DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese Courses

Portuguese Language

Portuguese 101-1 – Elementary 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.

Portuguese 101-2 – Elementary 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 101-1 or sufficient score on placement test.

Portuguese 101-3 – Elementary 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.

Portuguese 115-1 – Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

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.

Portuguese 115-2 – Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

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: PORT 115-1 or Placement

Portuguese 201-0 – Reading and Speaking Portuguese

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.

Portuguese 202-0 – Contemporary Brazil: Literature and Film

Instruction in reading and writing expository and narrative prose. Emphasis on vocabulary, linguistic skills, and syntax appropriate to formal written Portuguese.

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

Portuguese 303-0 – Topics in Advanced Portuguese

Advanced review of grammar concepts and idiomatic use of spoken and written Portuguese. Deals with a variety of topics in the context of Brazilian culture, history, literature, and current events. May be taken more than once for credit with change of topic.

Prerequisite: PORT 202-0 or equivalent.

Portuguese Literature

Portuguese 380-0 – Contemporary Brazil: Literature and Film

Taught in English

This course will explore selected themes and aesthetic trends in Brazilian literature and film (but mostly film) produced in the 21st century. We will be particularly interested in discussing how in the last decade both literature and film have blurred the boundaries between fiction and documentary, with an increasing emphasis on social and historical issues.  We will also pay close attention to the development of realism through the 20th century and the important role attained by documentary film making in the last decades. Although we will pay some attention to film techniques, our major concern will be with narrative strategies and ideological content. Class meetings will rely heavily on class discussion in a seminar format. 

Students will have the opportunity to do their readings and write their papers in English or Portuguese.

Films include: Barren Lives, The Hour of the Star, City of God, Playing, News from a personal war, Santiago, Bus 174 Estamira, Wasteland, and 5 X Favela

Readings: Barren Lives by Graciliano Ramos, The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, and a selection of articles (CANVAS)

Portuguese 396-0 – Topics in Lusophone Cultures

Taught in English

“Hitchhiking the Atlantic” charts the history of the Atlantic World through the biographies of singular individuals on the move. We will focus on the lives of Atlantic travelers who effected and reflected historical change relating to three core themes: racism and American slavery, industrial capitalism, and anti/colonialism. These themes are not isolated to the past; they continue to unfold in the present, shaping societies across the globe in the twenty-first century. Students will gain an understanding of how disparate histories in Africa, the Americas, and Europe have been interconnected on multiple scales, from individual to empire. The class will produce original biographies of Atlantic World travelers and use a digital mapping application to trace their movements. No prior experience with digital mapping is necessary; students interested in learning programming basics in a supportive and structured environment are welcome.

Topics in Lusophone Cultures – Bulldozed: São Paulo and Chicago

Taught in English

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. 

Graduate

SPANPORT 415-0 – Studies in 19th Century Literatures & Cultures

Analysis of the discursive models of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Latin American and/or Iberian literary and cultural production. Topics vary. May be repeated for credit with a different topic.

SPANPORT 425-0 – Exile and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Film

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.

SPANPORT 450-0 – Topics in Cultural Studies

Analysis of specific topics and debates within cultural studies and visual culture in Latin American and/or Iberia. Theme focus vary. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

SPANPORT 450-0 – Topics in Cultural Studies

Making the Sunflower Sing: Medicinal Plants in Songs and Poems from Wallmapu-Chile

 The course explores the presence of knowledges of different validations and origins about medicinal plants in a combination of Mapuche and Chilean poetic and musical texts from the 20^th and 21^st century. These texts range from ritual chants to hip-hop and from Gabriela Mistral to collections of poems that have been recently published (such as Malú Urriola, Elvira Hernández, among others). By initially setting our attention on the healing plants and their aroma, the aim of this course is for students to be able to reflect and write about the relationship between, nature, writing and gender, mixing literate, country and ancestral knowledges in a sort of “ecology of knowledges” that increases the appreciation for the subjectivities that have historically produced the knowledge on medicinal plants: women, peasants, indigenous.

 Textbook: The professor will provide an anthology and music playlist to the class.

Hacer cantar la maravilla: plantas medicinales en canciones y poemas Wallmapu-Chile

 El curso explora la presencia de saberes de distinta validación y procedencia en torno a las plantas medicinales en un conjunto de textos poéticos y musicales, mapuche y chilenos del siglo XX y XXI que van desde los cantos rituales al hip-hop, desde Gabriela Mistral a poemarios de reciente publicación (Malú Urriola, Elvira Hernández, etc.). Se persigue que, a partir de poner la atención en las plantas sanadoras y su aroma, los estudiantes puedan reflexionar y escribir sobre la naturaleza, la escritura y el género, combinando saberes letrados, campesinos y ancestrales en una suerte de “ecología de saberes” que incremente  la valoración por las subjetividades que históricamente han elaborado los conocimientos sobre las plantas medicinales: mujeres, campesinos, indígenas.

Textbook: Se presentará una antología y playlist a la clase

SPANPORT 450 – Topics in Cultural Studies: Dangerous Bodies in Turn-of-the-Century Latin America

Analyzes representations of different sexualities in Latin American fictions and visual culture from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the ways that these texts and images use the body to reveal the contradictions and complexities in the construction of the national culture. Graduate seminar (taught in Spanish).

SPANPORT 455 – Comparative Studies in Latin American Cultures: Comparative Studies in Latin American Cultures Literatura and Anthropology: Brazil and France

In his Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Levi-Strauss refers to Jean de Lery\'s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) as the "breviary of the anthropologist." Since then, accounts of the native cultures of Brazil (often nostalgic and melancholic) have played a central role in Western epistemologies, as well as in the construction of the modern Brazilian nation and aesthetics. This course is intended as both a thematic survey of Brazilian lettered culture and an investigation of the development of modern ethnography (largely in France). Firstly, we will discuss the role of European accounts of encounters with the Brazilian landscape and indigenous peoples in the development of modern ethnography; then we will analyze how the Brazilian lettered elite responded to the image of Brazil that was constructed by Europeans as an exotic space, and how they incorporated it into their projects of nation building (from 19th-century Romanticism, to Modernist avant-gardes and beyond). Finally, we will discuss how indigenous cultures remain a heterogeneous space in the national and global imagination, and the political consequences of this contradiction in contemporary societies. Readings will include travel narratives, novels, poems, essays, ethnographic accounts and films. Essays by Montaigne, Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Frank Lestringant, Michel de Certeau, Silviano Santiago, James Clifford, Krupat, Walter Mignolo, V. Crapanzano, Vincent Debaene, Viveiros de Castro, among others.
NOTE: Reading knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish and/or French desired but not required

SPANPORT 480-0 – Topics in Latin American Literature and/or Iberian Literatures & Culture

This seminar course explores Iberian and Latin American cultural and political issues in relation to particular representational techniques, prominent literary traditions, subject-and national-making practices, and varied forms of writing literary texts. Topics vary.

SPANPORT 480-0 – Topics in Latin American Literature and/or Iberian Literatures & Culture

Anarchisms and Marxisms in the Andes

In the late nineteenth century, anarchist and Marxist thought filtered into the Andes through two principal avenues: radical political activists and elite intellectual circles. While the initial points of entry of these socio-critical discourses were the region’s ports and cities, they quickly found their way to the most recondite parts of the region. This course proposes to investigate the shape that anarchist and Marxist thought took upon its contact with Andean societies through to its later development among various actors and at diverse sites, from 1890-1950. Already in the work of the Peruvian Manual González Prada in the 1890’s, an anarchist critique of property is retooled in order to address local semi-feudal land-owning regimes. Over the course of the first decades of the 20^th century, a slew of intellectual-activists take up powerfully influential Marxism in order to tailor it to local contexts and histories. Some examples include the works of Miguelina Acosta Cárdenas, José Carlos Mariátegui, César Vallejo, Raúl Haya de la Torre, and Manuel Seoane, in Peru; Jorge Icaza, Enrique Gil Gilbert, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Manuel Agustín Aguirre, and Joaquín Gallegos Lara in Ecuador; and Tristán Marof, Arturo Urquidi Morales, Gamaliel Churata, and José Antonio Arze in Bolivia.  At the same time, both in contact with intellectuals and independently, urban and indigenous activists such as Carlos Condorena, Ezequiel Urviola, Domitilia Pareja, and Luis Cusicanqui developed their own hybridizations of critical Marxist and anarchist discourses that sought to suture urban revolutionary movements with longstanding indigenous rejections of a colonial status quo.

In order to understand both the processes of transmission of these discourses and the particular transformations they underwent in the Andes, the seminar highlights the exceptional diversity of forms that these interventions took, from essay and chronicle to novel and poetry, from broadsheets and working-class press to public protest and violent rebellions, across the linguistic registers of Spanish to the region’s indigenous languages. How did basic notions of class, commodity, and revolution, shift when faced with realities of indigenous social formations and history?  What transformations were introduced into received Marxism and anarchism when they were transmitted into oral, regional Spanish as well as Aymara and Quechua?  How did Marxists and anarchists conceptualize semi-feudal societies and their economies?  How did they engage indigenous social formations and cultures? What modifications did working-class and indigenous activists introduce into the new critical discourses they encountered?  Finally, the seminar will consider the reflection on European critical-theoretical traditions that their reception and immediate modification in Latin America constitutes.

SPANPORT 495-0 – Practicum in Scholarly Writing & Publication

Workshop intended to help students to design, research and write a scholarly article. Required for all graduate students in their second year.

SPANPORT 496-0 – Dissertation Prospectus Writing Workshop

This course seeks to impart to students the knowledge necessary to answer the questions: what is a dissertation, and how do I write one? In the spirit of a workshop, we will work as a group to foster and cultivate the skill sets necessary to formulate and articulate an organizing question adequate to the charge of a significant, independent, multi-year research project. We will call this first stage the prospectus, and we will figure out what it is and how best to write it. We will try to distill multiple and often conflicting statements, expectations, and/or fears about what the dissertation is so we can effectively undertake its preparation and writing.

SPANPORT 499-0 – Independent Study

Independent reading under supervision. Consultation with director of graduate studies required.

SPANPORT 570-0 – Teaching Assistantship and Methodologies

Tutorial, taken on a ungraded basis, arranged between individual students and faculty, which include attendance at advanced undergraduate course lectures and service in teaching assistantships.

SPANPORT 590-0 – Research

This course is intended for students to conduct preliminary dissertation research while on fellowship