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The Graduate Program: Course Archive

Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Courses 2006 – 2007

Fall 2006 Graduate Courses | Spring 2007 Graduate Courses



Fall 2006 Graduate Courses


COURSE TITLE TIMES INSTRUCTOR
201 Literary Linguistics Tu 3-6 Azevedo
224 Monsters of Desire: Excess and Alterity in the Comedia W 3-6 Bergmann
229 Modern Spanish Poetry Th 3-6 Dougherty
242 Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory M 3-6 Iarocci
280.1

Seminar in Spanish American Literature: "Indigenismo"

 Th 3-6 Tarica
280.2 Literature and Law in Latin America Th 3-6 Ramos
285.1 Paleaography Tu 3-6 Rodríguez - Velasco
P275.1 Machado de Assis Tu 3-6 Passos


Spanish 223 (CCN 86340): Baroque Optics, Early Modern Poetic Subjectivities

Professor Emilie Bergmann

The Baroque has multiple usages and definitions that reflect its varying prestige: glorious or decadent, ornate excess or neoclassical, last gasp of the medieval or precursor to the secularism of the modern. This seminar traces the labyrinths of metaphor in the baroque poetry of Spain and Spanish America in the context of theorization of the visual arts and narratives of artistic periodization, in particular the ruptures and continuities between the pre-modern, modernity, and postmodernity.

The readings in this seminar center on seventeenth-century baroque poetry (Gongora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana) framed by the perspectives of the philosophical and political significance of visual culture in the Baroque.

Required Work:

Weekly presentations in class on specific poems or passages of Soledades, Polifemo, Quevedo's Heraclito cristiano or poems to Lisi, and Sor Juana's Primero sueno. In the second half of the seminar, one seminar session will be focused on each student's research topic with that student leading the class. One long research paper (10-12 pp.).


Spanish 242 (CCN 86343): Introduction to Literary Theory

Professor Dru Dougherty

Spanish 242 is a broad introduction to literary and cultural theory. Each week we will survey a major trend, using class time to clarify analytical concepts and discuss the propositions posed by the readings. The readings will supply a descriptive overview of major theoretical trends and classic texts by representative theorists within each tendency. From time to time we will also consider short literary passages in the light of the readings of the course.

Required Work:

Students will also be asked to hand in short (3-4 pages) responses to the work of 7 from among the theorists we consider. Each participant in the seminar will be asked to lead one of the seminar discussions, and, as a final project, to give a 10-minute talk on how some of the material of the course has informed his/her engagement with other texts read during the semester.

Texts:


Spanish 280 Section 2 (CCN 86349): Estado y cultura: la Revolución Cubana.

Professor Julio Ramos.

Este seminario explorará la relación entre estado e intelectuales en dos momentos claves de la revolución cubana: la década del 60 y el actual “periodo especial”,  en el interior de una historia del concepto de “autonomía” en el pensamiento político y estético de la modernidad. 

A partir del análisis específico de obras cinematográficas, literarias, musicales y políticas, nos preguntaremos sobre el papel posible de la creatividad y la invención en el campo de la experiencia política.


Spanish 280 Section 2 (CCN 86349): Literature and Democracy in 19th Century Latin America.

Professor Richard Rosa

The course will be an exploration of the relationship between literature and democracy discourse in Latin America during the century after independence, focusing on the issue of “representation” in both its political and aesthetic dimensions. Drawing from recent works political theory that focus on questions of language and conceptual history, we will attempt to make a re-description of the rhetorical strategies deployed by these writers.At the core of the projects of these intellectuals, we find an attempt to design strategies for managing the self in order to make it fit for the modern commercial society, while maintaining the integrity of a community and a notion of a common good.

We will discuss predominant interpretative trends and then try to formulate a different framework for reading them.Readings and topics include: the authors that worked within the context of the development of “Gran Colombia” (Francisco Antonio Zea, Juan García del Río, Jorge Lozano, Simón Bolívar, Antonio Nariño, Andrés Bello); the criticism of liberalism by Francisco Bilbao and Cecilio Acosta; race, commerce and aesthetics in Eugenio María de Hostos; the female civic republicanism of Juana Manuela Gorriti and Clorinda Matto de Turner; Indigenous and Afro-Latinamerican republicanism; the work of José Martí.


Spanish 285, Section 1 (CCN 86355): The Poetry and Theater of Federico García Lorca

Professor Dru Dougherty

The seminar is designed to study Lorca’s major poetic projects (Canciones, Suites, Poema del cante jondo, Primer romancero gitano, Poeta en Nueva York, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Sonetos del amor oscuro) as well as his now classic plays (Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, La zapatera prodigiosa, Bodas de sangre, Yerma, La casa de Bernarda Alba, Así que pasen cinco años, El público, Doña Rosita la soltera o el lenguaje de las flores).

Numerous questions will provide frames within which to read these works, including:

  1. What happens to lyric poetry when it enters the theatrical space?
  2. What aspects of burgeoning modernity did Lorca question in his poetry and plays?
  3. How closely did Lorca collaborate, as a dramatist and director, with the Second Republic’s cultural politics?
  4. What and where, for Lorca, was the public for his poetry and plays?
  5. How and where should his gayness figure in our reading?
  6. What role does ethical agency play in his tragic vision?
  7. Does it make sense to place Lorca within the orbits of surrealism and/or expressionism?
  8. What uses did the poet and playwright make of Spain’s rich literary heritage?
  9. As these questions suggest, the course will situate Lorca’s poetry and plays in relation to a dozen or so poetic, theatrical and cultural issues, providing an eclectic rather than a singular focus on an oeuvre that itself is extraordinarily varied.

Required Work:

Each student will write a research paper and an abbreviated 7-page version of the same for presentation at a professional meeting. In addition, each student will be asked to lead one class discussion and present his/her research at the final meeting of the seminar.


Texts:



Spanish 285, Section 2 (CCN 86358): The Meaning of Teaching.

Professor Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco

In this course we are going to examine the literary language, the rhetorical and poetic strategies articulated by the legislator to write the legal code in the vernacular.No, not that abstract: we will be reading some of the legal texts written in 13th Century in the Iberian Peninsula (fueros, Siete Partidas, Usatges, among others) and we will also consider other vernacular legal texts throughout Europe (Sachsenspiegel, Magna Charta, etc.); we will also get acquainted with some of the Latin legal traditions which were current at the same time, as well as some legal concepts from Islamic and Judaic law.

These readings and acquaintances will be the grounds for our study, which will be focused on this central question: how do these vernacular legal projects deal with the fact that they need both writing the law, and also create the legal vocabularies and the literary tradition upon which the legal project can be legitimated? This is, certainly, a very complex question.In order to answer it, we will be approaching the very act of legal creativity and dissemination of the law.

From 13th Century onwards, the legislators deem that in order to create and disseminate of the legal texts and doctrines they have to build up, as well, a complex series of textual / literary / cultural devices. As we will see in this course, some of these devices are tightly related to the poetic, artistic, or historiographical products, both oral and written.

We will be reading large excerpts from the greatest medieval legal code, the Spanish Las Siete Partidas, as in the following title (in modern Spanish):

For those who do not feel comfortable with the Spanish version, there is a full translation of the Partidas by Samuel Parsons Scott, recently reprinted (Philadelphia, Penn UP, 2001), an excellent acquisition for the personal library of anyone interested in Law or in Medieval and Early Modern cultures at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (in 1555 the Partidas were published to be used in the Americas, and they were still used recently in New Mexico or Arizona, for instance).

An online reader will be available with other texts (sources and critical studies)



Spanish 298, Section 14. (CCN 86399): Supervised dissertation writing group.

Professor Francine Masiello

Admission with consent of the instructor.

This is a year-long dissertation writing workshop for advanced doctoral students. Students will be expected to complete two polished chapters and a draft of a third during this two semester program.

The course will be structured as bi-weekly class meetings in which students will critique each other’s work; at least 2 hour-long individual consultations per semester with instructor in charge will be required of each student. Admission preference will be given to students in their second year of dissertation writing, but all applications will be considered.

Requirements for admission: prospectus approved by dissertation committee and one clean chapter to be submitted to instructor in charge by August 15.



Spring 2007 Graduate Courses

These are the courses, days, times, and instructors in charge, for the graduate Spanish & Portuguese classes. Clicking on the column headings will order the data in ascending or descending order, alphabetically or alphanumerically. Descriptions follow below.


COURSE CCN TITLE TIMES INSTRUCTOR
C202  86276 Linguistic History of the Romance Language
 Th 3-6
 Sempere, J
209
  86277 Seminar in Hispanic Linguistics
 Tu 3-6 Azevedo, M
221
  86280 Mystics  Moriscos: the Centrality of Marginal Subjectivities
 M 3-6
 Bergmann, E
232
  86283 Colonial /Post-Colonial Studies
 W 3-6
 Rabasa, J
280.2
  86286 On Memory
 Th 3-6
 Brizuela, N
285.2  86433 Origins of the Novel
 Tu 3-6
 Navarrete, I
298.14  86328 Dissertation Writing Workshop
 W 12-2
 Masiello, F
301  86421 Teaching Spanish in College
 MWF 12-1
 Villalba, C
302   86424 Practicum in College Teaching of Spanish & Portuguese
 F 3-6
 Villalba, C
 Port 275
  86754 The Unkept Garden: Portugual & Brazil Against the Enlightenment
 Tu 3-6
 Passos, J L


Spanish C202: History of the Romance Languages
Prof. Juan Sempere

A general introduction to the history of the Romance languages, with emphasis on Spanish, French and Italian, but with some consideration of other Romance languages such as Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese, and Romanian. The chief topics to be studied include:

  1. the basic linguistic structure of Classical Latin and its transformation into Vulgar Latin;
  2. the fragmentation of the Romance domain during the Dark Ages (500-1000 A.D.);
  3. the emergence of the Romance vernaculars in the high Middle Ages; and
  4. their post-medieval evolution. In addition to readings of a primarily linguistic nature, literary texts will be used to illustrate and characterize the basic characteristics of each Romance language. Main readings, covering issues on phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, will be in English and Spanish.


Spanish 209: Seminar in Spanish Linguistics
Prof. Milton Azevedo
Topic: Linguistic aspects of Literary Translation

This course is designed as an interdisciplinary forum to explore linguistic, stylistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural issues inherent in literary texts translated from English into Spanish or from Spanish into English. It addresses the relevance for translation of aspects of language such as morphology and syntax (language structure), the lexicon (collocation, literal vs. figurative correspondences, false cognates), semantics (style, denotation vs. connotation, associative and allusive meaning), pragmatics (register), regional variation (choice and representation of dialects), sociolinguistics (social correlates of language variation, taboo language, standard and nonstandard language), cognition (heteroglossia, reader's role), and cultural issues (transposition, compensation, and borrowing). There will be weekly exercises involving the analysis of excerpts from published translations and an individual presentation by each student.



Spanish 221: Orthodoxy, Empire, and Its "Others"
Prof. Emilie Bergmann

The formation of national identity in terms of religious orthodoxy in early modern Spain identified as "other" communities that had previously been integral parts of peninsular culture, in particular, converted Jews and Muslims, whose faith and loyalty to the Crown were under constant suspicion.  With the Protestant reformation, the autonomy of women’s religious communities and women’s authority in theological matters became an increasingly greater threat to the church. This course examines the contradictory representation of these prohibited identities as abject and idealized, often conflating sexual, religious, ethnic and ideological difference.

Course requirements: two essays, 5-7 pp., class presentations, and final paper (10-12 pp).



Spanish 232: Colonial/Postcolonial Studies
Prof. Jose Rabasa


This course offers an introduction for graduate students to Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies.  In studying colonial texts we inevitably bring into play our own particular historical consciousness, that is, our myths, prejudices, categories, understandings of objectivity and subjectivity, and a sense of being in the correct with respect of the beliefs of previous generations.  We will read primary sources in conjunction with representative texts informed by postcolonial theory and subaltern studies.

The point is not to celebrate these new approaches in academia but to gauge both their explanatory power and their epistemological limits.  Our method will consist of first understanding the theory on its own terms and only then elaborate a critique.  Ultimately, we must ask ourselves if theories developed on the colonization of Asia, the Middle East or Africa during the nineteenth-century are applicable to Latin America and its postcolonial experiences. 

This is a immense topic that would take us far from the colonial period, so here we will be concerned with the following five main categories:

  1. America as discovery and invention;
  2. Discourses of conquest, resistance and counter-insurgency;
  3. The spiritual conquest;
  4. Questioning the conquest;
  5. Fiction in the colonial world.

We will study representative texts from different genres: Relaciones, Chronicles, Letters, Epic Poetry, Lyrical Poetry, and Novel.  We will not be exclusively concerned with written texts using the Latin alphabet but will also study other cultural artifacts as maps, icons, and Native American writing systems.  The Native-American chronicles will include texts written in alphabetic script as well as visual representations drawing elements from pre-Hispanic forms of iconic script.  Particular attention will be paid to how these postconquest texts tend to subvert the function and the meaning of written discourse and pictorial perspective in Western culture, and thus to constitute forms of cultural survival.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Students will write short (2-3 page) position papers on the readings of each week. One oral presentation that will include a book review of the text(s) presented to the class (750-1000 words). I will place the reviews in Blackboard.

TEXTS:

Reader available at University Copy, 2425 Channing Way.



Spanish 280.2  On Memory
Prof. Natalia Brizuela


What does it mean to remember, to recall, to recollect?  What is the relationship between memory and narrative?  How does this relationship change according to the narrative medium—film and literature—through which and on which memory is ascribed and inscribed, and furthermore, how does memory articulate the very structure of these different narrative mediums? 

The seminar will have as it’s core the texts of Argentine writer Juan José Saer—“La mayor”, “Sombras sobre un vidrio esmerilado”, Glosa, Nadie nada nunca—reading with and through Saer’s work literary texts by Proust, Borges, Onetti and Calvino and Sebald as well as films by Gutierrez Alea, Rocha, Marker, and Tarkovsky, and theoretical texts by Aristotle, Plato, Bergson and Freud, Benjamin and Ricoeur.  With the exception of Borges and Proust, the literature and film that we will explore in the seminar roughly spans a twenty-year period that covers the mid-late sixties to the mid-late eighties. 

Thus, although the course will be an exploration on the poetics of memory rather than on the politics around the remembrance of specific historical events, the seminar’s corpus will address questions of historically specific modes of memory.

Spanish 285.2: The Origins of the Novel “Revisited”
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete

This research seminar will explore synchronically the varieties of narrative forms that were available c. 1500, and examine various approaches to narratology in terms of their applicability to the late middle ages.

The title of this course is based on Menéndez y Pelayo's four-volume study and anthology of narrative before Cervantes. The course has three aims:  to recover for the theory of the novel the broad conceptions of the genre implicit in 19th c. literary historiography; to play those conceptions off against 20th c. theories of narrative and the novel (including Propp, Greimas, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Segre, Vitz, etc.); and to explore 15th and 16th century narrative culture as reflected in the Spanish novel. Our keystone texts will be three novels published during this period, La cárcel de amor, La Celestina, and Amadís de Gaula, but in addition to these we will explore a variety of other narrative forms, such as ballads, lives of the saints, chivalric biographies, frame tales, travel accounts, etc. Among the questions we will address are:  what were the minimal requirements for a narrative?  what models of subjectivity were available at this period?  could historical events be narrated as such? does the problem of authority exist for the late medieval narrator? Thus although most of the primary sources would be from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the theoretical aspects should make the course worthwhile to all students interested in the novel.

Special note for students in other departments:  students from comparative literature, French, Italian, etc. are especially welcome.  The principal works are readily available in translation and you may substitute for the other Spanish texts analogous ones from other literary traditions if they are more central to your own studies.  The course will be conducted in bilingually and student presentations and research projects can deal with texts in any of the Romance languages.

Requirements:  A long research paper, constructive critique of another student’s paper, and class presentations.

Spanish 298.14: Dissertation Writing Workshop (By permission of instructor)

Prof. Francine Masiello

This is the second semester of a year-long dissertation writing workshop for advanced doctoral students. Students will be expected to complete two polished chapters and a draft of a third during this two semester program. 

The course will be structured as bi-weekly class meetings in which students will critique each other's work; at least 2 hour-long individual consultations per semester with instructor in charge will be required of each student.

Portuguese 275.1: The Unkept Garden: Portugal and Brazil against the Enlightenment

Prof. José Luiz Passos

D. João V was a very lucky king who ruled between 1706 and 1750 with an overstated sense of religious devotion. A few years before his coronation, one of the ultramarine colonial companhias had found gold in Brazil. D. João V had his royal chapel named a cathedral and Lisbon raised to the status of a Patriarchate. He would later send annual shipments of regalia, wax and gold to the Vatican, acknowledging the fact that “Deos Nosso Senhor [ha] augmentado as minhas rendas com o ouro, que se tira das Minas Geraes” (Alexandre de Gusmão. Codex titulorum… 2 vols. Lisbon: Typ. Regia Sylviana & Academia Real, 1746-48. p. 289). The philosopher Matias Aires was born in Brazil the son of the Provedor-mor das Casas de Fundição. His father’s high standing in the colonial mining business paid for his education in Coimbra and Sorbonne. Matias Aires’ Reflexões sobre a vaidade dos homens (1752) is a moral essay that argues for a broader and unusual account of vanity as the ultimate master passion. It reads as a cautionary treatise intended for and dedicated to the next king, D. José I. The colonial and confessional subtext is provocative. Gold had redefined the Luso-Brazilian colonial trade; it had a deep cultural and social impact. It was “found,” rather than harvested as sugarcane. Fate matched hard labor and industry. Gold mining also troubled Azeredo Coutinho, bishop of Pernambuco and Évora, whose defense of the sugarcane engenhos (1791)—much like Matias Aires’ emphasis on the positive, creative aspect of vanity—was based on conflicting criteria deriving from natural law, religious doctrine, and laissez-faire political economy. Though the Enlightenment in the Luso-Brazilian world holds basically the same claims about universality, individuation, and autonomy of the subject, it grounds them on a provocative mix of pragmatic and doctrinal principles. Its ramifications have shaped the discourse on the relationship between Portugal and Brazil, and between each country and their own sense of the past. In both countries, the endurance of the pastoral mode as a way of probing identity; the concern with a suitable match between ideas and social practices; and their spiritual and economic integration to a broader continental setting are among the topics contemporary critics have engaged in when trying to account for transatlantic modernity. Within a decolonization context, the long and ever-changing Luso-Brazilian eighteenth century offers a challenging and new way of framing the Enlightenment.

Required readings:

Suggested readings: