these terms and why? Who do they include/exclude? Why do we need these identity markers in the first place? Our course will engage these questions by surveying and analyzing literary, historical, and visual productions from the time of the foundation of the Spanish empire to the present time in the Spanish speaking world.
- SPA 303: Spanish Literature and Culture: Modern Spain 1700 to PresentIs culture a representation of the world or a place to be inhabited? Is literature an ideological plot of the Nation-State or a collective space of experience and experimentation? Regarding Modernity, what has art been for? This course will address these questions by delving into Spanish Modernity, from 1700 to the present. We will explore key literary works and authors' performative interventions in public spaces in relation to main cultural, political, and social currents.
- SPA 304/LAO 304: Spanish in the CommunityThis course explores the complexities of Spanish language and Latinx identity in the United States. Through a variety of readings, videos, and documents in Spanish and English, we will address a range of issues including the past and present of Spanish language in the US, the relationship between language and identity, and processes of racialization of language and linguistic minorities. The course also aims at situating the tensions and hopes around the maintenance of Spanish in immigrant communities in the broader context of struggles for social justice.
- SPA 307: Advanced Spanish Language and StyleSPA 307 is an advanced language course. Its main purpose is to develop and reinforce accuracy and fluency in both writing and speaking Spanish. Students will also learn to identify linguistic features that characterize different genres, as well as social and cultural factors that aid in the interpretation and understanding of different texts and types of speech. More specifically, the course aims at providing the tools for discourse analysis, raising awareness of the social and ideological values that permeate discursive practices, and developing autonomy and proficiency as an advanced learner of Spanish language.
- SPA 330/POR 330: Junior Seminar: Spanish and Portuguese-Speaking WorldsThis seminar has been designed to assist SPO concentrators in the production of their fall JP. With such end, the seminar will be conducted as a writing workshop. The emphasis of the first part of the seminar will be on introducing students to the approaches, critical concepts and tools utilized in cultural studies in the Luso-Hispanic and Latinx world. In the second part of the seminar, students will be expected to write and share their JP-in-progress, as well as comment on their peers' ongoing work. By the end of the semester, students should have completed about eighty percent of their independent work.
- SPA 345/LAS 345: Topics in Latin American Literature and Ideology: Art, Memory, and Human Rights in Latin AmericaThis course studies artistic and cultural practices that created different aesthetics and politics of memory that have become essential in order to respond, denounce, and creatively resist to different forms of violence and human rights violations. Looking at literature, visual arts, memory museums, and film, the course will pay special attention to different articulations among visual, discursive, and territorial regimes of signification, from the 1950s to the present. Some classes will be held at the Art Museum in order to work with materials from the Latin American collection.
- SPA 350/LAS 349: Topics in Latin American Cultural Studies: Money and Matter in Spanish AmericaHow has money shaped the material world that surrounds us? How have objects in turn influenced our financial thinking? In this course, students will learn to use humanistic tools to reflect on these questions through an examination of the cultural production of Spanish America. Engaging with works that span from the Baroque period all the way to the present-day neoliberal era, this class invites us to think creatively about the complex relationship between money and materiality that is at the core of capitalist development.
- SPA 363/LAS 334: Critical Theory in Latin America and BeyondThis course introduces students to a variety of approaches to the study of art and culture, with a focus on those produced in and about Latin America. Was the Haitian Revolution victorious thanks to strong military leaders or shrewd masses? Are films a fun escape or a means to rethink the world? How do people with little internet access make creative use of new media? How do we understand art's relation to history and politics? Readings include selections from the Black Radical tradition, Marxism, Feminism, Subaltern Studies, Aesthetics, as well as select examples from literature and film. Nor prior knowledge of theory expected.
- SPA 376/MED 376/COM 366: The 'Other' in CervantesWhen the name Miguel de Cervantes is mentioned, readers tend to think of the character Don Quijote-his idealism or madness. But beyond that, the book stages daring critiques of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, class, and human nature. Such Cervantine works as the 'Persiles' and the 'Novelas ejemplares', as well as his theater offer equally challenging responses to the hegemonic structures of the Spanish empire. By means of these texts and their historical and philosophical contexts, this course will examine Cervantes' questioning of many of the contested social and political structures in place during the turbulent times in which he lived.
- SPA 388/LAS 358: The Skins of the Film: Latin America and the Politics of TouchingFilm is comprised of multiple surfaces: the screen, the actors, the structure of the darkroom, the mobile devices of the audiovisual present, the bodies that vibrate around us, the actual strip of plastic that records the images... Critics have already broadly debated how film touches us politically and emotionally. This seminar formulates a different question: how do we touch film? In Latin America, the interaction between filmic skins is founded on the relationship between art and politics. We will consider how filmmakers debate the politics of the surface and how spectatorship poses a deeply political problem for the region.
- SPA 406/LAS 410: Dark MattersThis seminar explores darkening technologies in contemporary Latin America as the main tools of a new poetics that strongly challenges vision and its alleged ability to "clearly" generate knowledge. We will explore a variety of artifacts that discard the eyes in favor of experiences of blindness, obscured vision, and tactile sensation that interrogate the visual imperative. I propose that opacity, darkness, and blindness are poetic mechanisms that can stand up to the authoritarian regime of vision and question the insidious ways in which light suffuses peripheral knowledge, politics, and bodies.
- SPA 508: Departmental Graduate ProseminarThe goals of this seminar are to integrate first and second year graduate students into the department and the university, to provide practical information about the department's main fields of expertise and potential career paths, and to provide a space for support and reflection about the milestones and challenges of graduate school. More broadly, this seminar will help students to begin the ongoing tasks of understanding how our discipline work, developing professional habits and practices, and cultivating an identity as a scholar and researcher.
- SPA 538/COM 546: Seminar in Golden-Age Literature: The Library, the Ruin and the Labyrinth in the Hispanic BaroqueThe aesthetic production of the Baroque period is frequently figured by the Library, the Ruin, and the Labyrinth-three architectural structures that collectively offer a negative progression from an image of an ordered, encyclopedic knowledge (the library), to a disordered, decayed structure that was formerly whole (the ruin), to the epistemological and existential quandry (the labyrinth). Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Baltazar Gracián offer abundant aesthetic representations of all three environments. They are paired with key theoretical concepts by Davidson, Deleuze, Buci-Glucksmann and Wigley.
- SPA 543: Seminar in Modern Spanish Literature: City in Disarray: Apocalyptic Imaginaries in Spanish Neoliberal CrisisIn Spain, the economic, social, and political crisis (now reopened by covid19 crisis) entails the proliferation of apocalyptic narratives. The last two decades of neoliberal policies of dispossession, intensified by the 2008 economic depression, have transformed the Spanish territory and, therefore, the ways people inhabited it and perceived it. In that regard, imaginaries on doomsday occupied a central place in cultural representations. This course explores through characteristic tropes of the apocalyptic imaginaries (related to space degradation) the reasons, effects, and affects generated by these representations projected on the city.
- SPA 548/COM 548: Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Psychoanalysis for Cultural CriticsSince the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, psychoanalytic theory has emerged as a key tool for analyzing culture. This seminar will examine how psychoanalysis has been a model for various forms of criticism - literary, artistic, architectural, filmic, sociological, anthropological - and how these tools have been applied to understand Latin American culture in the 20th century, with special emphasis on Mexico and Cuba. We will discuss how psychoanalytic theory has been used to read the work of architects (Luis Barragán), filmmakers (Luis Buñuel), artists (Remedios Varo), and writers (Octavio Paz).