Featured Courses

Spanish 460 (May 21-June 14)

Repression and Representation:
Literature, Film, and Performance in Postdictatorial Latin America

This course, taught by Professor Ksenija Bilbija, will explore one of the most important issues of our times: human rights! We will focus on the ways survivors, writers, visual artists, film makers, journalists, and performance artists have tackled the issues of justice, revenge, victimhood and post-traumatic memory.

What is being remembered as well as how and when in regard to the military dictatorships in Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990) will shape our discussions in this course for which all materials will be available through canvas. We will talk about transitional as well as poetic justice. One goal of the course is to sharpen our “critical eye and tongue” and improve each individual’s skills as a reader, thinker, and writer.

requisites: Spanish 223 and 224

 

back to top

Spanish 319 (June 18-July 12)

Traveling through South America: Culture, Sites, and Language

This course, taught by Brandon Goodale, combines South American culture with expected South American linguistic variation. Students will work step-by-step towards a final project for which they will advertise a trip they have planned, logistically and financially, through South America, hitting the destinations of their choosing while being economical. To accompany this advertised trip the class will collectively create A Beginner’s Guide to Linguistic Variation: South America, and An Introduction to South American Culture. This course will be taught in Spanish.

By the end of this course, students will:

• have knowledge of Spanish linguistic variation in South America
• be able to search corpus data and read linguistic atlases
• be proficient in creating usable financial and logistical travel plans
• understand local culture
• have discovered sites of interest while catering the trip to a particular clientele.

back to top

Literature in Translation 245

Topics in Spanish American Lit in Translation

Spanish American narrative fiction first won global attention during the 1960s with the so-called Boom generation. This course, taught by Professor Glen Close, will explore the lesser known Post-Boom fiction of the last four decades, an era marked by various crises including those of the modern subject, the gender system, the literary intellectual, the nation-state, the prevailing economic development models, and the revolutionary utopias of the left. We will read English translations of approximately a dozen novels by some of the most prominent Post-Boom narrators in order to explore contemporary debates regarding the status of literature in postmodern culture, the inscription of individual and collective identities (especially those of poor, dissident, queer, and subaltern characters) and the impact of neoliberalism and the global corporate mass media on Spanish American societies. We will study innovative uses of genres such as crime fiction and autofiction (which combines autobiography with fictional elements), as well as the interaction of the novel with other mass-media discourses including cinema.

 

back to top

Spanish 414

Visual Celestina

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

 

back to top

Spanish 468, Lecture 002

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

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. We 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

 

back to top

 

 

 

Spanish 469

Mexican Migration to the US

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

 

back to top