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The Graduate Program: Course Archive

Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Courses 2007 – 2008

Fall 2007 Graduate Courses  | Spring 2008 Graduate Courses

Fall 2007 Graduate Courses

 Course CCN
 Title
 Time
 Instructor
200A 86307
 Proseminar
 M 1:30-3
 TBD
209  86475
 Hispanic Linguistics
 Tu 3-6
 Azevedo
242
 86310
 Literary Theory & Criticism
 Th 3-6
 Navarrete
260
 86313
 Cervantes
 W 2-5  Cascardi
280.1  86316
 Mexico:  Nationalism, Modernization, and the Arts
 W 3-6 Garcia-Moreno
280.2
 86319
 Modernities
 M 3-6 Brizuela
285.1 86322
 El Teatro de Valle-Inclan y Garcia Lorca
 Tu 3-6 Dougherty
285.2
 86325 El Mito de la Convivencia y los Estudios Medievales
 M 3-6
 Montaner
 Port 275
 86654
 Ethnography, Autography & Fiction
 Th 3-6
 Martinho


Spanish 200A. Proseminar. (1 unit)
TBA

One and one-half hours of lecture per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This course is designed to introduce all new graduate students to the research conducted in the department. Readings will consist of research papers authored by members of the department.


Spanish 242: Literary  Theory & Criticism (4 units)
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete

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.

Spanish 260: Cervantes (4 units)
Prof. Anthony Cascardi

Close reading and analysis of Don Quixote along with selected works form the Novelas ejemplares and the Entremeses.  This course will focus on questions of literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical heterogeneity in Don Quixote.  Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, we will examine the Quixote as an example of "heteroglossia," i.e. as a work situated within a context of multiple, competing, and transitional discourses. We will examine the social and historical context of Cervantes' polyglot universe, and we will look at the Quixote as a dialectical response to pre-existing literary forms. From an aesthetic perspective we will focus on Don Quixote as an example of the European baroque. Along with the works of Cervantes, we will read selections from major Renaissance works inside of Spain and outside, including Erasmus' Praise of Folly, Montaigne's Essais, the Lazarillo de Tormes, and El Abencerraje. Students will be required to complete a final paper for the course and to present an in-progress report during the course of the semester.

Spanish 280.1: Mexico:  Nationalism, Modernization, and the Arts (4 units)
Prof. Laura García-Moreno

Focusing on literature, film, and other visual arts,this seminar explores the changing relationship between culture and state configurations in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. In particular, we will study how Mexico City has been represented in literature and film; how writers, photographers, and film directors have mapped this urban space, its history and its conflicts.

Although we will focus primarily on the period from the revolution on, from the cultural transformations triggered by new media in the years after the armed conflict of 1910-17 to more recent ones resulting from the far-reaching structuration of national identity in the face of increasingly transnational realities, we will also look at selections of earlier writings such as Hernán Cortés’s Cartas de relación and Alexander von Humboldt’s The Kingdom of the New Spain.

We will consider texts that have helped consolidate and/or challenge the nationalization and implementation of modernization in Mexico. Towards the end of the semester we will address how art has responded to events such as the signing of the NAFTA, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the defeat of the PRI.

Examples of primary texts include Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Elena Garro’s Recuerdos del provenir, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, González Iñárritu’s Amores perros, as well as works by Jorge Cuesta, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, ElenaPoniatowska, José Emilio Pacheco, Jesusa Rodríguez, and sub-comandante Marcos.

We will read these texts in conjunction with writings by Carlos Monsivais, Rubén Gallo, Claudio Lomnitz, Roger Bartra, Alma Guillermo Prieto, Peter Ward, Benedict Anderson, Walter Benjamin, and Rem Koolhaas.


Spanish 280.3: Literature and Political Economy: A Tropical Perspective
Prof. Richard Rosa
The seminar will explore the relationship between political economy and literature through the reading of a corpus of literary texts by Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban authors. We will focus on how they attempted to map out the economic circuits into which the region was being incorporated since the end of the 19th Century; how they received, assimilated, and contested the designs proposed by political economists; and the consequences that a tropical economy, and its legacy of slavery, migrancy, coloniality, persistent economic fluctuations and instability had on the representations of their national and transnational identities. We will explore new methods and approaches for formulating questions regarding the relationship between material culture and literature, while also reading classical texts of political economy that had an effect on the rhetorical articulation of Caribbean texts. Authors include E. María de Hostos, José Martí, Pedro Mir, Fernando Ortiz, Antonio S. Pedreira, Luisa Capetillo, Alejo Carpentier, Ana Lydia Vega, among others. Theoretical readings include Marx, Mauss, Keynes, Glissant, Goux, Bourdieu, Woodmansee, Shell and others.

Spanish 285.1: El teatro de Valle-Inclán y García Lorca (4 units)
 Prof. Dru Dougherty

The two major dramatists from Spain’s early twentieth century are the subject of this seminar. They will be set within aesthetic/historical contexts, including symbolism, expressionism, national regeneration, the Spanish avant-garde and social theater. The authors’ ties/hostility to the commercial stage will also be studied. A variety of critical and theoretical topics will be introduced.

Texts:

Ramón del Valle-Inclán:

Federico García Lorca:

José Zorrilla:

Students will be able to choose between one 20-page or two 10-page research papers.

Spanish 285.2: El Mito de la Vinvvencia y los Estudios Medievales (3 units)
Prof. Alberto Montaner

Toda lectura del pasado está mediatizada por el presente, el cual, a su vez, está condicionado por su (lectura del) pasado. Un caso en que esto resulta especialmente patente es el de la cultura hispánica (no solo europea), especialmente en lo referido a la influencia que sobre su actual configuración ha tenido la pasada interacción de los componentes cristianos, musulmanes y judaicos. Dicha interacción, desde el clásico estudio de Américo Castro, se viene describiendo en términos de convivencia (más recientemente, de tolerancia) en el seno de la “España de las tres culturas”. De acuerdo con esta interpretación, el entramado cultural hispánico poseería una especificidad dentro del ámbito de la cultura occidental que se debería a la singular combinación de componentes de esa triple procedencia. A su vez, tal combinación habría sido posible gracias al clima de mutuo respeto propio de la convivencia , únicamente destruida por el radicalismo absolutista desarrollado desde finales de la Edad Media, cuya intransigencia habría llevado a desmontar dicha situación mediante la expulsión de los judíos en 1492 y la conversión forzosa y posterior expulsión de los musulmanes en 1525 y 1610, respectivamente. Pese a ello, los efectos de la convivencia se habrían dejado sentir aún en buena parte de la temprana Edad Moderna, debido al importante papel de los conversos, hasta su definitivo ahogamiento por parte de la Inquisición. La armónica situación preexistente resultaría, de ser cierta, un adecuado modelo ético y pragmático para cualquier país con una proporción suficientemente notable de inmigración multicultural y multiétnica, además de servir de apoyo a quienes ven en la “alianza de civilizaciones” un antídoto para la situación de violencia a escala mundial fomentada por el “terrorismo islamista” y para las tensiones entre Oriente y Occidente. Precisamente, el renovado favor de que goza la visión de la convivencia o tolerancia lleva a preguntarse si, cuando se describe tal situación, no se estará hablando predominantemente desde el presente y no desde el pasado. Ante tal perspectiva, el objetivo del presente curso es explorar esta cuestión y preguntarse si historiar es exclusivamente una forma de hacer política o si existe algún tipo de sentido y de (relativa) autonomía para algo que pueda considerarse propiamente “conocimiento histórico”.

Bibliografía:


Spanish 298.15: Dissertation Writing Workshop (4 units)
Prof. Richard Rosa
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.


Portuguese 275: Ethnography,Autography and Fiction(4 units) Selected Readings from Saramago and Luso-African Writers
Prof. Ana Martinho

R. Behar says in a recent text about her anthropological journeys that “ethnography is about finding stories we don’t know we have lost”.

This idea of lost books waiting to be told or read complies easily with the texts this course will be dealing with. They all have in common the fact of deriving from experiences that have a national or ethnical resonance and that can be subject to the close scrutiny of a collective reading and reception.

The ethnographic fiction or the fiction with an ethnographic background puts the writer in an ambiguous and in some way arguable position: somewhere between experience and knowledge it raises the questions of authorship, autography and appropriation. One could argue that this is maybe the permanent location of the writer, his role being the one of telling borrowed stories, and therefore making other peoples’ narratives his own transitory story or history. In fact, either we start with Saramago’s The Stone Raft or with Mia Couto’s mozambican Terra Sonâmbula, we will end up learning about national identity, mythical loss, symbolic reconstitution and reflexive story-telling.

An experienced anthropologist and a director, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, from Angola, will avoid the permanent signature on his narrative Vou lá Visitar Pastores by means of a descriptive voicing of the Other. He will still propose a rhetoric frame that has its roots in a semiotics of cultural practices embedded in multiple histories: Kuvale, colonial, post-colonial, Angolan.

Though centered in the above referred works, this course will also explore the possibilities of a comparative approach with a novel by Brazilian author Ariano Suassuna, Romance da Pedra do Reino, since it deals with the many values and forms of collective memorialism rooted in Pernambuco.


Course requirements: two essays (6-10 pp.) and 1 class presentation.



Spring 2008 Graduate Courses

 COURSE CCN
 TITLE
 TIMES
 INSTRUCTOR
200B
 86292  Proseminar
 Th 3-6 Masiello/Navarrete 
201
 86295  Literary Linguistics
 Tu 3-6
 Azevedo
224
 86307  Theater & the Baroque
 Tu 3-6
 Bergmann
280.1  86316
 Ficciones Culturales
 Th 4-7 Ramos
280.2
 86319  Voices of the Dead and the Other
 M 3-6  Tarica
280.3
 86322  Modernities W 3-6 Brizuela
285.1
 86325  Novel Histories
 M 3-6
 Iarocci
285.2
 86328  Theory & Practice of Medieval & Early Modern Studies W 3-6
 Rodriguez-Velasco
Port C275.1
 86654 

Slave Traffic & Colonial History in Literature (CROSSLISTEDW/AFR.AM.C275) 

 Th 4-7
 Martinho
Port 275.2 86657  Narrative & Violence in Latin America (CO-TAUGHT WITH ANTHRO 250X) Tu 11-2 Slater/Briggs
Port 275.3 86658
 Modernities W 3-6  Brizuela

Spanish 200B:Research Seminar I (4 units)
Profs. Francine Masiello & Ignacio Navarrete.

This research seminar will introduce entering students to graduate study in the department, but more advanced graduate students are invited to join the course. The research seminar has several objectives, practical and theoretical. First, it is designed to introduce students to data bases, research instruments, journals, and pertinent bibliographies in the student’s main field of interest. Second, the seminar is designed to give graduate students exposure to different genres of scholarly writing: précis, book review, the basis of the scholarly article.Crossing the grain of these practical questions, students will be introduced to the four categories of analysis that will be the basis of their future field statements: time, space, voice, and method. The objective is for students early on in their studies to understand the some of the possibilities of these key concepts and how they can serve as guides for their studies and their research. In this course, we will organize our inquiries around a problem in literary evolution: the transition from baroque to neobaroque poetics. Beginning with a study of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, the poetry of Quevedo, and Sor Juana, we will set an inquiry about the articulation of voice within spatial and temporal fields. We will also make a claim that certain aspects of the baroque esthetic reappears in the late 19th both in Spain and Latin America through the fiction of Pérez Galdós and the poetry of Rubén Darío. Finally, we will actualize contemporary neobaroque tendencies through the selected writings of Latin American authors Severo Sarduy,  Néstor Perlongher,  Manuel Puig, and Pedro Lemebel.  Through these different examples, we will track the articulation of voice as both a vehicle and disturbance of meaning; we will look at space as an interior construction projected on various external forms from the enclosed room or cell to the broad expanse of the city; we will look for the ways in which the normative temporal continuum is challenged through techniques of time compression or expansion and through the articulation of multiple or overlapping time frames; finally, we will look at the ways in which these techniques are taken in through the time and space of reading and the voice that our reading engenders.

Required Book List:

Spanish 201: Literary Linguistics (4 units)
Prof. Milton Azevedo

This course explores applications of linguistic theory to literary texts as a foundation for analyzing elements of fiction prose, such as narrative techniques, viewpoint, dialogue and discourse, direct and indirect speech, and representations of orality. Previous coursework in linguistics is helpful but not essential, as necessary information on linguistics will be introduced as required. Course fulfills either the graduate requirement of one course in historical or descriptive Hispanic Linguistics or the graduate requirement of one course in literary or linguistic theory.


Spanish 224: Theater & the Baroque (4 units)
Prof. 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 theater and poetry of Spain and Spanish America in the context of theorization of visual culture, and of the social and aesthetic centrality of excess, transgression and the monstrous in both genres. The readings in this seminar center on seventeenth-century baroque theater (Calderón and Tirso de Molina) and poetry (Gongora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana). Requirements: Weekly presentations on readings (poetry and critical approaches); mid-semester outline and final project.


Spanish 280.1: Ficciones culturales. (4 units)
Prof. Julio Ramos

A partir de la lectura de textos literarios, ensayísticos y fílmicos, este seminario explorará una serie de intervenciones de la literatura latinoamericana en varios debates claves sobre la reinvención de la cultura local ante el impacto de la globalización, el “cosmopolitismo” y la cultura mediática.

Lecturas:

Además leeremos una selección de trabajos críticos de J.M. Barbero, A. Quijano, B. Sousa-Santos, W, Mignolo, Coco Fusco y otros.


Spanish 280.2: Voices of the Dead and the Other (4 units)
Prof. Estelle Tarica

This course will examine Latin American authors and thinkers who have taken on the task of transmitting the voices of the dead and the other. We will look at lyric and testimonial forms by authors in the aesthetic and political avant-gardes, such as Vallejo (from the post-humous poetry), Neruda (Canto General), J.M. Arguedas (Katatay), and Menchú (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú…), as well as contemporary work that addresses these concerns in the neo-liberal age, such as Watanabe (Antígona), among others. What is the nature of the authority granted to these writers and to those to whom they apparently give voice? How has it changed over the course of the past century, across oligarchical, populist and neo-liberal political regimes? What languages and literary forms does it speak in and through – messianic, militant, lyric, elegaic, ethnographic? We will consider some of the critical debates surrounding the authenticity of testimonial narrative, as well as more recent debates about the role of testimony in national projects of reconciliation in the wake of civil war (truth commissions). We will also study philosophical reflections on the ethical dimensions of our relationship to these voices, and on the combined necessity and impossibility of properly transmitting them. If the voices of the dead and the other have a hold on us, then what kind of responsibility do they impose and how best do we discharge it? We will look at work written in the shadow of the Holocaust by European thinkers (Levinas, Levi), and explore the connection, or lack thereof, between this intellectual tradition and Latin American thought, especially in Liberation Theology and Philosophy (Meyer, Dussel).

Required Books (Please purchase on-line; all but two are available at www.latambooks.com ; be sure to use the “back-to-school” system at latambooks.com in order to receive a discount):

A Course Reader will also be required.


Spanish 280.3: Modernities (4 units)
Prof. Natalia Brizuela

What does it mean to be modern?  Is there only one way of being modern?  What are the configurations through which modernity is articulated, praised, rejected, or, said otherwise, made visible?  How do writers and intellectuals deal with tradition—and how do they define tradition— when faced with being and/or inhabiting a modern sensibility and modern times?  What are the relationships between national culture and literature vis-à-vis differing modernities?  This course will address some of the literary issues in a comparative seminar on Argentine and Brazilian modernity through a close reading of Faustino Domingo Sarmiento, Euclides da Cunha, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario de Andrade. Using these four writers as our reading machines, we will study the problematic, uneven, partial, peripheral, utopian, and disenchanted modernity that characterized Argentina and Brazil from the nineteenth century to the beginnings of the twentieth century.  Paying attention to the tensions between tradition and literary autonomy, between city and countryside, between civilization and barbarism, we will engage our four writers with some of the classic theoretical discussions on modernity.


Spanish 285.1: Novel Histories (4 units)
Prof. Michael Iarocci

Novel Histories.  This course will focus on the intersections of history and fiction as a theoretical problem within a series of representative 18th-,19th- and 20th-century Spanish novels whose subject matter is largely historical.  What happens to the respective status of “history” and “fiction” when the two meet in the space of the historical novel?  How is the idea of “history” transformed when it appears in fictional form? Conversely, what happens to the idea of “fiction” when it has a basic commitment to historical representation?  How can the claim of history (“this happened”) and the claim of fiction (“this didn’t, but pretend it did”) coexist within one discourse? The “linguistic turn” in critical theory and philosophy during the late 20th-century is credited with blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, and the “objectivity” of history as a discipline has been challenged on numerous grounds. Nevertheless history (and increasingly its sibling, memory) continue to be central organizing principles of contemporary cultural studies. This course is among other things an opportunity to reflect on the seemingly perennial debates regarding history, fiction and their (un)happy marriage.

Photocopies of additional materials  as needed.

*Orders for all books have gone to the ASUC Bookstore; students are encouraged, however, to find/purchase these materials on their own (through the web or elsewhere).  The cost may be lower, and the bookstore is not always reliable.  Galdós’s Episodios nacionales are available in full-text web versions.


Spanish 285.2: Theory & Practice of Medieval & Early Modern Studies (4 units)
Prof. Jesús Rodriguez-Velasco

This is a theoretical and methodological class about the specificities of studying medieval and early modern cultures, with particular attention to written cultures -bearing in mind that many medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books are extremely complex cultural artifacts with much more than text. We will be working with problems related to the material cultures (codicology, bibliology, palaeography, textual editing), bibliographies, how to prepare a research project on medieval and early modern studies, research methods, etc. The professor will prepare an electronic reader suitable for  this class. We will also be working with original materials and facsimilars.


Port. 275.1: Slave Traffic and Colonial History in Literature (4 Units)
Prof. Ana Maria Martinho 

Between the 16th and the 19th century over 12 million Africans were removed from their homelands and taken to different destinations in the New World. This reality, preceded by the establishment of Portuguese feitorias in North Africa as early as the 1400s, and the consequent exploitation of resources, meant drastic and disruptive changes in the global economic and cultural order.

Along with this situation another major issue should be pointed out: the ways in which slave trade and the further development of the new colonial systems originated Modern politics and societies in the Atlantic world.
Notions like State, Nation, Identity Gender and Race were widely perceived and discussed namely during the 18th and 19th centuries and many texts show us how this reality came to evolve to different models of interpretation.

Postcolonial societies have come to acknowledge the impact of the former imperial projects and to review the legacy of such past through new episte-mo-lo-gical and hermeneutical approaches. In doing so, they may be asserting the historical urgency of a critique that re-centers this debate somewhere between the postcolonial approach and globalization studies.

The relevance of this experience and discussion has been extensively dealt with in literature. In fact, written accounts in different genres can lead us through multiple narratives about the cultural responses to such events.

In this course we will study the above referred historic and social consequences as they were portrayed in poetry, fiction, autobiography and ethnography by writers on both sides of the Atlantic and namely in former Portuguese colonies.

Syllabus

1. European Imperialism, Portugal and the exploration of African Coast
1.1. The Atlantic Islands, Prince Henry and the Papal Bulls
Readings: Chronicles and Cartographic narratives

2. African kingdoms, conversions and territorial disruption
2.1.    Trading and enslavement
Readings: Travel Narratives and Exploratory Journals

3. The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Brazilian Sugar
3.1.   Coastal merchant cultures and geo-strategic wars
Readings: Letters, shipwreck descriptions and official reports

4. Abolitionism and colonial occupation in Africa in the 19th century
4.1. Discourses on slave trade: from legitimacy to anti-slavery manifestos
4.2. The justification of African Expansionism
Readings: Manifestos, autobiographies and ethnographic narratives

5. Ideology and literature in the Portuguese colonies
5.1.   Narrating the exotic, building the colonial text
5.2.   Dissonant voices and nationalism(s)
Readings: Poetry, historic narratives, allegorical novels

6. The Atlantic, Memory and Postcolonial Condition
6.1. Reading the past, writing the present?
Readings: African literature today – a brief survey of Cabo Verdean, Angolan and Mozambican writing

Course requirements: a final paper, an in-progress report during the semester and 1 class presentation.
All the texts in Portuguese will also be available in English or Spanish translation so that students from different academic backgrounds can join the class. Two Readers will be made available to the students.


Portuguese 275.2: Narrative & Violence in Latin America (4 units)
Co-taught by Profs. Candace Slater (Spanish & Portuguese) & Charles Briggs (Folklore/Anthropology)

What is the relationship between narratives written word and acts of physical violence?  Is there a discernible difference between violence as it is described in fictional and ostensibly non-fictional accounts?  If so, how can this difference or differences be measured?  How and why do they change over time?  Do particular sorts of acts of violence seem to require particular sorts of narratives?  Do narratives of violence automatically produce social effects, such as healing or more violence?  How do scholars, activities, “victims”, and “perpetrators” get drawn into the politics of narratives and violence when they write about these issues?  How are such issues translated into works that go under the rubric of “literature”?

This course, taught by Prof. Candace Slater and Prof. Charles Briggs looks at a number of ways that scholars have answered these questions.  Its examples come primarily from Latin America, where both professors work.  Candace Slater is writing a book on wonder and violence in a rapidly changing Northeast Brazil; Charles Briggs’ writing project focuses on narratives about infanticide and other types of violence in Vene has written about various narratives regarding violence in Venezuela, as they are told in police stations, courtrooms, in the mass media, and in popular narratives that circulate in complicated ways between wealthy and poor neighborhoods.

Those students who register for the course as Portuguese 275 will be expected to do their final paper on a theme that draws on one or more literary works in Spanish or Portuguese.