Featured Courses

Spanish 414

Visual Celestina

12:05-12:55pm MWF

This course, taught by Professor Ivy Corfis, will examine how early readers understood texts through word and image. The class will analyze early printed book illustrations and how they guided readers to “read” the work. Celestina [Tragi/Comedia de Calisto y Melibea] (ca. 1499), an important literary text of the late Castilian Middle Ages and early Renaissance, is an excellent case study of the early book as material object. This course will examine the work first through its written word, then look at how and where woodcut illustrations are incorporated into early editions and how the images reflect or alter what the text says, thus conditioning the “reading” of the word. In the end, meaning is created by many hands through many facets of the physical book. Through the textual word and associated images, students will come to understand the material production of the early book and interpret the visual messages editors and artists put forth to accompany the author’s narrative. The course will use online resources of texts and images and incorporate blended learning modules through Canvas.

Through this course students will:

• learn the importance of the book as material object
• analyze how printers and artists shaped textual meaning through images
• analyze texts critically
• hone oral and written communicative skills in Spanish through class discussion and written essays

requisites: Spanish 223 and 224

 

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Spanish 468, Lecture 002

Football or Soccer? ¡No! ¡Fútbol!: A Cultural History of the Beautiful Game

1:20-2:10pm MWF

Why is soccer considered a national sport in most Latin American countries? Why is it that a game that in its current form originated in England was adopted by a whole culture as a matter of national identity? These are just a few of the questions we will seek to answer while studying “the beautiful game” (as labeled by Brazilian soccer icon and three-time world champion Edson Arantes do Nascimento, a.k.a. Pelé) from a vast array of sources. This course, taught by Professor Marcelo Pellegrini, will explore short stories, essays, poems, and movies in the pursuit of the cultural meaning of an activity that in Latin America goes well beyond the realm of sports and touches upon national pride, economics, racial and social inequalities, gender discrimination, and politics. This class will be an opportunity for students to know more about a sport whose popularity is growing in the US and will invite them to expand their Spanish by getting to know the sometimes very idiosyncratic vocabulary used to describe soccer. By studying the beautiful game, we will have a chance to take a look into Latin American history and culture from a perspective often overlooked but thoroughly important.

requisites: Spanish 223 and 224

 

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Spanish 469

Mexican Migration to the US

9:55-10:45am MWF

This course, taught by Professor Rubén Medina, explores Mexican migration to the US from an historical, cultural, political, literary, and gender studies perspective. It will concentrate on analyzing various narratives dealing with Mexican migration and second-generation Mexicans in the US (films, documentaries, testimonies, essays, novels, short stories, musical expressions), in connection to theories of migration, transnationalism, and processes of transculturation. Discussions will also consider several key issues, such as legal or illegal status, social mobility, cultural integration and sense of belonging, uses of language (Spanish, English, Spanglish), and the production of new gendered identities. This course will be taught in Spanish and is an ethnic studies course.

requisites: Spanish 223 and 224

 

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