DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

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: PORT 101-2 or sufficient score on placement examination.

This intermediate course is designed to expand mastery in reading and speaking Brazilian Portuguese through select cultural videos, readings of literary cronicas, periodicals, and the Internet.

Prerequisite: PORT 115-2, PORT 121-3, or sufficient score on placement examination.

What stories does rubble tell?

This course examines the histories of São Paulo (Brazil) and Chicago (USA) through the demolitions that remade them over the twentieth century. Today among the most populous and ethnically-diverse global cities in the Americas, São Paulo and Chicago grew up as transportation gateways to the West and hubs of industry. The compelling shared and comparative histories of these two cities will serve as the basis for questions like: How do demolitions change places and the meanings attached to them? Why do authorities bulldoze certain structures and not others? Where do dislocated residents go? How have demolitions contributed to segregation, economic immobility, and racialized inequities across space and time? Course sections will follow the razing of singularly meaningful sites along with broad patterns of demolition related to housing and transportation projects (to take two examples). Source material will span from historical maps and city plans to samba and blues music that preserve razed spaces in popular memory. The course will include a collaborative research project. Students will use a digital mapping application to document, analyze, and visualize social and spatial change related to demolitions over time. No prior experience with mapping applications is required, and students interested in learning programming basics in a supportive and structured environment are welcome. 

For students with some previous experience in Spanish. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills in a cultural con-text. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program two or three times a week. Offered winter and spring.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 115-1 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

An introduction to the culture and sociopolitical issues of contemporary Spain in the basis for review of some problematic grammatical patterns and for skill-building in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 121-3, SPANISH 125-0, AP score of 4 on the Spanish Language and/or Literature, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

First course of a sequence that develops writing skills and structures through examination of the relationship between the individual and society. Emphasis on textual analysis and development of descriptive, narrative, and argumentative essays.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 201-0, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class required.

Advanced course for developing communication skills in Spanish for business purposes. Emphasis on language skills for the global marketplace: specialized terminology; writing; comprehension of cultural nuances in the Spanish-speaking business world. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 201-0 or AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam

Restrictions: No P/N; Attendance at first class is required.

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.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0

Survey of literature and history of colonial Latin America. Students will read indigenous, Hispanic and mestizo authors and texts. We will analyze narrative genres, going beyond their aesthetic qualities, to understand their political impact. We will balance close readings of chronicles, letters, poems and histories with discussions of larger issues, such as the problematic meanings of discovery and conquest, the textual construction of identities, and the translation process of indigenous languages into Spanish. These discussions aim to foster a critical approach to the studied materials as well as to strengthen the students' oral and written Spanish skills. 

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (can be taken concurrently)

This course offers a general introduction to drama during Spain's Golden Age period (sixteenth to early seventeenth century). This course will study the origins of drama, the anonymous Auto de los Reyes Magos, and the plays of such great dramatists as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca.

Prerequisite:  1 course taken before or concurrently from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0, or teacher permission if none of those have been taken.

This course will allow students to explore a series of critically acclaimed contemporary Latin Americanfilms from the 1980s to the present. The films, from countries that include Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia, will be accompanied by theoretical and historical readings (by authors such as Carlos Monsivais, Deborah Shaw, Fernando Coronil, and Paul Julian Smith) that provide a framework for their analysis, as well as fictional texts that provide further context. Among other topics, our discussions of the films and texts will cover subalternity and the Third World; sexual and racial politics; urban violence; postcolonial poetics; genocide; cultural hybridism; dictatorship and populism; and technologies of power.

This survey course explores some of the main visual trends, movements, and concerns that were discussed and performed in Latin America during the 20th and 21st Centuries. The class is structured around clusters of visual and literary production that had women artists at their core. We will devote each week to an in-depth study of one female artist and the ripple effects that her work and ideas produced in their spheres of influence—from visuality to politics. We will consider questions like: How did women artists inhabit the artistic space as one of emancipation and critique? How did Latin American artists incorporate and transform the artistic influences coming from Western Europe and North America? How did artistic practices influence and reflect local and regional contexts? How do these women engage with conceptualism and how does this engagement affect their work?

This course will explore how the experiences of exile and diaspora (both political and economic) have helped shape Caribbean literature.  We will examine a diverse array of texts – poetry, novels, short stories, films and critical essays – produced in both Spanish and English both in the Caribbean and in the United States by writers of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Cuban origin.  As we read, we will use exile and diaspora as lenses through which to interrogate other aspects of Latinx-Caribbean literature.  How are these experiences portrayed, and what role have they played in the construction of identities, both personal and collective?  How have these situations shaped the development of Caribbean communities (both physical and literary) within the continental U.S.?  Should exile and diaspora be seen as patterns connected to globalization, thus serving to complicate our idea of what is Caribbean, or can they in fact be seen as fundamental to the construction of Caribbean-ness?  We will look at how these movements affect the treatment of race and gender in these works, and we will analyze the role of nostalgia and humor in the navigation of different cultural and geographic spaces.

Readings will be drawn from the work of the following authors:  Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Stuart Hall, Christina Sharpe, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Ana Lydia Vega, Pedro Pietri, Reinaldo Arenas, Manuel Ramos Otero, Mayra Santos Febres, Aurora Arias, Josefina Báez, Pedro Cabiya, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Rita Indiana Hernánez, Frank Báez, and Urayoán Noel, among others. Cinematic texts will be drawn from the work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Coyula, and Alejandro Brugués.

Readings will be in English and Spanish. Class discussion will be in Spanish.