Courses
FALL 2013 - COURSE LISTINGS:
THREE-CREDITS
SPAN 70200 – Spanish Literary Theory
GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Zavala, [21727]
SPAN 80000 – Transatlantic Polemics: Language and the Pan-Hispanic Cultural Field
GC: Thursday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. del Valle, [21728]
SPAN 80100 – Spanish in Contact: Global Perspectives
GC: Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Newman, [21729]
(Taught in English) (cross-listed with LING 79100)
SPAN 81000 – Perceiving the Renaissance in 15th Century Spain
GC: Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Paolini, [21730]
SPAN 87100 – Transitional Justice in Latin American Literature and Film
GC: Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dapía, [21733]
SPAN 87100 – The Latin American Literary Canon: Political Debates, Critical Paradigms, Material Artifacts
GC: Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Degiovanni, [21734]
SPAN 87100 – Hispanic Jewish Literature and Cinema of the Diaspora
GC: Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Glickman, [21735]
(Taught in English)
SPAN 87200 – The Cinemas of Pedro Almodóvar and Guillermo del Toro
GC: Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Smith, [21736]
(Taught in English)
ONE-CREDIT MINI-SEMINARS
SPAN 87000 – Multilingual Education: Basque and International Perspectives
GC: Monday, 10/7/13 – Friday, 10/11/13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 4116.18, 1 credit, Prof. Jasone Cenoz, [21732]
(Basque Institute & Bernardo Atxaga Chair) (mini-course, 10 hours)
(Taught in English)
SPAN 87000 – Managing Linguistic Diversity in a Medium-sized Language Community. Lessons from the Catalan Experience.
GC: Monday, 10/28/13 – Friday, 11/1/13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 4116.18, 1 credit, Prof. F. Xavier Vila Moreno, [21731]
(Llull Institute & Rodoreda Chair) (mini-course, 10 hours)
(Taught in English)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
THREE-CREDITS
SPAN 70200 – Spanish Literary Theory
GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Zavala, [21727]
The most pressing debates currently taking place in the field of literary studies activate a wide range of theoretical notions that inscribe a genealogy of schools of thought, movements and interventions branching out across the Western world. These theories have in turn become central to our comprehension of literature as it intersects the general experience of culture, politics, economics and history. The present course will examine a historical arch of literary theory, from the early twentieth century to the latest developments conditioning relevant discussions on recent cultural productions. The course will explore approaches to literary texts and other cultural objects through linguistics and semiotics (Saussure, Jakobson, Todorov, Barthes), figures, tropes and mimesis (Auerbach, Frye, Compagnon, Ricœur), post-structuralism and deconstruction (Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Foucault), Marxism (Althusser, Adorno, Horkheimer, Jameson), gender and race (Butler, Cixous, Fanon), post-colonialism (Spivak, Said, Bhabha), psychoanalysis and anthropology (Freud, Lacan, Lévy-Strauss), politics, ethics and sociology (Zizek, Agamben, Rancière, Badiou, Bourdieu). The course will pay particular attention to theorizations and interventions from and on Latin America (Rama, Reyes, Borges, Cornejo Polar, Fernández Retamar, Larsen, Sarlo, Mignolo, Laclau).
SPAN 80000 – Transatlantic Polemics: Language and the Pan-Hispanic Cultural Field
GC: Thursday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. del Valle, [21728]
Foucault did not like polemics (Foucault/Rabinow). He passed moral judgment on a genre that, in his view, interfered with the search for truth and the relationship with the other. In a less negative vein, a number of discourse analysts (Angenot, Dascal) have underlined not only the complex communicational structure of this discursive genre but also its role in the development of public opinion and its entanglement in various realms of political life. In this seminar, we will assess the part played by language-ideological debates (Blommaert) in the tensions surrounding the articulation of a disputed Trans-Atlantic public sphere. We will focus on the following: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s disputes over orthographic reform in Chile (c.1843); Juan Valera and Rufino José Cuervo’s clash over the possible fragmentation of Spanish (c. 1900); the “polémica del meridiano” between Spanish and Latin American intellectuals over Madrid’s status as a cultural beacon (c.1927); Jorge Luis Borges’ response to Américo Castro’s perception of the River Plate’s linguistic profile (1941); Martín Luis Guzmán’s proposal, at the first conference of academies of the Spanish language, to reorganize the current institutional arrangement (1951); and Luis Fernando Lara and Concepción Company’s rift over the Diccionario de Mexicanismos (2011). The careful analysis of each polemical engagement will be informed by discussions of the interaction between categories such as polemic (Angenot, Foucault/Rabinow, Dascal), public sphere (Habermas, Calhoun, Warner), and pan-Hispanism (Sepúlveda, Del Valle). By its very nature, the course will examine the potential of Hispanic transatlantic studies, that is, the identification of the Atlantic as a dynamic organizing principle in cultural analysis. Room will be made for other polemics that students will be encouraged to identify and discuss. While the course will be conducted in Spanish, students who feel more comfortable speaking or writing in English may do so.
SPAN 80100 – Spanish in Contact: Global Perspectives
GC: Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Newman, [21729]
(cross-listed with LING 79100)
All languages are affected by interactions with other languages, and interest in the resulting language contact phenomena has grown steadily across sociolinguistics in recent years. Spanish arguably has constantly participated in intense forms of this contact ever since its emergence on the borders of Romance and Basque speaking regions in north central Spain. After a brief account of this history, we will examine a variety of recent sociolinguistic studies. These examine contact in Spain and Latin America, where Spanish plays a dominant role, and the US, where it plays a subordinate one. The studies reviewed will be examined as a series of related cases that throw light on questions involving language contact phenomena. These include:
* the relationship between language attitudes and ideologies and language shift and maintenance,
* how contact motivates or does not language variation and change, and
* how syncretic linguistic practices emerge and are evaluated.
In certain key studies these three threads are interwoven in particularly illuminating ways. Students will also examine Spanish in contact in an original research project using data from New York or potentially elsewhere via data gathered through social media. This course will be taught in English.
SPAN 81000 – Perceiving the Renaissance in 15th-Century Spain
GC: Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Paolini, [21730]
This course, which will be taught in Spanish, will deal with a selected number of representative works written during the 15th century in Spain. It will include samples of the poetic production of Santillana, Mena and Manrique; treatises in defense of women by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón and Diego de Valera, a novela sentimental by Diego de San Pedro, and La Celestina. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the various schools of poetry, we will analyze their underlying theoretical assumptions regarding their origins, functions and intended audiences. Special emphasis will be given to textual problems and to the meaning of the terms used to designate these schools, as well as to the language, use of rhetoric and techniques of artes poetriae. Similarly, attention will be paid to the reception, institutionalization and disappearance of these early examples of literary manifestation. The second part of the course will be dedicated to the analysis of a few treatises in defense of women, as a response to widespread misogynistic attacks such as that from the Arcipreste de Talavera, and how this major conflict becomes a central issue in the novela sentimental and La Celestina. The entire course will focus on the intellectual background of the authors, their readings, their sources, their intended audience and their place within a specific literary tradition that seems to be both Castilian and European in scope. While the course will be conducted in Spanish, students who feel more comfortable speaking or writing in English may do so.
SPAN 87100 – Transitional Justice in Latin American Literature and Film
GC: Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Dapía, [21733]
How do post-authoritarian and post-dictatorial regimes deal with legacies of violence and human rights abuses? How do they address the demands for justice that arise after those systematic mass atrocities? Should we remember or forget past atrocities? Does democratic stability justify limitations to criminal accountability? This course seeks to answer these and other questions as they applied to Latin American societies drawing on transitional justice theory. Transitional justice is a relatively new concept in international studies that has received recent attention in the wake of transitions from authoritarian rule in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay). With diverse emphasis on different Latin American societies, this course attempts to explore how these nations engage with brutal pasts and issues of justice and democracy-building as reflected in literature (Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, Griselda Gambaro, Alicia Partnoy, Jacobo Timerman, Horacio Verbitsky), films (Death and the Maiden (1994); Chile, Obstinate Memory (1998); State of Fear (2005); Los rubios (2005)), and other texts (Parque de la Memoria, Argentina; Museo de la Memoria, Chile).
SPAN 87100 – The Latin American Literary Canon: Political Debates, Critical Paradigms, Material Artifacts
GC: Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Degiovanni, [21734]
This course explores the role played by political debates, critical paradigms, and material artifacts in the production of contending versions of the Latin American literary canon from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. By focusing on several institutional transactions intended to legitimize representative repertoires of authors and texts, we will discuss how competing ideological projects came to define and promote opposing views of the Latin American literary field. We will pay special attention to the particular function performed by anthologies, book series, textbooks and reviews in this process. Theoretical debates surrounding notions of symbolic capital, cultural politics, and transnational literatures will inform our critical approach to the subject. Students are expected to engage with archival research for class presentations and papers.
SPAN 87100 – Hispanic Jewish Literature and Cinema of the Diaspora
GC: Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Glickman, [21735]
The purpose of this course is to discuss constructions of Jewishness (through characters, topics, and symbols) in writings and films from Latin America and Spain. The selected corpus includes fictional and documentary works written during the 20th and 21st centuries and covering five hundred years of Jewish life in Spain and Latin America.
Readings consist of short stories, novels, plays and films by Sephardic and Ashkenazi authors, including Ana M. Shua, Isaac Chocrón, and Moacyr Scliar -–and non-Jewish writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Carne Riera and A. Muñoz Molina. We will also view and discuss contemporary Latin American films from directors such as Daniel Burman, Cao Hamburger, and José Jusid.
The interpretation of the material covered will be both textual and theoretical, with a special focus on the most influential authors that have shaped the diaspora studies. Rather than attempt to fix a static definition of the Jewish cultural identity, the course will examine how Judaism is in constant flux, responding to cultural currents in its various diasporas. Braziel and Mannur’s anthology, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, encompassing multiple transatlantic and transnational voyages, will provide a framework for discussion. Related issues this course will highlight are: collective memory, inter-marriage, rituals, and multiple identities within a minority group.
The course will be taught in English. Students have the option of reading the material and writing their paper in Spanish.
SPAN 87200 – The Cinemas of Pedro Almodóvar and Guillermo del Toro
GC: Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Smith, [21736]
This course, which requires no knowledge of Spanish, examines the works of contemporary Spain and Mexico's most successful filmmakers, critically and commercially. These two figures might appear to be very different and, indeed, have formally collaborated only when Almodóvar produced del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, shot and set in Spain. Although he has greater transnational projection than perhaps any other European filmmaker, Almodóvar has filmed all eighteen features in his home country and language; while del Toro, with just eight films, has made for himself a nomadic career in two languages and three countries. Yet it can be argued that the pair has a great deal in common. For example, both directors have embraced transmedia, going beyond the feature film. Almodóvar's production company has expanded into television and theater; del Toro is a respected creator in the fields of the comic book and novel. Their internet presence is also substantial. The aims of the course are industrial, critical, and theoretical. First, Almodóvar is placed in the context of audiovisual production in Spain, while del Toro (as director and producer) is contextualized within the 'golden triangle' of Mexico, Europe, and the US. Second, both cineastes are interrogated for signs of auteurship (a consistent aesthetic and media image), sharing as they do a self-fashioning that takes place, unusually, within the confines of genre cinema (comedy/melodrama and fantasy/horror, respectively). Finally, the course explores how English-language critics have assimilated these two Spanish-speaking directors to debates in Anglo-American film studies that draw on psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and the transnational. The course will be taught in English.
ONE-CREDIT MINI-SEMINARS
SPAN 87000 – Multilingual Education: Basque and International Perspectives
GC: Monday, 10/7/13 – Friday, 10/11/13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 4116.18, 1 credit,
Prof. Jasone Cenoz, [21732]
(Basque Institute & Bernardo Atxaga Chair) (mini-course, 10 hours)
This course will focus on the development of multilingual competence in educational contexts and its relationship to linguistic and cultural diversity in society, including the use of languages of wider communication and minority languages. The characteristics of multilingual education in the Basque Country and research on the learning of Basque, Spanish and English will be discussed as compared to other educational contexts in Europe, Asia and North America. The need to consider “Focus on Multilingualism” as a teaching and research approach that takes into account the whole linguistic repertoire will also be discussed. The course will be conducted in English.
SPAN 87000 – Managing Linguistic Diversity in a Medium-sized Language Community. Lessons from the Catalan Experience.
GC: Monday, 10/28/13 – Friday, 11/1/13, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 4116.18, 1 credit,
Prof. F. Xavier Vila i Moreno, [21731]
(Llull Institute & Rodoreda Chair) (mini-course, 10 hours)
In an age of transnational flows of people and information, developing an adequate model for the management of linguistic and cultural diversity has become one of the most compelling issues for virtually any society in the world. In this respect, Catalonia offers an intriguing example of how an ‘immigration society’ without the support of a state of its own has managed to preserve and develop a vigorous language, a robust identity and a vibrant culture, in the cadre of a multilingual, open and economically developed society. In this course we will be reviewing the sociodemographic, political and cultural evolution of Catalonia’s with an emphasis on the last decades, trying to identify the main features of its model for sociolinguistic and cultural cohesion, and we will try to spot its main successes, its failures, and the lessons Catalonia’s experience has to offer to other societies. The course will be conducted in English.