Fall 2003

GRADUATE COURSES IN HISPANIC STUDIES
FALL 2003

(Course information subject to change)
(Cross-reference with Department Roster)

Spanish 680
History of Spanish and Latin American Film
Prof. Solomon
T 2:00-5:30

This course offers a historical overview of Spanish cinema from the early silent films of Ricard de Baños and Fructuos Gelabert to the celebrated works of recent filmmakers such as Julio Medem and Pedro Almodóvar. The seminar includes screenings of 15 films, among them Locura de amor (Juan de Orduña), El cochecito (Marco Ferreri), Diferente (Luis María Delagado), Bienvenido Mister Marshall (Berlanga), La Residencia (Narciso Ibáñez), La muerte de un ciclista (J. Bardem), La ley del deseo (Pedro Almodóvar), Vacas (Julio Medem), and Día de la bestia (Alex de la Iglesia).

Spanish 689
The Spanish Labyrinth: National Memory and the Essay in Contemporary Spain
Prof. Nadal
R 1:00-4:00

Taking our cue from Rubert de Ventós' El laberinto de la hispanidad, we will study the role essays have played in both articulating and dismantling the traumatized national identities of contemporary Spain. After a bout of melancholy and mourning, Montaigne had inaugurated the essay as a genre in an attempt to work through (painful) emotions with a dose of rational thought. The fairly abstract ways in which contemporary Spanish essayists have chosen to delve into a repressed national memory echoes the genre's beginnings. Like Montaigne's "I," the nation scrutinized in the essay soon proves to be chimerical, a changing and untraceable reality or a repressed monster, a short-lived opinion or a cruel and abstract law. In short: where the self was, there shall the nation be. Readings will include Eugeni d'Ors, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Zambrano, Sánchez Ferlosio, de Ventós, García Calvo, and Azúa among others.

Spanish 690
Subjectivity and Ethics in Modern Latin American Narrative
Prof. Laddaga
M 1:00-4:00

What is a subject? How does a subject relate to his/her world or to other subjects, be they human or non human? What form of relating could be considered just? We will read some of the most important Latin American narratives of the twentieth century with these questions in mind. Readings will include the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, Paradiso by José Lezama Lima, Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, and El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas by Reinaldo Arenas.

Spanish 692
From Lack to Excess:  The Invention of Colonial Discourse in America
Prof. Martínez San Miguel
W 1:00-4:00

This course will study a selection of writings to trace the emergence and development of an "American" discourse during the colonial period.  We will explore the invention of a new language to describe the New World, the constitution of an "indigenous" and/or "mestizo" identity and the emergence of colonial and Creole intellectuals.  This seminar proposes a chronological reading of texts as a discursive voyage from lack to excess in the constitution of ways of narrating and representing the colonial experience.  We will conclude with a discussion of the crisis of Colonial studies during the 1980s, and with an assessment of the field's status within contemporary Latin American studies.