spring 2009 classes: upper division course descriptions
Spanish 107B: Survey of Modern Spanish Literature (3 units)
Prof. Dru Dougherty
The course presents a representative selection of authors whose texts are considered modern classics: José Zorrilla (Don Juan Tenorio), Benito Pérez Galdós (La de Bringas), Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Sonata de estío), Antonio Machado (Soledades and Campos de Castilla), Federico García Lorca (El romancero gitano and Así que pasen cinco años), Julio Llamazares (Luna de lobos) and Carmen Martín Gaite (El cuarto de atrás). The conceptual framework for the course will be the writer’s use of the past to speak of, and sometimes for, the present. Cultural topics will include the romantic dream, fiction and history, decadence, the disoriented modern subject, violence and the metaphor, the avant-garde, civil war, the book as interlocutor.
Spanish 111A (CCN 86220: Cervantes. (3 units)
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete
This class is designed as an introduction to the reading and interpretation of Don Quijote. After orienting ourselves, for the first couple of weeks, with some selections from Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, we will proceed to read the complete text of Don Quijote. Emphasis will be on close reading of the novel and on the relationship between Don Quijote and the origins and development of the modern novel, and the class will integrate a detailed reading of Cervantes’s works with discussion of relevant historical and theoretical topics. Four quizzes, 3 short papers, and a final exam.
Texts:
Cervantes, Don Quijote (any edition will do but the Castalia edition is recommended; ISBN 84-7039-284-0)
Efron, Arthur. Don Quixote and the Dulcineated World. Paunch. ISBN -9602478-6-6
Quint, David. Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12227-X
Spanish 115 (CCN 86223): Spanish Poetry (3 units)
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete
This course has two parts. In the first, we will trace the evolution of Spanish poetry during a broadly-defined Renaissance, beginning with the Marqués de Santillana, who theorizes the distinction between poetry and prose, and continuing with Garcilaso de la Vega, who exemplifies a notion of clarity in which poetry is like prose is like speech. With a look at semitic poetics as exemplified by the 16th century mystic (and converso) poets Fray Luis de León and San Juan de la Cruz, we will arrive at the complex Baroque poetics of Góngora and Quevedo. In the second part of the course we will examine the legacy of Spanish Renaissance poetics in the 19th-century poet Bécquer and in the poets of the generation of 1927. The emphasis throughout will be on poetics and on the use of language as a medium. A short essay and a larger project, which could be another essay, a translation, or a hypertext project. There will also be a final exam. In addition to a class reader or selections on Bspace, you should count on buying the following books:
Garcilaso de la Vega, Poesías castellanas completas. Castalia. ISBN 84-7039-743-5
Leon, Fray Luis. El cantar de los cantares de Salomón. Cátedra. ISBN 84-376-2043-5
Bécquer, Rimas. Cátedra. ISBN 978-84-376-1343-7
Gaos, Vicente (ed). Antología del grupo poético de 1927. Cátedra. ISBN 978-84-376-0053-6
Spanish 135.2 (CCN 86229): Contemporary Spanish Novel (3 units)
Prof.Pilar Alvarez-Rubio
Description and Objectives: This course will concentrate primarily on novels written in the second half of the 20th century, including works by Mexico’s Juan Rulfo, Cuban Alejo Carpentier, Colombia’s García Márquez, Chilean Isabel Allende, and Puerto Rico’s Rosario Ferré. We will reflect upon recurrent topics explored in Latin American narrative, such as the rewriting of history in fiction, the nature of patriarchy, the effects of colonialism, and issues of race and gender. In addition, we will read and discuss critical and theoretical texts by major Latinamericanists.
Students will acquire advanced understanding of the most salient issues that comprise the literary production, culture, and historical background of modern Latin America, through lectures, student presentations, critical essays, discussions, and one film screening.
Spanish 135.3 (CCN 86232): Portraiture (3 units)
Prof. Natalia Brizuela
What is a portrait? What is in a portrait? This graduate seminar will explore forms of portraiture in different mediums—literary, photographic, cinematographic—from the nineteenth and twentieth century, asking of these depictions of the “face” and the “I”—meant to make visible physical traits but above this, character, interiority—how they liberate and confine at the same time, how, that is, they function both as forms of self display and as apparatus of control, conforming and molding subjects. We will pay particular attention to the “democratic” impulse of photographic portraiture, and the ways in which that opening up of the genre—taking it beyond the royal and regal sphere—in the mid nineteenth century changed the laws of the genre as well. We will also pay particular attention to questions of mimesis and indexicality, but even more importantly, to the necessary fiction inherent in this genre.
Spanish 135.5: Latin American Short Story (3 units)
Prof. Laura Garcia-Moreno
A survey of short fiction from different parts of Latin America by male and female writers throughout the twentieth century. The course involves close readings of short stories and the analysis of their place in specific historical, social, and cultural contexts, along with the study of theories on this literary genre. Stories by Quiroga, Arlt, Bombal, Borges, Cortazar, Carpentier, Rulfo, Garro, Fuentes, Donoso, Onetti, Lispector, Garcia Marquez, Arenas, Bryce Echenique, Peri Rossi, Ferre, Monterroso, and Saer, among others.
Prof. Garcia Moreno
Spanish 135.6:Literary and Visual Practices in Mexico from the Revolution to Nafta (3 units)
Prof. Laura Garcia-Moreno
Focusing on a variety of literary and visual forms of expression, this course explores the changing relationship between culture and state configurations in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. Through the analysis of short stories, novels, poems, paintings, films, documentaries, essays, installations and performances, we will focus on how cultural production has participated in the writing and rewriting of modern Mexican history or contributed to shape, consolidate, and/or undermine dominant representations of national identity. Azuela, Rulfo, Garro, Castellanos, Paz, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Pacheco, Monsivais are some of the writers included, along with writings by members of the EZLN, films by Bunuel, Gonzalez Inarritu, and others.
Spanish 135W.1:Borges, Buddhism and Cognitive Science (3 units)
Amelia Barili
In this course we will study an aspect not much studied in Borges' work till now: his interest in Buddhism and its echoes in cognitive science research. We will read Borges short stories, poems, essays and conferences where he explicitly or implicitly refers to Buddhism. We will discuss his book "Qué es el budismo?", written with Alicia Jurado in 1976. After reading excerpts from the classical books on Buddhism that Borges refers to in his book and from modern commentary on them, we will enter in dialogue with renown experts of the Theravada, Mahayana, Tantric, and Zen schools of Buddhism he discusses.
Researchers from the Dalai Lama's Mind Life Institute will give a presentation on the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism and on their cutting edge research with cognitive scientists on the effects of meditation on brain function. We will learn simple focusing and contemplative practices and consider ways of integrating meditation into our busy academic life as a way of fostering our critical and creative thinking. Students are expected to practice at home, to keep a weekly journal of their findings and to complete two major research papers on Borges and Buddhism.
Spanish 135W.2: Modern Spanish Poetry (3 units)
Prof. Dru Dougherty
The course will cover Spanish lyric poetry from the late-romantic Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870) through the rise of Hispanic symbolism (Rubén Darío) and its development in Spain (Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado) followed by the avant-garde poets of Ultraísmo (Guillermo de Torre, Eugenio Montes) and five poets of the Generation of 1927: Ernestina de Champourcin, Concha Méndez, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén and Rafael Alberti. Topics in poetics that we will discuss include Baudelaire’s notion of modernité, symbolist organism, creationist esthetics, feminine re-mythification, pure poetry, lyric depersonalization, and anti-modernist protest poetry. Because this is a course that fulfills the Spanish composition requirement, enrollment can not exceed 15 students. The course is restricted to Spanish majors. Students will write 5 expository essays totaling at least 21 pages in final form. Writing topics we will work on include the all-important introduction, argumentation, the use of relative clauses, connectors, transitions, the historical present, and bibliographic form. Spanish 102A is a prerequisite for this course.
Spanish 161: Spanish Phonetics and Phonology (3 units)
Ana Ameal-Guerra
Prerequisites: Spanish 25 and proficiency in Spanish.
The aim of this course is to offer an introduction to the theories and practices of articulatory phonetics and the phonology of Spanish. Likewise, it will introduce the most important phonetic and phonological dialectal differences, and the corresponding linguistic terminology. In class, we will develop exercises about definitions, recognition, production, transcription and analysis of oral speech from various regions, which will help the student to acquire the necessary skills to analyze the phonological and phonetic system of Spanish.
Spanish 163: Issues of Multilingualism (3 units)
Ana Ameal-Guerra
Prerequisites: Spanish 100 (or equivalent at instructor’s discretion) and proficiency in Spanish. Overview of issues on the interaction of language, culture and society in multilingual/multicultural settings, according to both early foundational work and current research. The course aims to foster an informed understanding of what it means to be multilingual and the effects of language contact; to critically examine language conflict situations and language and power, through notions such as minority languages, creoles, diglossia, language shift, endangered languages and language loss, language revitalization and maintenance; the implications of bilingualism for educational policies and language planning; the impact of language socialization and ideology on social/ethnic identities; and to study, from theoretical as analytical perspectives, bilingual communicative practices and code-switching. Topics will be illustrated by a survey of case studies from different Spanish-speaking language communities, including the US. Particularly recommended for Option D majors.
Spanish 166 (CCN 86256): Language and Style (3 units)
Prof. Milton Azevedo
Language and style analyzes a variety of literary and nonliterary texts from a linguistic perspective, to address questions such as what characterizes the style of different authors and of discourse forms such as fiction, journalism, scientific writing, fiction, legal writing, or advertising, among others, from the viewpoint of language structure and vocabulary.This course is recommended for students majoring or minoring in Spanish, particularly in option D. Spanish 25 (completed, not taken concurrently) is a must. Furthermore, experience shows that students without formal training in linguistics and familiarity with linguistic concepts taught in Spanish 100 (Introduction to Spanish Linguistics) usually find this course rather difficult. Specifically, concepts of Spanish phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as language variation (temporal, regional, social, and contextual) will be needed from the very beginning of the course. There is a substantial amount of reading in Spanish and in English, and attendance and active participation are essential. Course grade will be based on tests on set dates, participation in class discussions, a combination of unannounced quizzes and other exercises, an oral presentation and a final paper/exam.
ILA 180 (CCN 87203): Nahuatl Poetry and Painting (3 units)
Prof. Jose Rabasa
This course is designed to introduce students to Nahuatl textuality by drawing examples from poetry and painting. Under poetry, we will include a variety of literary forms: histories, chants, rites, legends, myths, letters, wills. By painting, we will understand a broad array of pictorial texts: histories, calendars, myths, cartographies, book illustrations, mural, land titles. These broad definitions seek to undermine the obviousness of the following binaries: "myth vs. history" and "ritual vs. literature" but also "people with writing vs. people without writing" and the variation "with history vs. without history." We will address the interrelations between alphabetical writing, pictography, and orality. Central to our concern will be the (ethno)poetics of Nahuatl verbal and pictorial texts. In addition to readings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts such as the anonymous Leyenda de los soles, the Cantares mexicanos, Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, and histories and chronicles by the Indian historian Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quatlehuanitzin, we will read some recent studies of pictorial codices and maps by Barbara Mundy, Elizabeth Boone, and Stephanie Wood. The course will also offer students an introduction to Nahuatl through the study of James Lockhart's Nahuatl as Written (classes on Tuesday will be dedicated to the study of Nahuatl). At the end of the semester students will work in groups to produce an analysis and translation of a Nahautl text.
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