94 courses with the subject SPAN, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
SPAN 1120Elementary Spanish: Review and Continuation4
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility for their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies.
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1210 students may take SPAN 1120 (fall) or SPAN 1220 (spring).
While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.
SPAN 1230 is the third course in the Spanish language sequence. It is designed to help students progress from the novice high level to the intermediate mid level in speaking, listening, reading and writing. The course is structured around four thematic units: fashion and art; the natural world; personal relationships; and health. In each unit, we will learn the vocabulary and grammar constructions that are necessary to talk about the unit's topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the skill of giving and defending opinions. Throughout the semester, we will discuss and analyze a wide variety of art from the Hispanic world, including songs, fashion, visual arts, TV shows, films, performance art, newspaper articles, documentaries, film shorts and podcasts. The overall goal of this course is to develop students' ability to comprehend authentic materials in Spanish and formulate nuanced opinions about those materials.
This low-intermediate course expands Heritage students' confidence and competence in Spanish by providing opportunities to build upon the conversational skills they have. Through literary texts, other readings, music, films and the visual arts students broaden their vocabulary, improve grammatical accuracy, develop writing skills and enrich their understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. The heritage student grew up speaking Spanish and finished high school in the U.S.
This innovative topics course focuses on oral communication in Spanish for students concurrently enrolled in courses offering special projects abroad or short term study abroad trips. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.
SPAN 1502Conversational Skills for Spanish in Global Contexts1
This innovative course focuses on basic oral communication in Spanish. Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context. It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.
Designed to expand bilingual Heritage students' knowledge of Spanish by providing them with ample opportunities to develop and improve each of the basic language skills, with a particular focus on writing vocabulary. The heritage student has at least one parent of Hispanic origin and grew up speaking Spanish at home; s/he also finished high school here in the US. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.
SPAN 2070Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions3
Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.
SPAN 2090Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation)3
This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.
SPAN 2095Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II3
This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country. It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed.
What would people think if you spoke out loud to yourself, at length, in the middle of a crowded room? On stage in a theater? The reactions would probably differ. What, then, is the function of monologues on the stage and in the performance arts? For whom are they meant? In this course, taught in Spanish, students explore the rich and complex role of monologues from the perspective of rhetoric, psychology, philosophy, and performance. Students have the chance to examine and enjoy a combination of Spanish and Spanish American plays. From the contemporary period, students study a selected mix of short plays, casting monologues, and videos. Students also write their own monologues with the assistance of the professor and/or perform them under the tutelage of Spanish theater actor Jose Luis Pati? Throughout the class, students focus on acquiring and delivering cultural meanings through improved pronunciation, tonality, delivery, and general presentation of oral work and performances.
This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations. Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence. Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.
Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.
Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernandez, Marti, Dario, Agustini, Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.
This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calder?and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others.
This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course. All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.
Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.
SPAN 2205Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish3
Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.
This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call Spain. Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generaci?98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine espa?and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.
This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call Spain. Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generaci?98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine espa?and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.
SPAN 2460Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers3
This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers. We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chavez, and Carmen Maria Machado.
SPAN 2715A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World4-5
This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories. (HIST-HGS)
SPAN 3020Spanish Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)1
This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.
Focuses on the practice of narrative writing in Spanish. Explores what makes a novel and a short story work, paying close attention to narrative structure, plot, beginnings/endings, character development, theme, etc. Students read classic novels and short stories as points of departure for the discussion. Because the course is a workshop, students are expected to write their own fiction.
SPAN 3290Performance and Memory in Contemporary Latin America3
How does the body remember the past? In this course, we will take this question as a point of departure to analyze the work of twelve contemporary artists from Latin America whose performances revisit individual, collective, national and global pasts in order to challenge official histories, denounce unspoken violences, and create space of empowerment and healing. As we discuss these performances in dialogue with the work of various critics and theorists, we will consider the potentialities and the limitations of performance, the ethics of reenactment and representation, and the sort of memories and archives we can only access through the body.
SPAN 3330Mexico City: Cultural Capital of Modernity3
This seminar explores the culture of Mexico City in relation to its rapid modernization and growth in the 20th and 21st century. One of the largest cities in the world, and a point of encounter and global forms of art and culture. Mexico City provides a key example of the ways in which modernization becomes experienced in both the arts and popular culture. This course will explore this process from the explosion of the city beginning in the 1920s, all the way to the present. We will explore the way in which art, literature, media and popular culture capture the sounds and images of the city. This course is taught in Spanish.
This course is an introductory survey of Latin American gender debates, feminist movements, and theories from the turn of the 20th century to today. Taking a regional perspective, we will examine the various defining strains of Latin American feminist tradition(s), including: 1) mass movements, activism, and mothers; 2) crossovers with anticolonial, indigenous, diversity, and transgender theories.
Latin American culture has always been very receptive to outside influences; its intense participation in global networks has been a way to be modern. At the same time, throughout the twentieth century, Latin American culture has also spread globally and influenced people outside the region. In this course we will explore this complex cultural exchange, showing how the idea of modernity in the continent was born out of this relation with the rest of the world. We will read Latin American authors of world literature (Borges, Bola?Garcia Marquez, Lispector), and we will explore some Latin American icons and cultural phenomena popular abroad: Frida Kahlo, Che Guevara, soccer, Rigoberta Menchu, telenovelas, magical realism.
SPAN 3465Performing the Comedia: Text, Voice, Body3
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mark the Golden Age of Spanish theater, celebrated for its wealth of plays or comedias, the social prominence of the stage at the time, and the lasting relevance of its themes in present day. This course examines Spanish Golden Age theatre through performance, exploring how comedias were staged historically and how they can be revived today through acting, editing, and translation. Performance, understood as embodied practice and restored experience, offers insight into how comedias shaped identities, mediated interactions, and reflected realities. Students will develop their oral and written communication in Spanish while engaging critically with key sociopolitical issues. They will also increase their familiarity with dramatic text analysis, stage performance, literary translation, and bibliographical research.
Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.
This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.
From portraiture to landscape, from the urban to rural, from the monumental to the mundane, this course explores Spanish photography, studying a range of artists and styles - formal, experimental, documentary, abstract, conceptual - between 19th century and the present. At the heart of weekly discussions will be some key foundational questions: What is photography? What is Spanish photography? How does one read a photograph? What does photography, a supposedly visual medium, have to do with language, textuality and writing? What are different theories of photography? This course is conducted in Spanish and designed for a diverse group of students, including those who already are familiar with the language of photography as well as those who have never studied photography before.
This course examines the politics of fashion in Spain from the 18th-21st centuries, exploring such topics as textile trade and Spanish empire, ethnicity and national garb, fashion and gender norms, as well as contemporary debates around cultural appropriation.
SPAN 3675Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries3
Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)
Documentaries are born out of the necessity to capture the real and to tell a truth. When we watch documentaries, we tend to comfortably rely on that claim and, often, take what they teach us as indisputable evidence of what reality is. In this course, we will put into questions the reality that documentaries portray-and the possibility itself of portraying reality-by discussing a selection of Latin American documentaries that raise important issues regarding the ethics and politics of representation. In our discussions, we will critically engage with the boundaries of the cinematic frame and debate the ethical responsibilities of the filmmaker, the value and the political and social impact of the image, the role of the spectator, and the implications of filming and being filmed by an other.
SPAN 3750The Last Laugh: Humor in Latin American Literature and Film3
What can laughter do? Upon reading a funny passage by Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault observed that his ensuing laughter "shattered all the familiar landmarks of my though." The implication is that humor is an analytic: a way of revealing the relationships that underlie society. This course will explore how laughter has been mobilized in Latin American literature and film to probe social hierachies and create community through shared pleasure. We will study the affordances of comedy, satire, and the absurd, in connection with subjects that some might consider "no laughing matter."
SPAN 3760Andean Thought, Monuments and Spectacles3
This course aims at introducing students to the core elements of the thought, praxis and way of life of one of the key bastions of indigenous resistance in the New World since Columbus's arrival in 1492: South America's Andean region. We will study the region's key cultural categories, following Cuzque?poet and thinker Odi Gonzales's claim that any study of the region requires taking these categories as starting point. These include questions of time, space, life, death, society, religion, number, and gender. We will study how these categories are formed in tension, syncretism and co-transformation with other languages and cultures-especially Spanish-over centuries of colonial and neocolonial domination. Primary material examined include films, photography, drama, novels, poetry, testimonies, and religious texts.
SPAN 3785War and Martial Arts in the Hispanic World3
Is war simply destruction or is it also culture? Why do films, novels, and video games so often celebrate combat, turning it into spectacle, discipline, and even art? Can violence be "just"? What role does war play in modern society, and why? This course examines how war and martial arts shaped the Hispanic world early modernity. Through literary texts, visual culture, and performance, we explore how swordplay, dueling, and military training became aesthetic and ideological expressions of class, gender, religious, and racial identities. From Spanish Golden Age plays and poems to fencing manuals and colonial chronicles, students will trace how martial practices transformed identities across the early modern Atlantic. Conducted in Spanish.
As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)
This course explores the aesthetics of disability in modern and contemporary art and performance. From canonical artists like Pablo Picasso to Frida Kahlo, bodyminds that disrupt normative expectations have long served as sites of creative tension. By bringing theories of disability and embodiment into conversation with the arts, students will examine how notions ofableism shape mainstream understanding of aesthetics, function, and form. Surveying a range ofworks from the twentieth and twenty first centuries, students will explore how disabled and non-disabled artists alike have reimagined ideals of beauty and normativity by centering disability.
This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and ropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries may include Poema de mio Cid, ibro de Apolonio, Yida de santa Maria Ogipciaca, Libro del conde Lucanon, poetry by Quevedo and Gongora, etc. and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.
SPAN 4130Media Theory from Latin America: Mediations, Hybridity, and Beyond3
This course approaches the 20th and 21st century canon of theories of media from a Latin American perspective, including both theory produced in the region (by figures such as Jesus Martin-Barbero, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Ana Lopez, and many others), and global traditions influential in Latin America (from the Frankfort School, Semiotics and Cultural Studies to theories of affect and distribution of the sensible. Through the intensive study of theoretical texts, this course is a study of the vocabularies key to the study audiovisual media in Latin America (print, radio, television, cinema, cybermedia), as well as the process of mediation, subjectivation and affectivity resulting from the correlation between media and Modernity.
In the field of aesthetics, the uncanny refers to an affective state, most commonly the sensation of encountering something-an object, a place, a situation- as both familiar and strange a the same time. Such experience of the "strange-familiar" (unheimlich) produces a disquieting sense of uncertainty, uneasiness, or doubt and may even spark extreme feelings of alienation, anxiety, dread, horror, and repulsion. This seminar explores the philosophical origins and conceptual terrain of the uncanny in relation to 20th and 21st century cinematic production.
What does it mean for a nation to "devour" the world and reinvent itself in the process? This course takes Oswald de Andrade's daring 1928 Cannibal Manifesto as its point of departure to explore how Brazil has continually reimagined itself through acts of cultural transformation and resistance. From the radical experiments of modernism and the neo-concrete movement, to the psychedelic aesthetics of Tropicalia and and the contemporary visions of Afrofuturism, this course traces how art, music, performance, film, and literature have reshaped Brazilian identity. Conducted in Spanish.
The course will explore medieval culture through the five senses, emphasizing how the differences with our own knowledge and practice of the sensorium produce sets of questions and avenues for thought, attuning ourselves both to our sensorial environment and to the premodern imagination. Moving between theoretical texts-philosophy, cognition, theology, perception-and case studies-literature, but also architecture, music, stained glass, manuscripts, etc. - we will examine the conceptualization and interpretation of the sensorium and experiment with ways of reconstructing or refreshioning the medieval in the modern.
In this course. we will read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-1615),unquestionably one of the most influential works in world literature. Our approach will be twofold. From the vantage point of "then," we will examine the work's inescapable historicity by exploring the intricate web of social phenomena, political process, cultural movements, and literary genres that shaped the text. From the perspective of "now," we will consider the diverse ways in which Don Quixote is read, studied, and understood today, engaging with a range of methodological approaches and tracing its countless translations, rewritings, remediations, appropriations, and reimaginings. To that end, we will critically analyze contemporary cultural products such as films, documentaries, television series, and graphic novels. This course will be conducted primarily in Spanish, except on the days specified in the syllabus.
SPAN 4446Golden Age Poetry and the Hispanic World3
This course is the senior seminar for Spanish majors and will explores the lyric traditions if the early modern Hispanic World. From courtly sonnets to villancicos and popular ballads, we will trace how poetry shaped and reflected early modern experiences of love and death, joy and anxiety, carnality and spirituality. Students will master their language skills as they practice with different approaches to reading poetry: from rhetorical analysis and recitation to close reading, critical theory and cognitive poetics. With these abilities, we will trace the birth of modern subjectivity with Garcilaso de la Vega, engage with satire and metaphysical anguish with Francisco de Quevedo, delve into the art of obscurity with Luis de Góngora, and we will discover the limits of knowledge with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
This seminar is the senior seminar and will explore Spain's political and cultural landscape through the language of modern and contemporary visual constructions, with a specific focus on three distinct yet interrelated visual spheres: spectacles, monuments, and ruins.
Experimental media surfacing from different corners of the Iberian Peninsula, since the emergence of the avant-garde to the Internet age, has a long-standing history of exploring new modes of sensory perception-the relationship between technology and emotion, vision and time, abstract forms and concrete effects. In this course, we will study a range of audiovisual materials from photomontage and short animation, to surrealist cinema and video art. As we move through different registers, the goal will be to study the language of media, its aesthetic relation to literary forms, and its connection to poetry and philosophy.
Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
SPAN 4577Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies4
As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to undo borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb desbordar (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)
SPAN 4595Reform, Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America4
This topics course examines the processes that gave rise to various radical political movements in parts of Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Readings and discussion around particular historical case studies combined with theoretical questions related to resistance, defiance, rebellion and revolution. Some prior knowledge of Latin American history is recommended but not required. Spanish helpful but not required. (HIST-HNA)
In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.
SPAN 4670Narratives of Race and Belonging in Spain4
This course examines memoirs and non-fiction works written by a new generation of writers of color. By surveying the anti-racist works of Asian-Spanish, Arab-Spanish, and Afro-Spanish authors we will probe such topics as national identity, migration, belonging, racism and anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and diasporic identities. Students will also learn gender-inclusive and racially inclusive Spanish.
SPAN 4690Latin American and Latinx Environmentalisms3
This course provides an introductory overview to environmental thought in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. We will discuss pre-Columbian approaches to the nonhuman and colonialism's transformative impact on ecosystems in the hemispheric America's. We will then turn to contemporary debates about whether nature should be treated as a resource or as a commons, with special attention paid to Indigenous philosophers like Ailton Krenak, Latinx scholars like Laura Pulido, and visual artists like Laura Aguilar and Carolina Caycdo.
What does it mean to be civilized? What does it mean to be barbaric? Who decides who is civilized and who is not? Is there an intrinsic relationship between the two? This course studies the way a colonial and racist heritage, which divided the world into 'civilized' and 'savage,' 'European ' and 'cannibal,' was taken up again after colonial independence as a key question for Latin American thinkers concerned with modernization, anticolonialism and dictatorship. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will trace the continuities and transformations of the concepts of civilization and barbarism in diverse local contexts of Latin America up until today.
This course explores the relationship between food and culture in Latin America. It asks what we eat and why, and in what contexts. We will examine how colonialism and globalization have shifted consumption patterns in Latin America, as well as the environmental implications of different agricultural practices. Students will whet their appetites with a variety of literary texts, films, and images about food.
This course examines the many ways the Amazon-the world;s most biodiverse region, spanning nine countries-has been imagined and represented, from a "green hell" that consumes explorers to a realm of enchanted beings like the giant snake Cobra Grande and the pink river dolphin, and from the mythical El Dorado to industrial utopias and environmental dystopias. We will explore how extractive activities and deforestation have shaped the region, while also highlighting its role as a cradle of indigenous epistemologies, technologies, and medicines, and as a space of encounter between humans and countless other forms of life. Materials include novels, films, photography, documentaries, songs visual art, and travelogues. The class is conducted in Spanish.
Extractivism is a concept developed by Latin American thinkers to describe the region’s historical insertion into the world economy based on the large-scale removal and export of raw materials, like gold, timber, and oil. Extractivism drove empire and funded its expansion; it also was the impetus for enslavement, dispossession, and extinction. It names an instrumentalist logic that is underwritten by the assumption of infinite resources and the pursuit of endless growth and accumulation. In this course, we will dig into theories of extractivism as well as how Latin American art, literature, and film lay bare extractivism's violence and offer ways of conceptualizing life otherwise, moving toward the proliferation of plural ways of conceptualizing the planet.
This course explores the rich, global food cultures of Greater Mexico, that is, a idea of Mexican gastronomy that encompasses the country of Mexico, the Mexican American community in the US, and Mexican migrants around the world, as well as the practice of Mexican food culture by non-Mexicans. The course raises fundamental issues related to the ways in which the practice and representation of gastronomy allow the consideration of topics such as colonialism, globalization, gastrodiplomacy, economic development and sovereignty, while discussing the role of food culture in subjectivity and identity. These questions will be explored through an array of literary, artistic and cinematographic texts, as well as the critical work of scholars across the humanities and the social sciences.
SPAN 4880Clarice Lispector: Philosophy, Politics and Literature3
What is literary creation? How does it relate to thinking, to doing, to being, to nothingness, to the cosmos? What is its temporality, identity, spatiality/place? What is literature's violence? Moreover, how do these questions relate to our sociopolitical realities,including questions of gender, class and race? These are just a few problems that one of the greatest women writers (and thinkers) of the twentieth century, the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, invites us to pose anew. In this course, we will dive deeply into her works, embracing the challenge of bridging the philosophical and the political through the literary, and doing so from the sociocultural complexities of twentieth-century Brazil. Alongside reading her works, we will watch film adaptations and trace cultural, literary and philosophical resonances.
In this course we will explore how Latin American science fiction and fantastic novels, graphic novels, short stories, and films from the modern and contemporary period have represented the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg. The aim is to reflect on what these representations tell us about the shifting notions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the region, and to analyze how these weird bodies are able to challenge binary constructions such as civilization/barbarism, nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, and body/mind, while creating spaces for emerging alternative communities. Some of the authors to be read are Mario Bellatin, Samanta Schweblin, Leonora Carrington, and Martin Felipe Castagnet.
This course examines Latin American literature in the context of the visual and auditory of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, in which mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet have threatened writing's representational privilege as a technology of information processing and storage. We will analyze how literature has been able to sustain its visibilty in the competitive media ecology: the power of mass media fantasies to mold the individual's subjectivity, and of the visual image to manipulate reality; the relationship between literature and popular culture and the market place: and the young writers' engagement with the new technologies of the information age.
This course is designed to help doctoral students (in the third year and beyond) fine-tune their academic writing in English. Over the course of the semester, we will cultivate effective and sustainable writing practices while also develping a toolkit to support writing across academic genres, including the prospectus, abstract, article and dissertation chapter. Unlike a traditional seminar, this workshop will entail weekly writing, revising, critique, and peer-review.
This course explores how the vocabulary (words like price and credit), structure (such as one of loss and gain), and tropes of medieval (and early modern) Spanish fiction speak to the emergence of different economic figures, reading texts from the 13th through the 17th centuries, and critical texts by Mauss, Derrida, Shell, Bataille, and others.
SPAN 6130Media Theory from Latin America: Mediations, Hybridity, and Beyond3
This course approaches the 20th and 21st century canon of theories of media from a Latin American perspective, including both theory produced in the region (by figures such as Jesus Martin-Barbero, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Ana Lopez, and many others), and global traditions influential in Latin America (from the Frankfort School, Semiotics and Cultural Studies to theories of affect and distribution of the sensible. Through the intensive study of theoretical texts, this course is a study of the vocabularies key to the study audiovisual media in Latin America (print, radio, television, cinema, cybermedia), as well as the process of mediation, subjectivation and affectivity resulting from the correlation between media and Modernity.
The publication of 2010 of The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, officially marked the consolidation of the Affect Theory Turn, a turn triggered by the debates and discussions around a vast interdisciplinary corpus that challenged a view of the subject as individual and self-contained, as if focused on the intensities that pass between bodies and the bindings and unbindings, becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements they provoked. The Affect Reader 2, published in 2023 and edited by Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, raised new questions that considered both the potentialities and limitations of affect theory and how it has changed in the last decade. This course takes these debates and questions and puts them in conversation with theoretical, literary, and artistic works that, grounded in Latin America, both challenge and expand our understanding of affect by introducing the cultural, linguistic, political, and social nuances of afecto.
In the field of aesthetics, the uncanny refers to an affective state, most commonly the sensation of encountering something-an object, a place, a situation-as both familiar and strange at the same time. Such experience of the strange-familiar (unheimlich) produces a disquieting sense of uncertainty, uneasiness, or doubt and may even spark extreme feelings of alienation, anxiety, dread, horror, and repulsion. This seminar explores the philosophical origins and conceptual terrain of the uncanny in relation to 20th and 21st century artistic, literary, architectural and cinematic production. If the uncanny traditionally signals a blurring of categories (familiar/unfamiliar, truth/fiction, reality/imagination) resulting in a fundamental distrust of observed reality, then what might its contemporary iterations reveal about our age of pervasive suspicion?
This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Herve Guibert, Pepe Espaliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.
SPAN 6225The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past3
This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles. In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished. Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.
What does it mean for a nation to "devour" the world and reinvent itself in the process? This course takes Oswald de Andrade's daring 1928 Cannibal Manifesto as its point of departure to explore how Brazil has continually reimagined itself through acts of cultural transformation and resistance. From the radical experiments of modernism and the neo-concrete movement, to the psychedelic aesthetics of Tropicalia and and the contemporary visions of Afrofuturism, this course traces how art, music, performance, film, and literature have reshaped Brazilian identity. Conducted in Spanish.
In this course. we will read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-1615),unquestionably one of the most influential works in world literature. Our approach will be twofold. From the vantage point of "then," we will examine the work's inescapable historicity by exploring the intricate web of social phenomena, political process, cultural movements, and literary genres that shaped the text. From the perspective of "now," we will consider the diverse ways in which Don Quixote is read, studied, and understood today, engaging with a range of methodological approaches and tracing its countless translations, rewritings, remediations, appropriations, and reimaginings. To that end, we will critically analyze contemporary cultural products such as films, documentaries, television series, and graphic novels. This course will be conducted primarily in Spanish, except on the days specified in the syllabus.
In this course, we will discuss innovative Brazilian narrative, poetry, and essays from the 20th century to the present. Some of the topics, literary movements, and debates to be addressed will include modernism, the representation of the Northeast region, Amazonian cosmogonies, speculative fiction, environmental issues, literary responses to dictatorship, issues of race, social inequality, and gender, and the relationship between the center and the periphery. Some authors to be discussed are Raul Bopp, Patricia Galv? Rubem Fonseca, Jo?Guimar? Rosa, Clarice Lispector, and Ana Paula Maia.
This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
SPAN 6660The Question of Science in Latin American Literature3
The role of science in modern Latin America has been a complex one: it has been used as a tool to justify racial oppression and legitimize colonialist projects; scientific discourse has also been used to make more complex human beings' relationship with their society and the universe. In this course, we will explore the relationship between literature and science from the early twentieth-century until the present, using as a point of departure social Darwinist discourses that purported to explain through organicist metaphors the supposed failure of the modern project in Latin America, to arrive at this present where scientific discourse is used by narrators and poets to create novel assemblages between species, and to tackle the social and environmental crises brought about by the Antropocene.
In this course, we will take an inter-and multidisciplinary approach that examines works of fiction, film, performance, and photography to explore how specters intervene in and mold the social, political, and cultural landscape of contemporary Latin America. We will discuss how different spectral figures challenge official narratives of memory, ground political authority, complicate transitions and endings, and fuel social movements and revolutions. As we engage with overlapping times, uncanny spaces, and restless bodies, we will also consider how spectrality shapes is shaped by the development of new media, the contemporary resurgence of populist discourse, the global migration crisis, and the urgency of ecological concerns.
SPAN 6726Black Spain: Empire and Afro-Iberian Culture3
This course explores Black Spain through 16th and 17th century historiographical and literary sources. "Black Spain" refers both to the darker myths and troubling realities of the Spanish Empire,a period marked by the Inquisition, religious wars, early racism, the rise of global capitalism, and the invention of genocide and the transatlantic slave trade. Black Spain also refers to the history of the Afro descending communities that lived in Iberia, an often-neglected chapter of the African diaspora. From the 15th century onward, these communities left an indelible mark on the arts and literatures of a period known as the Spanish Golden Age. Black Spain is often at the center of current debates about Spanish national identity-discussions that, until recently, largely excluded Afro-descendant men and women. This course is conducted in Spanish.
This course explores Latin American literature from the 60's onwards, taking a look at the changing landscape, from the heyday of the Boom writers and Garcia Marquez' magical realism, to urban fiction in the nineties. We will study authors such as Garcia Marquez, Manuel Puig, Daimela Eltit, Roberto Bola?Alberto Fuguet, Mario Bellatin, and Mayra Santos-Febres.
SPAN 6840Excess: Gender and Embodiment in Theory and Fiction4
This course provides graduate students with an overview of feminist and queer theories of gender and the body, as well as representations of the gender and the body in narrative fiction. We will critical examine the discursive turn; in feminist theory as well as more recent challenges to this school of thought including new feminist materialism and critical disability studies. We will also look at the ways in which gender is inflection by sexuality, race, caste, and class.
The fantastic and the supernatural are the fundamental elements of this course, in which we will analyze Latin American short stories, novels, and films, featuring ghosts, vampires, monsters, witches, zombies, haunted houses, and ecological horror. We will explore issues relating to colonialism, feminism, hybridity, and miscegenation. The texts range from the 19th century to present.
SPAN 6875Latin American Literary Theory: From the Foundations of the Rise of Cultural Studies3
This course is an introduction to the themes and ideas surrounding the formation of Latin American literary theory, through the reading of essential works. The course focuses on landmark debates, surrounding the question of literary historiography, the development of concepts such as transculturation and heterogeneity, and the development of sociocritical approaches seeking to relate literature to Latin America’s historical and geopolitical conditions. It also engages the ways in which Latin Americans debate theorists from the Frankfurt School, structuralism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics alongside the aesthetic development of the region’s literature. Authors to be discussed include Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Antonio Cándido, Ángel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Flora Sussekind and Beatriz Sarlo among others. This course will be taught in Spanish.
This is a graduate survey course of Latin American poetry from the Popol Vuh until today. We will simultaneously study the construction of a poetic canon - major works, figures, and movements - and deconstruct it, examining popular productions, genre-defying works, and poetry in non-European languages. Guiding questions include: How does poetry in Latin America understand itself? How does poetry in Latin America conceive of its role vis-?is society, politics, and literature more broadly? Alongside figures such as Vallejo, Mistral, Sor Juana and Neruda, but also the anonymous author of the Apu Inka Atawallpaman. Mapuche poet Daniels Catrileo and the singers of cielitos in the Southern Cone, we will ultimately ask: what is poetry after the invention of Latin America?
SPAN 6885Clarice Lispctor: Literature, Philosophy, Politics in 20th Century Brazil3
What is literary creation? How does it relate to thinking, to doing, to nothingness, to the cosmos? What is its temporality, identity, spatiality/place? What is literature's violence? Moreover, how do these questions relate to our sociopolitical realities, including questions of gender, class and race? These are just a few problems that one of the greatest women writers (and thinkers) of the twentieth century, the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, invites us to pose anew. In this course, we will dive deeply into her works, embracing the challenge of bridging the philosophical and the political through the literary, and doing so from the sociocultural complexities of twentieth-century Brazil. Alongside reading her works, we will watch film adaptations and trace cultural, literary and philosophical resonances.
In this course we will explore how Latin American science fiction and fantastic novels, graphic novels, short stories, and films from the modern and contemporary period have represented the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg. The aim is to reflect on what these representations tell us about the shifting notions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the region, and to analyze how these weird bodies are able to challenge binary constructions such as civilization/barbarism, nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, and body/mind, while creating spaces for emerging alternative communities. Some of the authors to be read are Mario Bellatin, Samanta Schweblin, Leonora Carrington, and Martin Felipe Castagnet.
