Spanish Graduate Courses & Seminar Topics

The Fin-de-siècle covers a brief span of time, from the last third of the Nineteenth Century to the opening years of the Twentieth, prior to World War I, yet the period proves so fertile a ground for the study of the modern experience in all its complexities and paradoxes. During this period the grand narratives of modernity came into crisis with the progressive erosion of positivism as a criterion of truth, the increasing consumerist logic of the capitalist world-system, the impact of technology and mass culture, and the imminent collapse of European colonial rule at a global scale. The disruption of the principles of unity and progress in history, and the sense of social fragmentation, gave way to a more complex understanding of the modern experience, particularly from the perspective of literature and art, therein the period’s historical and philosophical relevance to the present.

In the spirit of approaching fin de siècle culture with a fresh view, this course proposes a Latin American perspective. This vantage point will allow students to explore the paradoxes of European civilization in the context of the history of colonialism. But it will also question the conventional outlook of Latin America as the “elsewhere” of Western modernity because it calls for a reconsideration of Latin America’s centrality in defining the intellectual foundations of the modern experience. Furthermore, the course will foster students’ appreciation of Western thought by approaching classic texts drawn from this heritage from and for the point of view of Latin American thinking.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain saw the burgeoning of narrative works whose female protagonists are involved in a wide range of socially and sexual transgressive behavior.  Several of them are among the most innovative contributions of the age, pointing out new directions for narrative in general.  The seminar will reflect on the connection between female transgression and literary creativity.  Why do so many pioneering works take as their point of departure the depiction of the lives of marginalized women engaged in the sex trade?  All of them were written by male authors, thus obliging us to pay especially close attention to issues of gender as lived within contemporary Spanish society.  Several of the texts to be studied represent outgrowths of the newly born genre of the picaresque novel.  How do the picaresque novels whose protagonists are women differ from those with male protagonists?  Our approach will be multidisciplinary, though our prime focus will be narratological.  Works covered include Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza, Francisco López de Úbeda’s La Pícara Justina, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s La ingeniosa Elena, and Alonso Castillo Solórzano’s Teresa de Manzanares.

Course includes discussion of classic works by Latin American, European, Asian, and African thinkers. Course approaches theory as a means to respond strategically to a particular literary or cultural manifestation in specific contexts.

Interpretation, critical thinking, hoaxes, humour, ethical and political issues are studied through an examination of works by Jorge Luis Borges and Macedonio Fernández.

This course studies the 21st-century political protests that took place in Brazil, especially the Turnstile Revolt (Revolta da Catraca, 2004-2005) and the June 2013 Protests (Jornadas de Junho). The protests are seen through the lenses of musicians (mostly from punk rock and rap genres), photographers, filmmakers and writers. The purpose is to see how artists engaged with the protests and their political ideas through a variety of discourses: anarchism, flaneurism, student rights, urban interventions, the right to the city, a revival of May ’68, etc.

The seminar will engage in close reading of major examples of Quevedo’s poetry and prose within the social, cultural, and ideological context of seventeenth-century Spain. Attention will be paid to Quevedo’s relationship with the principal thematic and stylistic currents of the Baroque. Quevedo’s love poetry will be a primary focus of concern; there will also be a strong emphasis on his satire, including its abundant use of the grotesque. Finally, the seminar will provide a succinct overview of Quevedo’s contributions as a political theorist. Readings will include a wide gamut of poetry as well as El buscón, Los sueños, La hora de todos, and Política de Dios.

The course traces a genealogy of the “antiquarian imagination” in Colonial Latin America, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We explore the complex interaction of gazes, interests and epistemologies that coalesced around the creation of a Pre-Columbian Antiquity.

Readings of selected works followed by discussion of Federico García Lorca’s iconic status and posthumous presence in film, exhibitions, fiction, song, and other forms of Spanish popular culture.

The course will center on the major works of this highly influential narrative genre that first emerged in Spain during the sixteenth-century.  We will focus our attention on its formal characteristics (for example, the complex use of first-person narration) as well as on its thematic and ideological dimension.  We will survey the ways in which the works reflect a wide variety of sociopolitical and economic phenomena affecting Spain at the time:  from the growth of cities and the ranks of the urban poor to the national obsession with “honra;” from the discrimination faced by those of Jewish or Muslim ancestry to the decline of Spanish imperial power as a result of never-ending wars, a crushing national debt, and major epidemics.  The role of the Catholic Church and religion in Spanish society will also be a central concern.

We will study the abundant use of humor (often cruel) in these works as well as the relationship between the pícaro and the mythical archetype of the trickster.  Finally, the course will examine the role that the Spanish picaresque novel played in the development of literary realism and the birth of the “modern novel” (a role at least as large as that played by Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha).  The works to be read are the following:  Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), Francisco López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina (1605), several of Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1613), and Francisco de Quevedo’s El buscón (1626).

Techno-scientific innovation and environmental degradation has brought about the discredit of the belief in universal humanity. This seminar investigates the posthuman predicament (and related fields, like New Materialisms and Biopolitics) through a set of Latin American literary and cinematic works.