Courses

This course introduces complex sentences and various tenses and short literary and cultural texts. Students practice all four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) in Spanish. Taught five days a week in Spanish.

Through discussion of literary and cultural texts and films, as well as a review of grammar, this course aims to help students acquire greater skill and confidence in both oral and written expression. Taught three days a week in Spanish.

An excellent opportunity to brush up your Spanish while learning about current issues in Spain and Latin America. The class meets only once a week for an hour. Class requirements include reading specific sections of Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, everyday on the internet (El País), and then meeting once a week to exchange ideas over coffee with a small group of students like yourself.

Are you interested in talking about current news while practicing your oral skills in Spanish? Have you ever considered participating in a radio program? This course is an excellent way to keep in touch with your Spanish while collaborating with “El Super Barrio Latino” a radio program conducted by the Latinx community of Northfield. In each program we will explore international and domestic news and we will interview people in our community. Relying on international newspapers, students will discuss common topics and themes representing a wide array of regions. (Language of conversation is Spanish)

This course serves as a bridge between beginning (204-208) and advanced courses (220-300) in the Department of Spanish. Its main objective is to improve your written and oral skills by looking at some of the best examples of the graphic novel in Spain in recent years, including: Vida y muerte de Lorca (biography), Las Meninas (art history), Yo, asesino (detective novel), Homenaje a Cataluña (Spanish Civil War), Náufragos (urban tales of Madrid and Barcelona), Ardalén (autobiography), and others. Students will be expected to write several short compositions and to give oral presentations applying specific grammar skills in the context of texts and paintings examined in class.

This is an intense grammar/cultural workshop intended to help program participants navigate successfully through everyday situations such as ordering food at a restaurant, getting a haircut, describing your symptoms to a doctor, buying clothes or simply hanging out with your new Spanish friends. The course has two components—one strictly grammatical (“how do you say X exactly?”) and another cultural (“is it right to use the informal tú with a waiter?”).

Pragmatics studies the relationship between language and context. Learning conversational skills in a second language requires students to linguistically adapt to a range of contexts, hence the field of pragmatics provides an ideal theoretical framework for a conversation class. For example, students learn about essential cultural and linguistic differences between English and Spanish with regard to conversational styles, politeness and verbal interaction in general.

This course will introduce the student to several production systems and aesthetic traditions in Latin American cinema, from silent cinema to current Netflix productions, allowing students to engage cinematic debates by situating them in their national, regional and global cultural contexts. Be prepared to be immersed in the moving image and its cultural significance through the viewing of many films and critical work on them. Recommended as a foundation course for further study.

This course focuses on contemporary short stories and short novels. We will read some of the most relevant living authors from Latin America including Carlos Gamerro, Pilar Quintana, Kike Ferrari, Yeniter Poleo, Antonio José Ponte, among others. This will expose students to the most pressing issues in today’s Latin America, ranging from gender, violence, racism, and immigration. We will interview at least one of the authors read during the term and discuss the social implications of their literature in today’s world.

Muslims and Jews lived in the country we now call “Spain” for nearly 1000 years before they were both expelled in 1492 and 1609. No other European nation has ever experienced this kind of cultural hybridity. This course examines the tense coexistence of all three cultures between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, as reflected in historical documents, civil law, literature, and art. Readings include: Hispano-Arabic women poets mocking the Koran, Sephardic literature, Hispano-Arabic gay poetry, letters from Queen Isabella defending “her” Jews, the expulsion of Jews as narrated by Jewish chroniclers of the time, Núñez de Muley’s Memorandum in defense of moriscos (Spanish Muslims), Father Agustín Salucio’s stunning plea for an amnesty that would stop the persecution of Spanish Jews, Cervantes, and others. If you thought Muslims were newcomers to Europe, think again—you are in for a ride.

This course offers a fresh look of Spain’s current political and economic life. Discussion topics include the rise of Podemos and the new Spanish political scene, the Catalan separatist movement, political corruption, illegal immigration, and the role of the European Union.

This course proposes an exploration of Madrid in a historical perspective to track those tensions between the persistence of the city and the pulsion of modernity, between the local traditions and peculiarities and the influences arriving as an effect of globalization. In this journey we will study the transformation of Madrid from Middle Ages to the present, focusing on the struggles and strategies of the community adapting to the new circumstances. In more general terms, we will understand Madrid’s way of life, the problems and particularities of its community, and as well as an introduction to the threats to urban society in a global world.

An introductory course to reading major texts in Spanish provides an historical survey of the literary movements within Latin American literature from the pre-Hispanic to the contemporary period. Recommended as a foundation course for further study. Not open to seniors.

Since the death of Franco in 1975, Spain has undergone huge political, socio-economic, and cultural transformations. Changes in the traditional roles of women, the legalization of gay marriage, the decline of the Catholic church, the increase of immigrants, Catalan and Basque nationalisms, and the integration of Spain in the European Union, have all challenged the definition of a national identity. Through contemporary narrative and film, this course will examine some of these changes and how they contribute to the creation of what we call Spain today.

Latin American culture is populated with monsters. As manifestations of racial, gendered, and class difference, they can be found in artistic production all over the hemisphere. This course explores these narratives, primarily focusing on the cannibal, the witch, and the zombie as representations of difference, fear, and colonialism in Latin America. We will analyze literary and visual production from the sixteenth century to the present in order to strengthen students’ analytical and written skills in Spanish. Emphasis will be given to methods to ‘reading’ our materials, to learning how to approach those sources from different cultural and critical perspectives, as well as to produce written reactions and analysis.

Carnivals are frequently associated with colourful crowds, merrymaking and excess. But what role do carnivals play in the construction of national and collective identities? We will try to answer this and other questions focusing on films, paintings, and literary texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that represent some of the most popular carnivals in Latin America: Candombe (Uruguay), Yawar Fiesta (Peru), Blacks and Whites (Colombia), Oruro (Bolivia), and Rio (Brazil). We will analyze them from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes literary criticism, anthropology, and history. Students will engage with debates about nation, popular culture, modernity/modernization, and intangible cultural heritage.

In this course we study the relationship between myth and history in Central America since its origins in the Popol Vuh, the sacred texts of the Mayans until the period of the post-civil wars era. The course is organized in a chronological manner. We will study, in addition to the Popol Vuh, the chronicles of Alvarado, some poems by RubÚn DarÝo and Francisco Gavidia, some of the writings of Miguel +ngel Asturias and SalarruÚ. The course will end with a study of critical visions of the mythical presented by more contemporary authors such as Roque Dalton and Luis de Li¾n.á

This course proposes a genealogical study of the concept of Human Rights. The course will begin with the debates in sixteenth century Spain about the theological, political and juridical rights of “Indians.” The course will cover four centuries and the following topics will be discussed: the debates about poverty in sixteenth century Spain; the birth of the concept of tolerance in the eighteenth century; the creation of the modern political constitution in the United States, France and Spain; the debates about women’s rights, abortion and euthanasia, etc.

Poetry will be studied as an activity that shares a common ground with other social practices. In particular, we will examine particular moments and cases of Latin American literature in which the poem (the making of poetry and the form of the text) has been conceived in its connection with work, that is, with the process of transformation of materiality into specific “objects,” involving a necessary social use of time and space. We will explore this topic starting with Modernismo and, after covering the Vanguardias, will get to some key developments from the 1960s to present.

Basic readings in Spanish history and culture in preparation for the program.

This course is a comparative study of classical and Christian tragedy from Sophocles to Valle Inclßn and from Aristotle to Nietzsche. Classes alternate between lectures and group discussions. Course requisites include a midterm exam and a final paper. All readings are in Spanish, Sophocles and Aristotle included.

Muslims conquered Spain in 711 and lived in the country roughly until 1614. This course will examine the Islamic origins of Spain from a variety of disciplines, including literature, religion, history, and art history. Topics covered include:Hispano-Arabic literature, the fall of Granada, the repression of Moriscos under Philip II, aljamiado literature (literature written in Spanish with Arabic characters), the expulsion of Moriscos, and the diaspora in Tunisia. We will also devote two weeks to the study of the representation of Turks, Muslims, and Moriscos in Cervantes’ plays and novels, including several chapters of his famous Don Quixote. All texts are in Spanish, including Arab sources by Ibn Hazm, Wallada, Muhya, and other Hispano-Arabic and Morisco writers.  

This course studies the cultural representation of labor in Latin America. It focuses on the racial division of labor over the colonial, industrial, and neoliberal periods. We will analyze a wide range of visual and literary representations of Native, Black and women workers under the Encomienda labor system; peonages during the period of independence and specific national contexts (i.e. rubber tapper); industrial workers throughout the twentieth century (blue-collar workers); as well as the role of unemployment and precarized labor within the context of globalization.

In this course we will study the various meanings of what has been labeled, aesthetically and sociologically, as the Post-Modernist age, or Late Modernity. We will also study the relationship between “postmodernism,” the late-capitalist era and what has been called the “culture of contentment” or “culture of well-being.” In addition, we will attempt to understand the interactions that exist between consumer culture, market societies and dominant ideology. To develop this theme we will focus on Spain, but will also continually establish cross-cultural comparisons with other countries. This course addresses many different genres (e.g. fictional essays, documentaries, gag cartoons, graphic novels, comics). The course also features evening films and guest lectures.

Among other things, Don Quijote is a “remake,” an adaptation of several literary models popular at the time the picaresque novel, the chivalry novel, the sentimental novel, the Byzantine novel, the Italian novella, etc. This course will examine the ways in which Cervantes transformed these models to create what is considered by many the first “modern” novel in European history.

Have you ever wondered if not capitalism, then what? In this course we will critically approach the historical background, the causes and, most importantly, the consequences of the civil and ecological crisis unleashed globally in 2008. Both in its origin and its consequences, this crisis went beyond the financial field, extending into the realms of politics, economics, culture, media and ecology. In light of this context, we will take a transdisciplinary approach to the study of capitalist culture and analyze the main changes that have developed from the cycle of social mobilizations surrounding the “indignados” movement or Spanish 15M in 2011. With a primary focus on Spain, we will concentrate on analyzing cultural artifacts that mark a paradigm shift from a capitalist culture towards the development of a culture of the commons that seeks to improve the living conditions of the social majority, defending both human rights and ecological justice.

When we travel to another country are we tourists or travelers? What are our expectations when traveling? How do we get to know a place, its people, and culture? In this course we will walk through the history of some of the most important cultural and historical landmarks that mark the different transitions that Spain has gone through. We will become travelers who read, think, observe, and reflect upon political, cultural, and social questions connected to each text we read and every place we visit. This program includes several workshops with guest speakers, and significant contact with social collectives and communities in Spain.

More than a study of the image of Madrid in Spanish literature, this course examines the actual experience of living in a cosmopolitan city through a variety of disciplines, including Urban Studies, Geography, Architecture, Sociology, and Spanish poetry and fiction. Special attention will be given to imaginative walking and counter-tourist tactics as theorized by Phil Smith and the British psychogeographic movement.

In 2014 Obama and Castro simultaneously announced the end of an era: the Cold War. This announcement was a turning point for one of the most influential and symbolically important political movements in Latin America: The Cuban Revolution. We will study the political and historical background that sustained this revolution for over fifty years. We will read historical, political, philosophical, and cultural texts to understand this process and the fascination that it commanded around the world. We will also examine the different exoduses that this revolution provoked and the exile communities that Cubans constructed in different parts of the world.

We will study the Caribbean as the space, par excellence, of imperial, racial and cultural intersections. With a special emphasis on literary production in the Spanish Caribbean, we will focus on the formation of hegemonic nationalist discourses that often silenced the region’s great racial and cultural diversity. We will analyze symbolic and cultural constructions of power rationalized with complex racialized beliefs to sustain the social and political structures in these countries. We will read texts by José Martí, Juan Francisco Manzano, Lydia Cabrera, Nancy Morejón, Nicolás Guillén, and Derek Walcott among others.

Borges once said about Quevedo that he was less a man than a vast and complex literature. This phrase is probably the best definition for Borges as well. We will discuss the many writers encompassed by Borges: the vanguard writer, the poet, the detective short story writer, the fantastic story writer, the essayist. We will also study his many literary masks: H. Bustoc Domecq (the apocryphal writer he created with Bioy Casares) a pseudonym he used to write chronicles and detective stories. We will study his impact on contemporary writers and philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, Roberto Bola±o, etc.

This course will examine representations of Indigenous peoples in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to constructions of race and gender. We will explore topics such as the racial and gendered associations used to construct indigeneity, the exclusion of alternative indigenous gender subjectivities, and the double subordination indigenous women have historically experienced. Some questions we will explore are: How has indigeneity been understood in nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin America? How have nineteenth-century Latin American nations imagined and disciplined female indigeneity? What new forms of indigenous gender identities became visible during the twentieth century? The course includes materials related to Central America (Mexico, Guatemala), the Andes, and the Amazon.

This seminar will have Mexico City as protagonist, and will examine the construction of one of the largest urban centers of the world through fictional writing, cultural criticism, and visual/aural culture. We will critically engage the fictions of its past, the dystopias of its present, the assemblage of affects and images that give it continuity, but which also codify the ever-changing and contested view of its representation and meaning. From Carlos Fuentes to Sayak Valencia, in the company of Eisenstein and Cuarón, among others.

Latin American cultural history is one of agitation and turmoil. Since colonial times, Riots, Rebellions, and Revolutions are not only at the center of Latin America’s politics, but also its art, literature, and culture. Through a survey of a representative selection of canonical and non-canonical Latin American texts (including literary pieces, films, pamphlets, periodicals, photographs, among others), this course will examine the intersections between literature, politics of unrest, and intellectuals in Latin America. Students will gain an understanding of fundamental topics of Latin American cultural and political history, including colonialism, modernity, racism, and political resistance.