In this seminar, we will study the centuries long “conversations” between North American and Spanish American writers. Principally through short stories and some novels, we will examine their mutual fascination. Our reading list will include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Horacio Quiroga, John Reed, Mariano Azuela, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood, Manuel Puig, Silvia Iparraguirre, E. L. Doctorow, and Cormac McCarthy. The class will be conducted in English, and students may read Spanish American works in English translation or Spanish according to their ability or desire.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3010 (students who have taken SPAN 4010 may not take SPAN 3020)

Attention will center on in-depth examination of the nuances of vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, grammar and style. Students will write on a broad range of topics in a variety of formats for a variety of purposes. Their work will serve as a point of departure for analysis of written language.

This is an advanced Spanish course that focuses on the uses of Spanish business terminology. It is designed to teach the fundamentals of practical commercial Spanish correspondence, advertising, foreign trade, insurance, transportation, and banking. Other important aspects of the course will be studying Hispanic countries’ commercial behaviors, and their present economical reality. This course is recommended only for students with a solid background in Spanish. (One or two 300-level Spanish courses required.)

This class has been cancelled.

This course offers an introduction to the formal study of the Spanish language. Topics include: articulatory phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3020.

SPAN 3010, Grammar Review, must be completed before enrolling in SPAN 3300 or an AP Spanish Language score of 5
NB: Students with an AP Spanish Literature score of 4 or 5 may not take this course for credit.

PLEASE NOTE: SPANISH 3300, LITERARY ANALYSIS, IS A PREREQUISITE FOR ALL LITERATURE SURVEYS (3400, 3410, 3420, 3430) AND ALL LITERATURE AND CULTURE CLASSES. THIS IS A DEPARTMENT REQUIREMENT.

Drawing upon readings from different periods of both Spanish and Latin American literature, this course introduces the student to the fundamentals of analyzing narrative, lyric poetry, and drama. Through daily readings and discussions, as well as several exams and papers, the student will develop a critical vocabulary that will allow him or her to make convincing oral and written arguments about the relationship between what a literary text says and how it says it. All work will be conducted in Spanish. This course is a pre-requisite for all further work in literature and culture & civilization in the Spanish program. It is also a required course for Spanish majors.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3300

El curso consiste en un panorama introductorio a la literatura castellana de la Edad Media, el renacimiento, y el barroco, hasta 1680 (la fecha de la muerte de Calderón). Las obras se estudiarán en su contexto histórico-cultural. Además de intentar estimular un aprecio por algunas obras maestras de estos períodos, se intentará dar a conocer el marco histórico-intelectual de varios aspectos de la cultura peninsular, tanto como enseñar algunas estrategias para la lectura atenta de los textos antiguos.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3300

A survey of major Spanish texts and authors from the Enlightenment to the contemporary period. We will study literary and cultural movements such as neoclassicism, romanticism, positivism, realism, symbolism, “modernismo”, existentialism, etc. We will also study a range of works that exemplify all the major literary genres: lyric poetry, drama, novel, short story, and essay. Seven short papers spaced throughout the semester. All readings and all discussion in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3300

This is a survey course of Latin American Literature to introduce students to the major authors, and literary movements of Latin America from its Discovery in 1492 up to 1900. Students will get a comprehensive understanding of Hispanic America in that period, reading and discussing a selections of works from accounts of the conquest, colonial period and 19th century, analyzing its historical and literary importance. Some authors include: Cristóbal Colón, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Núnez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José María de Heredia, Esteban Echeverría, Ricardo Palma, José Martí y Rubén Dario.

Prerequisite: SPAN 3300

This course is a survey of Spanish American literature. The objective of the course is to introduce students to major authors, works, and literary movements of Spanish America from 1900 to the present. Students will read poetry and short prose selections from an anthology (Voces de Hispanoamérica) as well as a play (Rodolfo Usigli’s El gesticulador). Written work will consist of reaction papers (250 words each), a midterm exam; and a two part exam: the first part will be taken in class and will deal will require recall of information, the second part will be an open-book, open-notebook, take-home essay exam covering all the reading of the course. All the writing in the course is in Spanish and you are graded equally for grammar and concepts.

Mexican Literature

Poets Writing Novels, Poligraphic Writing in Contemporary Mexican Literature.

The landscape of Mexican literature is experiencing a rapid and profound transformation. One of the most important and seldom studied phenomenon of the new tendencies is the “crossing over” of poets and narrators to the “opposing camp.” Seasoned authors like Homero Aridjis and José Emilio Pacheco and younger women writers like Carmen Boullosa and Cristina Rivera Garza have made the commitment of reshaping their creative habits and skills to cross from the writing of poetry (Aridjis, Pacheco, Boullosa) to become successful novelists or crossing from prose (Del Paso and Rivera Garza) to the poem. What are the risks and efforts invested in these transformations? In what ways the practices of one discourse spur, hinder or dialectically engage the other? What can we learn as readers about literature and authorship by studying these transformations? Along with the thematic axis (historical violence, madness, desire) common to these authors, these are some of the questions to consider in this course specialized on contemporary Mexican literature.

The materials for the course will be available as a Xerox packet from Brillig Books. The course will survey examples of the Spanish American Short Story chronologically, beginning with Quiroga and Arévalo Martínez as transitional figures. It will continue with short stories by Borges and successive Boom writers inclusing García Márquez and will then discuss some later writers such as Valenzuela, Allende and Skármeta. The grade will be based on three short essays, two in Spanish and one in English.

This seminar focuses on the main varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. We will review the history of the Spanish language in what is now the United States. We will study the linguistic characteristics of the main varieties (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar), and look at some sociolinguistic topics related to English-Spanish contact situations: language policy issues, linguistic borrowing, or code-switching. We will also explore aspects related to Spanish-Spanish contact situations (i.e. how does intensive contact among varieties of Spanish affect each other?). Throughout the course, students will prepare short written and oral summaries of assigned readings, and a longer research paper. Pre-requisites: (1) SPAN 3020, (2) SPAN 3200, and (3) SPAN 3010, or any linguistics course.

This class will study the major historical, social and cultural transformations of Spain in 20th and 21st centuries: how Spain became the country that it is today, and what major contributions shape its historical identity. The first part of the course will be historical. In the 19th century Spain lived through a period of dramatic changes starting with the French invasion of the Peninsula, and the loss of the American colonies. The breaking point was the Spanish-American war and the crisis of 1898, that produced a profound crisis, and the search for solutions, liberal or radical, that eventually divided Spain into two parts, known as the “two Spains”. The consequences of this rupture were the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Special emphasis will be put on understanding Spain in all its complexity: regional diversity and nationalism. The second part of the course will be dedicated to social issues: demographic composition, social changes from the 20th century up to today, and the impact on the family, women issues, birth rate, education and sexuality. The third part will be dedicated to the study of the Spanish artistic movements and their most relevant contemporary representatives in the field of music (zarzuela, flamenco and popular music), painting (from Goya to Picasso), and architecture (Gaudí, Calatrava).

This course will explore the history of the Inquisition in Spain from its origins in 1478 to its demise in 1834. Topics will include: organization and jurisprudence; the prosecution of Jewish converts to Christianity, Protestants, and Moriscos; crypto-Judaism in Spain and the New World; censorship and its impact on science and culture; attitudes toward magic, madness, witchcraft, and religious enthusiasm; the control of sexuality; gender and Inquisitorial practice; myths about the Inquisition; its representation in art and literature. Readings (in Spanish and English) will include case histories and other primary source documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as recent books and articles on the Inquisition. The course will be conducted in Spanish. This course counts toward the Jewish Studies major, fulfills the culture and civilization requirement for the Spanish major, and fulfills the College historical studies requirement. Pre-requisite: one 4000-level Spanish course. Students registered in 4701 will be required to write a 15-page research paper using primary sources; students in 5701 will write a longer paper and have additional assignments. Graduate students, fifth-year Curry students, and Distinguished Majors in Spanish should enroll under the 5701 rubric. Please note: course requires a high level of proficiency in reading Spanish.

The course will deal with the authors and works contained in the Enlightenment and Romanticism M.A. reading list broadly in chronological order. Students are expected to provide themselves with the texts in question. The first part of the course will cover the relative failure of the Enlightenment in Spain to counteract traditionalism and deal with the question of pre-romanticism. The second part of the course will discuss interpretations of the Romantic movement and illustrative texts, emphasizing the movement as a cultural watershed and the survival of negative, subversive Romanticism. The grade will be based on a 20-24 page paper, the title to be negotiated.

This course will concentrate on the following works of Golden Age Prose: Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón by Alfonso de Valdés, El Abencerraje (anon.), Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán, El coloquio de los perros y el casamiento engañoso by Cervantes, Los engaños amorosos by María de Zayas, La Dorotea by Lope de Vega, and El discreto by Baltasar Gracián. We will approach these works from a literary-historical perspective, with a focus on the discourses of exchange. How do the authors attempt to address the question of what is owed to social inferiors and superiors, to family members and friends, to loved ones and to God? Why do worries over ingratitude, the burdens of reciprocity, and theft figure so prominently in these works? How are these concerns related to early modern religious controversies, economic change, and ideologies of gender? Theoretical readings will include Marcel Mauss’s classic essay The Gift, Natalie Davis’s The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, and selected essays Pierre Bourdieu.

Study of Spanish American women’s writings published in the last decades of the 20th century, emphasizing the literary representation of subject formation, family relationships, gender, power, and politics. We will read works by Castellanos, Garro, Gambaro, Molloy, Valenzuela, Eltit, Ferré, among others, and essays on feminist and gender criticism. We will also discuss films by women directors that enhance the readings. Class participation, oral presentations, and research paper.

Topic: The Novels of the Latin American Boom and Narrative Theory.

In the course we will study several major novels of the Boom as we also pursue a complementary study of narrative theory.

Novels: Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Casa Verde, Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz.

Narrative Theory: Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse. Excerpts from other theoretical works.

The seminar will focus exclusively on Celestina and examine it in its varying incarnations (‘Comedia’ ‘Tragicomedia’ ‘Prologada,’ etc., beginning with the putative 1499 Burgos edition and continuing through the Valencia 1514 text). Topics to be discussed within the context of the semester are: textual history (books, printers, and the book trade in early modern times); the history of the language and the problems of multiple authorship; Celestina and the medieval Latin tradition (Petrarch, Seneca, Ovid, the Ovidian tale, Humanistic Comedy, etc.); medieval sentimental literature and the question of intertextual parody; the cancionero tradition and the composition of Celestina; naturalist philosopy, fifteenth-century love literature (particularly love sickness and medical lore), the University of Salamanca, and the work’s intellectual and ideological context; questions of intentionality, critical distortions, Averroism, Epicureanism, and the problem of converso authorship; humor, puns, and esoteric jokes; narrative technique (the effaced narrator); characterization and the subversion of normativities; construcyion of subjectivity; and other relevant themes.

This seminar has two objectives: 1) to give students an introduction to critical race studies; and 2) to enable students to apply critical theories about race to a corpus of Spanish, Portuguese, and English-language texts ranging from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, and from poetry and drama to the essay and novel. Our work will therefore be both theoretical and practical, both transatlantic and hemispheric. All discussions and written work (book review, midterm paper and final paper) will be in Spanish. Readings may include: essays by José Gumilla, Sir Thomas Browne, Benito Feijoo, and Domingo Sarmiento; Tirano Banderas, Raza Cósmica, La cuarterona, Jubiabá, Song of Solomon.