GRADUATE COURSES IN SPANISH

SPRING 2007

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

Spanish 684
La Novela Realista
Prof. López
W 4-6

Spanish 687
Iberian Cinema
Prof. Solomon
R 4:30-7:30

This seminar combines an overview and critical examination of Spanish cinema with an introduction to film theory.  Beginning with early silent film innovators such as Segundo de Chomón and Luis Buñuel, the seminar units will cover Francoist film, Spanish neo-realism, cinema during the Spanish Transition and La movida, recent Spanish cinema since 1990, and the advent of short digital filmmaking.  In conjunction with the works of filmmakers such as  Almodóvar, Medem, Saura, Erice, Bardem, Berlanga, Villaronga, Patino, de la Iglesia, Franco, and León de Aranea, we will examine a variety of film theory including the ideas developed by Eisenstein, Bazin, Metz, Kacauer, Deleuze, Carroll, Mulvey, Gunning, Barthes, Williams, Stam, and Clover. The seminar is taught in English but many of the required feature-length films are not available with English subtitles.

Spanish 689
Space and the Political Imagination
Prof. Nadal-Melsió
T 3-6

In this seminar we will explore the ways in which space has shaped the political imagination and, in turn, how the political has informed spatial experience. From Plato’s Republic to Situationist practices, space has often emerged as a corrective to a purely abstract understanding of power and the political. It has since taken a variety of roles, from an ally to state control to a resilient remnant of historical memory to the experiential site of the urban everyday. Topics for discussion will include: the city, the spatial politics of everyday life, power, utopianism, the spectacle, sovereignty,  governmentality, the monument and memory, urban insurrection as an event, and globalization. The first two thirds of the seminar will be devoted to careful critical readings of key theorists of space—Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, Kristin Ross, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson.  Once the conceptual framework of the discussion has been established, each student will introduce materials, taken from her own field of expertise, that explore spatial questions to the class. Requirements: informed class discussion, short weekly reaction papers, a class presentation, project proposal, and a final paper or exam.

Romance Languages 690
Foreign Language Teaching Methodologies
Prof. McMahon
W 2-4

Romance Languages 690 is a course required of all Teaching Assistants in
Spanish, French, and Italian in the second semester of their first year of teaching. It is designed to provide instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively and builds on the practicum meetings held during the first semester. The course will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition. Students who have already had a similar course at another institution may be exempted upon consultation with the instructor.

Spanish 692
Problemáticas Coloniales
Prof. Martínez-San Miguel
M 2-5

This course analyzes the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with contemporary studies on minority discourse, and colonial and postcolonial theory. Instead of focusing exclusively on a historical context to explain the thematic representation of the unequal relationships of power in the colonial period, or reading these texts as an extension of the ambiguous identity characteristic of a colonial subjectivity—as in the foundational works of Memmi, Fanon and Nandy, for example—we will study how this “colonial” condition is incorporated into the verbal strategies of the chronicles and written texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Latin America. The course includes texts by Cristóbal Colón, Fray Ramón Pané, Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Titu Cusi, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Secondary readings will include selections from: Rolena Adorno, Edmundo O’Gorman, Martin Lienhard, José Rabasa, Walter Mignolo, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Kathleen Ross, Margarita Zamora, Josefina Ludmer, José Antonio Mazzotti, Aníbal Quijano, Guilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Coronil, Jorge Klor de Alva, Albert Memmi, and Ashis Nandy, among others.

Spanish 697
After Postmodernism
Prof. Laddaga
W 5-8

Aesthetics and politics in recent literature and art In the last quarter of a century a deep and widespread change in artistic and literary practice has been taking place. This process of change has accompanied the vast technological, social and political transformations that we usually describe with the term "globalization." It is a process that it is not particularly easy to identify, describe and analyze from the perspective of our usual disciplinary framework, in as much as a lot of the most interesting productions of recent years take the form of trandisciplinary projects, artists´and writers´initiatives that attempt to connect and mediate not only different media, but also the field of art and the fields of political activism, scientific practice or economic production. An increasing number of artists and writers have been, in the course of the last decades, focusing their efforts not so much in producing art works than in setting up platforms for large numbers of individuals to engage in the collaborative production of texts, exhibitions or films, and, at the same time, participate in processes of social and political organization. We will propose a theoretical framework to analyze these productions, and use the conceptual and methodological tools acquired in reading a series of recent art works, narratives, films and collaborative trandisciplinary projects.