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The Graduate Program: Course Archive

Spanish & Portuguese Graduate Courses 2009 - 2010

Fall 2009 | Spring 2010


Fall 2009

CCN Course Number   Time   Location Course Title Professor
86306 200A F 1-3 5125 Dwinelle Spanish Proseminar Brizuela, N.
86307 200C F 2-5 5125 Dwinelle Research Seminar II Tarica, E.
86310 C202 F 2-5 5210 Dwinelle Linguistic History of the Romance Languages
NOTE: Cross-listed with French C202 Section 1 and Italian Studies C201 Section 1		 McLaughlin, M
86313 229 Th 3-6 250 Dwinelle Modern Spanish Poetry (After Romanticism)
NOTE: "Modern Spanish Poetry & Poetics"		 Dougherty, D.
86316 242 M 3-6 204 Wheeler Literary Theory & Criticism Bergmann, E.
86319 280 001 Th 3-6 129 Barrows Seminar in Spanish American Literature
NOTE: "The Seductions of Modernity: Borges and Argentine Literature"		 Brizuela, N.
86322 280 002 W 3-6 204 Wheeler Seminar in Spanish American Literature
NOTE: "Barroco Colonial"		 del Valle, I
86324 280 003 Tu 3-6 180 Barrows Seminar in Spanish American Literature
NOTE: "Testimonial Subjects"		 Tarica, E.
86325 285 001 Tu 3-6 129 Barrows Seminar in Spanish Literature
NOTE: "Spatial Approaches to Narrative"		 Navarrete, I.
86451 301 M 12-1
W 12-2		 215 Dwinelle Teaching Spanish in College Villalba, C.
86454 302 F 4-6 251 Dwinelle Teaching Practicum Villalba, C.
86657 PORT 275 W 3-6 201 Giannini Critical & Stylistic Studies of a Single Author Slater, C.

Spanish 229 (CCN 86313):  Modern Spanish Poetry & Poetics  (4 units)
Professor Dru Dougherty

The seminar will consist of three modules. 1) The symbolist paradigm as set by Rubén Darío and its subsequent adaptation by Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. 2) The  dismantling of symbolism by the revolución ultraísta, which will open a discussion of avant-garde poetics (Borges, Guillermo de Torre, Gerardo Diego). 3) Readings of poets from the Generation of 1927: Alberti, García Lorca, Champourcin, Guillén and Cernuda. Topics of study will be: the symbolist “ensueño,” “civil” lyric, free verse, visual poetry, neo-traditionalism, the divided and/or discontinuous poetic subject, and surrealism. Critics we will read include Jonathan Culler, Paul Olson, Dominique Combe, Willard Bohn, Richard Murphy, Robert Kaufman and James Longenbach.

Requirements: either 1) a 5 to 7-page paper on each of the modules, or 2) a 15-20 page paper on a single topic. In addition, students will write a report for the class on one book listed in the bibliography and make a final oral presentation of an actual or possible research project.


Spanish 280.1 (CCN 86319): The Seductions of Modernity: Borges and Argentine Literature (4 units)
Prof. Natalia Brizuela

How do writers and intellectuals deal with tradition when faced with modernity? How do they define national culture and literature? This course will address the literary issues of Argentine modernity through Borges. Using Borges as a reading machine, it is structured as both a course on the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and as a study on the problematic, uneven, utopian, peripheral and partial modernity that characterized Argentina—and most of Latin America—in the first half of the twentieth century. We will focus on the tensions between tradition and literary autonomy, between city and countryside, between civilization and barbarism. Alongside Borges’ poetry and short stories, the course will approach such diverse authors and genres from Argentine literature and culture of the twenties and thirties as Roberto Arlt’s mad scientists and utopian anarchists, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s x-ray of the pampas and his fascination and fear of Goliath’s head—his name for the modern city, Ricardo Güiraldes’ revisiting of the gaucho genre in his 1926 bildungsroman, and Adolfo Bioy Casares’ fantastic and phantasmatical invention.


Spanish 280 003: Barroco Colonial (CCN 86322)(4 units)
Prof. Ivonne Del Valle

In this seminar we will explore the aesthetic and socio-political meanings associated with the Baroque. Even though many studies position the beginning of the Baroque in European countries that later exported its aesthetic forms to the Indies, in this course we will contemplate the possibility of understanding the paradigm in an inverse way in order to think about the role the colonial experience had in the development of certain aesthetic and political forms on the other side of the Atlantic. This possibility has to do not only with inverting a model to suggest the primacy of some historical actors over others, but above all with the need to think about the origins of our modernity. Our course will be centered on Baroque texts from New Spain but will also include some writings produced in Spain. We will read theoretical works that explore the political, religious, and philosophical thought of the time (Loyola, Las Casas, Hobbes, Descartes) together with contemporary criticism and theory that contribute to an understanding of the Baroque (Derrida, Zizek, Rama).


Spanish 280.3: (CCN 86324): Testimonial Subjects (4 units)
Prof. Estelle Tarica

This course will explore the testimonial and autobiographical vein running through contemporary Latin American fiction and examine the disciplinary questions that its presence there provokes. We will be concerned with testimony as a response to atrocious violence and censorship and thus a rebellious act with political and moral aims. Yet, as with autobiography, testimony's linguistic nature, first-person enunciation, and reliance on memory complicate its relationship to these urgent realities and raise questions about the truth that it imparts and the ethical demands that it fulfills. These questions become more acute the further we travel from the juridical realm that lends testimony its greatest efficacy and the closer we get to literature and aesthetics. Can testimony be literary? Can fiction be testimony? Our focus in this course will be on recent Spanish American texts where testimony, autobiography and fiction mesh to provide an extended meditation on these dilemmas. We will read works from the past forty years by José María Arguedas, Tununa Mercado, Juan José Saer, and José Emilio Pacheco, among others, and consider them alongside some famous examples of the testimonio genre.

Required Books (purchase online at the websites indicated):


Spanish 285.1: (CCN 86325): Spatial Approaches to Narrative (4 units)
Prof. Ignacio Navarrete

This course will concentrate on a number of approaches to narrative that have traditionally been analyzed in terms of spatial metaphors. These include frame-and-chain narratives (enmarcados y ensartados), interlacing, the use of real and imaginary geographies, and narrative fragmentation. Theoretical readings will include selections from Viktor Shklovsky, Joseph Frank, Robert Durling, Alban Forcione, and W.J.T. Mitchell. Among the narratives we will study (some of these in sizable excerpts): Calila y Dimna, Amadís de Gaula, Persiles y Sigismunda, Fortunata y Jacinta, and La colmena.


Portuguese 275: (CCN 86657): Brazil: The Roots of Violence: Contemporary Marginal Literature and its Varied Histories (basic knowledge of Portuguese required)
Prof. Candace Slater

Violence-both its shifting definitions over time and its central role within the present-is the focus of this course. We will begin with a taste of very contemporary representations of violence-novels, rap lyrics, films, various sorts of documetaries-before bouncing back into the past, then newly forward into the 21st century. The course uses interdisciplinary sources and welcomes students from other areas on campus (please have a reading knowledge of Portuguese) but it affords an excellent overview of some of Brazil's most celebrated authors. These include Euclides da Cunha, Gracilian Ramos, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Osman Lins, João Gilberto Noll, and Milton Hatoum. We will examine various theories of violence and the relation between narrative and violent acts. Some of these readings are by Brazilian authors; the majority of works are classics by writers such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and Todorov.

Partial Reading List



Spring 2010



CCN Course Number   Time   Location Course Title Professor
86313 P 200B 001 LEC Th 3-6P 2525 TOLMAN Research Seminar I Dougherty, D.
86316 P 209 001 SEM Tu 3-6P 5303 Dwinelle Linguistic and Cultural Issues of Literary Translation Azevedo, M.
86322 P 224 001 LEC Tu 3-6P 202 WHEELER Major Dramatists of the Golden Age Bergmann, E. L.
86328 P 280 001 SEM W 3-6P 202 WHEELER Ilustración y periferias Del Valle, I.
86331 P280 002 SEM M 3-6P 204 Dwinelle Race and Nation in Spanish America Tarica, E.
86336 P 285 002 SEM W 3-6P 104 GPB Espacio y política de la representación en la novela naturalista transatlántica Iarocci, M.
86654 Port 275 T 3-6 201 Wheeler Hall "Region, Nation, Globe: The Place of Regional Literature & Culture in Modern Brazil".Slater, C.

Spanish 209 (CCN 86316):
Prof. Milton Azevedo

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 syntactic 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 the relevance for translation of issues such as transposition, compensation, lexical borrowing, cognition, and dialogue structure.


Spanish 280.1 (CCN 86328): Ilustración y periferias
Prof. Ivonne del Valle

Enlightenment thinkers strove to construct disciplines and knowledges of universal reach, a need reflected in their drive to integrate areas that, for different reasons, had until then been little explored or were still outside of European imperial powers’ full dominion. In this course we will consider how some peripheral areas of America became a challenge for the implementation of universal paradigms. We will read canonical Enlightenment texts together with lesser known writings that highlight the fractured dialogue between Europe and the peripheries.

Spanish 280.2 (CCN 86331): Race and Nation in Spanish America
Prof. Estelle Tarica

This course offers a survey of key moments in the history of racial thought in 19th and 20th-century Spanish America. The starting premise is that national identities have been thoroughly racialized, yet the meanings of race shift across time as modern political ideologies, interacting with colonial structures and ideas, dominate debates about national identity, from Romanticism to Liberalism, positivism to national-populism. The course will be particularly concerned with understanding how these ideologies are forged locally among diverse social actors who appropriate and reformulate racial concepts towards their own ends. The course will start with current scholarly approaches to basic concepts and definitions of race, then proceed to chart a number of significant discursive shifts from Independence to the mid-twentieth century, drawing from historiography and the essayistic tradition. The final section of the course will examine avant-garde movements in three national case studies: Peruvian indigenismo, Mexican revolutionary nationalism, and Cuban negrismo. Required books TBA.



Port 275: "Region, Nation, Globe: The Place of Regional Literature & Culture in Modern Brazil". T3-6.
Prof. Candace Slater.

(Working knowledge of Portuguese required.)

At first glance, the term “region” seems quaint, even downright outmoded. However, one could argue that the regional has always been a foil to the national in Brazil and that it serves as a kind of antidote to globalization today. Even the favela—so fundamental to contemporary images of Brazil—can be seen from some perspectives as a kind of deterroritorialized region. We will look at theories of the regional, the local, and the global and discuss the ways in which these play off against 21st-century texts. The writers on whom we will focus include Milton Hatoum, Ronaldo Correia de Brito, and Bernardo Carvalho—all authors of texts that make us question what a region is today. This year’s Distinguished Brazilian Writer in Residence, Maria Rita Kehl—a psychoanalyst known for her work on 21st-century traumas—will be a visitor to the seminar.