Introduction to grammar and development of listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in Brazilian Portuguese, as well as the history and culture of Portuguese-speaking countries.
Prerequisite for 101-2: 101-1 or sufficient score on placement test; for 101-3: 101-2 or sufficient score on placement test.
For students with some previous experience in Spanish. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills in a cultural context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video lab twice a week.
For students proficient in Spanish. Comparative sociolinguistic and interactive approach to communicative competence emphasizing pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure, and patterns of spoken and written Portuguese.
Prerequisite: AP 4 or equivalent on the Spanish Language Placement Exam.
Based on the communicative approach, Port 121 helps students achieve an intermediate language level of proficiency through furthering development of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese will continue to be developed through meaningful cultural contexts. The course also offers insights into the history and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries in Europe, Africa and America.
Instruction in reading and writing expository and narrative prose. Emphasis on vocabulary, linguistic skills, and syntax appropriate to formal written Portuguese.
Prerequisite: 111-3/112-3, 115-2, 121-3 or sufficient score on placement examination.
Aspects of the literatures and cultures of Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa (Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, Guine Bissao). Possible topics include Brazilian modernism, Lusophone African literature and film, race and sexuality in Brazilian literature, travel narrative, literature and ethnography, the Portuguese novel, nation and nationalism. May be repeated for credit with different topic.
For students who have studied Spanish less than two years. Communicative method. Development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills, as well as knowledge of Hispanic culture, through context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program twice a week.
Based on the communicative approach, Port 121 helps students achieve an intermediate language level of proficiency through furthering development of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. Grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of Brazilian Portuguese will continue to be developed through meaningful cultural contexts. The course also offers insights into the history and culture of the Portuguese speaking countries in Europe, Africa and America.
Spanish 199-0 Language in Context: Contemporary Spain
An introduction to the culture and politics of contemporary Spain in the basis for review and further development of some of the most problematic grammatical patterns in Spanish.
Prerequisite: 121-3, 125-0, AP score of 4, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.
Spanish 201-0 Conversation on Human Rights: Latin America
First course of a sequence designed to develop speaking strategies and structures through analysis of modern (20th- and 21st-century) Latin American culture. Emphasis on accurate informal conversation.
Prerequisite: 199 or Spanish Language Placement Exam.
Spanish 203-0 Individual and Society through Written Expression
First course of a sequence that develops writing skills and structures through examination of the relationship between individual and society. Emphasizes textual analysis and development of descriptive, narrative and argumentative essays.
Prerequisiste: 201, AP score of 5, or Spanish Language Placement Exam.
Spanish 204-0 Reading and Writing in the Art of Protest
Second course of a sequence designed to develop writing skills and structures through analysis of socially committed art. Emphasis on cultural analysis and development of longer essays.
Development of advanced Spanish communication skills, as well as a thorough and personal cultural knowledge of the Chicagoland Hispanic community through readings, discussions, writing and required volunteer commitment.
Introduction to textual analysis and to topics such as genre, narratology, prosody, and figurative language, aiming to prepare the student to read, discuss, and write analytically in Spanish about literature and culture.
Prerequisites:204 or AP 5 in Spanish Language AND Literature.
Survey of the origins of the Spanish language and the development of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the end of the Spanish Golden Age. Study of representative figures and major literary developments in conjunction with political and cultural history.
Spanish 260-0 Literature in Latin America before 1888
Survey of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and romantic traditions in Latin America. Focus on authors and texts such as Popul Vuh, Cristobal Colon, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Martin Fierro.
Theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. Articulation and production, classification and description, combination and syllabification, sonority sequencing, prosodic features, and prevalent dialectal variations.
Significant poetry, narrative, and criticism from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Topics such as decadence, aestheticism, the flaneur and the rastacuero, cosmopolitanism, the modern city, and exoticism.
Prerequisite: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261.
Poetry, prose, and visual art by major figures and groups in 20th-century vanguard movements. Works by authors such as Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolas Guillen, Felisberto Hernandez, Vicente Huidobro, Manuel Maples Arce, and Cesar Vallejo.
Spanish 346-0 Testimonial Narrative in Latin America
Study of the tradition of testimonial writing in Latin America with attention to cultural, political, and historical contexts and questions of truth, memory, and subjectivity. Works by authors such as Miguel Barnet, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Alicia Partnoy, Elena Poniatowska, Jacobo Timerman, and Rodolfo Walsh.
Prerequisite: 1 course from 250, 251, 260, or 261.
Spanish 397-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures: On Debt
Debt is a social relation. It has received cosmological, theological, and economic articulation for centuries. Yet, at its core, debt is a form of social binding, hence a social bond. This course will examine debt as an economic, social, and historical relation in order to consider its critical function, thereby exploring the very idea of a critique of debt. We will read texts by Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, David Graeber, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eletra Stimilli, among others. We will also consider ancient and contemporary articulations of debt forgiveness, relief, or cancellation (as articulated, for example, by Strike Debt or the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt). This will give us an opportunity to refer to cases of debt in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Spanish 397-0 Special Topics in Latin American, Latino, and/or Iberian Cultures: Indigeneity and Gender in Latin América
This course will examine representations of indigenous peoples in Latin America during the 19th and 20th 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.
SPANPORT 410 Introduction to Colonial Latin America: Narrative, History, Theory
This course offers a critical overview of the epistemological practices and ideological underpinnings that shaped the multi-faceted process of colonialism in what we call today Latin America. Focusing on indigenous, mestizo and European texts produced from the late fifteenth century to the late seventeenth century, we will explore the diverse power struggles, strategies of negotiation, and misunderstandings that underlie the production of the foundational textual knowledge in and about America.
Key to this course is the debate on the social and political consequences that the introduction of the European technology of writing had on Native American societies. A fundamental tool for colonial administration and Christian evangelization, alphabetic writing fostered both spaces of incorporation and of exclusion of indigenous peoples. We will analyze how writing shaped a particular notion of literary canon and of archive that tied knowledge to alphabetic writing, while framing indigenous peoples as objects to be analyzed, but not as subjects who produced knowledge. The colonial concept of literacy and the more recent postcolonial critical redefinitions of it will guide this approach.
This course also aims to frame the debates on colonial literature beyond the axis of literacy. For that, we will discuss how the concept of legibility can allow us to have a better understanding of the process of marginalization of native pre-Hispanic modes of inscription and communication, but also of native uses of alphabetic writing.
Going from colonial texts to theory, this course intends to familiarize students with major contemporary critical theories and debates that have led to a productive destabilization of terms and concepts such as indigeneity, indianness, discovery, conquest, colonization, empire, mestizaje, hybridity, and otherness.
Readings will be in English and Spanish. Class discussion will be in Spanish. All written work should be done in Spanish.
This course will consider key texts in Frankfurt School Critical Theory alongside Decolonial Thought and Decolonial Feminism. Discussions will consider conception of critique at work in these texts in order to construct a decolonial critical theory of society. Readings will include texts by Gyorgy Lukacs, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Anibal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Maria Lugones, Yuderkis Espinosa-Minoso, and Gloria Anzaldua.
