Spring 2001

GRADUATE COURSES IN SPANISH
SPRING 2001

Spanish 530  Bodies of Evidence: The Case of Medieval Spain
M. Brownlee
R 2-4

Bodies of evidence, bodies of knowledge, the body politic, bodies--inviolate to mutilated, saintly to criminal-are figured in Medieval Spanish literature in ways that reveal not only cultural paradigms, myths and obsessions, but also some widely divergent realities. Notions of the body and its cultural inscription involve the history of marginal social groups, the history of the senses, of sexuality and of gender  The relationships between bodily and cognitive systems will form the basis for our analyses of: The Cantar de mio Cid, Bereceo's Milagros, the Libro de Alexandre, the Caballero Zifar and the Conde Lucanor.

Spanish 687  The Films of Luis Buñuel
López
R 4-6

In this course we will study the cinematic production of Luis Buñuel by concentrating on nine of his films.  An introduction to the Spanish avant-garde of the 1920s followed by a detailed description of Surrealism in Spain in the 1930s through the work of Buñuel and of Salvador Dalí will introduce us to the study of the filmmaker's first three titles, An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age, and Land Without Bread.  While Surrealism's the starting point of Bunuel's career, this movement is not the only valid point of reference for his entire production.  The films he completed after World War II partake of the Surrealist imagination but they add a world of mental processes formed by memories, dreams, and states of the imagination that draw from familiar and unfamiliar experiences (religion and sin; sex, biology and art; cruelty, perversion and mysticism).  Using recent developments on film theory we will attempt an explanation of this subsequent work, studying films completed during his exile in Mexico (The Forgotten, The Exterminating Angel, Nazarin) as well as those completed after his return to continental cinema, both in Spain (Viridiana, Tristana) and in France (That Obscure Object of Desire).

Students will be assigned an oral report and they will complete a research paper concentrating on one of the movies by Bunuel that we will not cover in class.  Research paper, oral report and class participation will decide final grade.  Lectures and class discussions will be conducted in Spanish.

Spanish 690  Latin American Narrative and Art in Times of Globalization
Laddaga
T 1-3

The course will address a series of Latin American narratives and works of art of the last two decades.  Some of the authors to be studied are the Argentineans Cesar Aira, Marcelo Cohen and Sergio Chejfec, the Chileans Diamela Eltit and Roberto Bolano, the Brazilian Joao Gilberto Noll (whom we will read in English), and the Mexicans Francisco Hinojosa and Daniel Sada.  Among the artists whose work we will analyze are Ernesto Netro, Gabriel Orozco, Guillermo Kuitca, Doris Salcedo, Francis Allys and Tunga.  We will pay special attention to the way these artists and writers construct figures of the ethical act in the context of a historical universe such as the one that has been deploying itself in the region since the beginning of the '80s, and to the way they connect these figures with issues of literary and artistic form.

Spanish 692  From Lack to Excess:  The Invention of Colonial Discourse in America
Martínez San Miguel
M 1-3

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.

Spanish 694  Modern Spanish American Fiction
Alonso

W 1-4

This seminar will address the specificity and uniqueness of Spanish America's cultural production, that is, those elements that make the Spanish American case differ from the paradigmatic postcolonial situation, and which make recent developments in postcolonial studies not fully applicable to it.  We will explore these issues in the context of the literary production of the twentieth century in Spanish America from roughly the twenties to the present, that is, the epoch encompassing the larger metropolitan cultural phenomena of Modernism and Postmodernism.

Among the texts read will be:  Gallegos, Doña Bárbara; Guillén, Motivos de son, Sóngoro Cosongo; Rulfo, Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas; Carpentier, El reino de este mundo; Cortázar, Rayuela; Borges, Ficciones, El aleph; Vargas Llosa, La Casa Verde, El hablador; Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, La campaña; García Márquez, Cien años de soledad, Crónica de una muerte anunciada; Puig, El beso de la mujer araña.  There will also be a set of photocopied critical readings that will supplement the course's primary reading list.