Spanish Courses

Spanish Language

Spanish 101-1 – Elementary Spanish

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.

Prerequisites: None

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

Spanish 101-3 – Elementary Spanish

For students who have never studied Spanish or studied Spanish less than two years in high school. Communicative method. Development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills in a cultural context. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 101-2 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 105-6 – First-Year Seminar: "Look Out Sin!" Jewish Lives in Spain

Taught in English

In his outrageous version of the Inquisition in History of the World Part I, the comedian Mel Brooks touches on many of the misconceptions about the Inquisition that circulate today, indicating the lack of deep knowledge about Jewish life in Spain throughout history. In this seminar, we will examine both the Inquisition and other essential moments in Spanish-Jewish history: the (mostly) peaceful coexistence with Arabs and Christians in the Middle Ages, the 1492 expulsion and its aftermath, and Spanish-Jewish life in the 21st century. Our guide will be primary sources, the voices of Spanish Jews throughout describing their experiences in poetry, biography, and other texts. We will also examine universal themes--for example, the suffering of refugees--that emerge and are relevant to our contemporary world.

Spanish 105-6 – First-Year Seminar: Vicarious Fictions: History and Experience in Latin American Contemporary Literature

Taught in English

 What do we mean when we say, “it happened to me?” Are my experiences exclusively my own? But what if what I experience, feel, suffer, or even imagine, has actually never happened to me? Do experiences belong exclusively to someone or are they somehow collective? Can I feel, or perhaps share, the pain (and joy) of others? Can I give voice to somebody else’s experience, if not out of identification, at least out of empathy? How ethical or opportunistic would that be? At the same time, what if I cannot properly articulate my own experiences without imagining the experience of others? What happens when I realize that my own feelings derive from somebody else’s narrated experience? In short, what are the boundaries between appropriation of the other’s experience and authentic identification?

Spanish 105-6 – First-Year Seminar: Women At The Border: The Marginalization Of Latinas In The U.S.

Taught in English

Immigration has become one of the ‘hot’ buttons of contemporary social and political dialogue. Through the prism of the Latina experience in the United States, this class will explore causes and consequences of global migration in the 21st century, analyze the marginalization of third-world immigrants in first-world society, and seek to develop an understanding of the evolving ‘face’ of America. Students will further examine how their individual experiences and backgrounds help shape their perceptions of this new world order.
Latina immigrants to the U.S. often leave intolerable circumstances and brave life-threatening border crossings in pursuit of the American dream. Yet, those who succeed in crossing the geographic border almost inevitably find that the marginalized existence they hoped to leave behind takes on an equally powerful form in their new world as they face economic, political, racial, and cultural barriers north of the border.

Spanish 115-2 – Accelerated Elementary Spanish

For students with some previous experience in Spanish. Communicative method used for development of speaking, listening, conversation, and grammar skills in a cultural context. Offered winter and spring. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program. 

Prerequisite: SPANISH 115-1 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 121-1 – Intermediate Spanish

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through emphasis on cultural content and functional use of Spanish language. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program twice a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 101-3, SPANISH 115-2, or Spanish Language Placement Exam

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

Spanish-121-3 – Intermediate Spanish

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through emphasis on cultural content and functional use of Spanish language. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video program.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 121-2 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 125-0 – Accelerated Intermediate Spanish

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through readings and short films. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video. Offered in fall only.

Prerequisites: AP score of 3 or Spanish Language Placement Exam

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

Spanish 127-0 – Accelerated Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Language Learners

Communicative method. Further development of grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing skills through readings and short films. Three class meetings a week. Outside online video. Offered in fall only.

Prerequisites: AP score of 3 or Spanish Language Placement Exam

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

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.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 121-3, SPANISH 125-0, or AP score of 4 on Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class required

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. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 199-0 or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class required.

Spanish 202-0 – Conversation on Current Topics

Second course of sequence designed to develop speaking strategies and structures through examination of culturally related topics in the Spanish-speaking world. Emphasis on formal conversation and specialized vocabulary. Three class meetings a week. This course may not count toward the major/minor in Spanish.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 201, AP score of 5, or Spanish Language Placement Exam. Attendance at first class is required.

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 the individual and society. Emphasis on textual analysis and development of descriptive, narrative, and argumentative essays. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 201-0, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam.  No P/N. Attendance at first class required

Spanish 204-0 – Reading and Writing 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. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 203-0 or SPANISH 207-0. No P/N. Attendance at first class required.

Spanish 206-0 – Spanish for Professions: Business

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 or AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language Exam. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 207-0 – Spanish for Heritage Speakers

For heritage speakers, the course emphasizes writing, syntax, and formal modes of the language.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 197, AP score of 5 on the Spanish Language or Literature Exam, or departmental Spanish Language Placement Exam. Three class meetings a week. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 208-0 – Spanish and the Community

Development of advanced Spanish communication skills and of a thorough and personal cultural knowledge of the Chicago-area Hispanic community through readings, discussions, writing, and required volunteer commitment (15 hours/quarter).

Prerequisite: SPANISH 203. Three class meetings a week.

Spanish 260-0 – Literature in Latin America before 1888

The course provides an overview of Latin American literature and culture before the modernismo movement of the late nineteenth century. We will study a range of historical contexts and perspectives to consider how early literary texts and narratives shaped the formation of the so-called New World. Our readings will cover topics including colonization, class, gender, and race and will grapple with questions surrounding the problematic meanings of discovery, conquest, and identity. Together, we will consider not only the history of knowledge production in Latin America but also how that history highlights the limits of representation. With this goal in mind, we will explore distinct narrative forms, including but not limited to chronicles, letters, poems, illustrations, and forms of record keeping.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0 (May be taken concurrently.)

Literature Fine Arts Distro Area

Spanish 281-0 – Spanish Phonetics and Phonology

This is a foundational linguistics course that introduces students to the theory and practice of Spanish sounds and phonology. Offered in spring only. Three class meetings a week.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent. No P/N. Attendance at first class is required.

Spanish 302-0 – Advanced Grammar

Advanced course designed to polish Spanish usage through in-depth study and development in grammar, focusing on items most problematic for nonnative speakers.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 204-0 or equivalent.

Spanish Literature

Spanish 220-0-2 – Introduction to Literary Analysis

This course offers students an introduction to both literary analysis and Spanish and Latin American literary traditions. While our primary object of study is literature—that is, different literary forms (e.g., narrative, poetry, drama) and individual literary texts—we will also consider other forms of cultural production (e.g., feature films, documentary films, and photography). When “reading” our primary sources, we will practice a range of methods so as to learn how to approach those sources from different historical, cultural, and critical perspectives. This course aims to strengthen students’ analytical and written skills at the same time that it works to foster their interest in Spanish and Latin American literature and culture.Student assignments will be workshop and project based and will form part of a larger final quarter project.

Spanish 220-0-3 – Introduction to Literary Analysis

This course is an introduction to textual analysis and literary theory, aiming to prepare students to develop a critical approach to literature and culture in Spanish. Students will become familiarized with the vocabulary and methods of literary and cultural analysis through a careful examination of the various definitions and functions of literary language, and the formal aspects of diverse genres: narrative, poetry, drama, and essay. This course also interrogates the concept of literature as aesthetic phenomenon and its socio-cultural implications and thus explores the relationship between literature and the arts, cinema, and politics.

Spanish 220-0 – Introduction to Literary Analysis

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 or AP 5 in Spanish Language AND Literature

Spanish 250-0 – Literature in Spain before 1700

This course is a survey of the most influential literary works of the Spanish Middle Ages and the early Golden Age, periods that impacted not only the present culture of Spain but also that of much of Latin America. From the first manifestations of the written romance language (Xth c. Glosas del Monasterio de San Millan de la Cogolla) to the mester de juglaria (Poema del Cid) and the mester de clerecia of Gonzalo de Berceo to the Archpriest of Hita to the Marquis of Santillana to the Coplas de Jorge Manrique to Garcilaso de la Vega, the course outlines fundamental cultural phenomena, such as the evolution of Spanish from “vulgar” Latin and the establishment of Christianity and its literary manifestations.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220 (Can be taken concurrently or with teacher permission if SPANISH 250 has not been taken)

Spanish 261-0 – Literature in Latin America since 1888

Survey of the modern period, including modernismo, the historical avant-garde, the "Boom," and recent literary trends. Authors such as Delmira Agustini, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda, and Cristina Peri Rossi. 

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

Spanish 261-0 – Literature in Latin America since 1888

This course is an (incomplete) overview of some of the major trends and figures in Latin American literature and culture from 1888 until today. It is also an opportunity for students to improve and practice their Spanish language skills, while getting a better understanding of Latin American’s history and cultural manifestations. Throughout the term, we will frame our discussions to consider the following questions: What is Latin American Literature and how has it been understood? Are there common characteristics in the cultural practices of the region that allow us to label them as belonging to a specific category? Is there more than geography in the unity of Latin America? Does Latin America even exist? What does it mean to produce art as a Latin American and why is it different? We will review a variety of literary styles, forms, and concerns, as well as different ideological constructions, to see how artists and thinkers have grappled with these questions since the late 19th century.

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

Spanish 261-0 – Literature in Latin America since 1888

This course provides an overview of some of the major trends in Latin American literature and culture since 1888, while at the same time offering opportunities to improve students’ oral and written Spanish.  The course will emphasize various literary styles and ideological constructions that, in different ways, reflect the complexity of Latin American cultures.  While introducing students to the social and historical context in which the works were written, the course will focus on the following issues: the cultural and political dimensions of literature; the representation of class, gender, and race; the formative impact of nationalism and internationalism; and the concern for finding autochthonous modes of expression.

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

Spanish 310-0 – Origins of Spanish Civilization

The course will allow students to research in relative depth a topic related to the development of Spanish civilization from its pre-history through the Christian Re-conquest of the land conquered earlier by the Islamic invaders. To this end, the first part of the course will be devoted to lectures, videos, and the examination of some Medieval texts in class. The second part of the course will be largely devoted to the presentation of the student research in an oral report that will lead to a paper of no less than 2000 words. The course will examine various aspects of the literature and culture of Spain, mainly from the Roman conquest (218 B.C. to the year 19 B.C.) and domination of most of the land by Rome (19 B.C. to the beginning of the Visigoth domination in 468 A.D.), the introduction and development of Christianity, the Visigoth domination and its Catholic kingdom (415-711 A.D.), the Muslim invasion (711), and the great Christian victory of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 A.D. which led to the re-conquest ofmost of the territory of the peninsula by the mid thirteenth century with the exception of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, which was finally defeated in 1492. We will read pages from a cultural history, texts from the earliest manifestations of Spanish prose, from the earliest manifestations of Spanish lyric, from the Cantar del Cid, and from a few Medieval poems, and watch numerous videos and films on Medieval art, culture, and the march of history and hear student reports on various cultural topics.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 320-0 – Golden Age of Poetry and Prose

We will read representative texts by classic authors from the Golden Age of Spanish letters (16^TH-17th century), including Garcilaso de la Vega, Santa Teresa de Jesús, San Juan de la Cruz, Fray Luis de León, Quevedo, and short works by Cervantes (not Don Quijote).  Students will become acquainted with the historical, artistic, cultural, and religious context, including the music of great composers and the art of world-renowned artists like Velazquez and El Greco.

Prerequisite: 1 course from SPAN 250, 251, 260, or 261.

Spanish 343-0 – Latin American Avant-Gardes

This course offers an overview of early 20th century avant-garde movements in Latin America and the historical contexts in which they emerged. In particular, it focuses on the main urban centers of vanguard practices in the region, including Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, Havana, and Lima. We will pay special attention to how avant-gardist artists and writers negotiated foreign influence and local conditions, and how these movements conceived themselves as profoundly regional while speaking in an international idiom. We will emphasize the engagement with problematics in their local and global varieties, including race, gender, capitalism, imperialism and modernity.

Prerequisites: SPANISH 250, 251, 260 or 261

Spanish 350-0 – Art As Idea: The Idea Of The Artist

This course aims at exploring the ways in which Latin American artists incorporated concerns, techniques, and methodologies of conceptualism into their practices since the early 1960s. We will look at the connections with mainstream (US-Western Europe) conceptual art, but we will concentrate on the differences to address issues of political activism, pedagogy, and art theory. Paying particular attention to the transition from art as craft to art as idea, we will inquire into how the studied works present a specific idea of the artist and its role in Latin American societies. The class will be in close dialogue with the exhibition Pop América, on view at the Block Museum during the Fall Quarter.

Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0

Literature Fine Arts Distro Area

Spanish 361-0 – Latin America: Studies in Culture and Society

Analysis of the history of culture in Latin America with an emphasis on the intersection of politics, society, and literature and on the relationship between literary and visual culture. May be repeated for credit with different topic.
Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0

Spanish 361-0 – Justice and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America

This class will provide an overview of debates surrounding the meaning of “justice” and “resistance” in contemporary Latin America. It will also interrogate how these terms have been used and, in some instances, appropriated for political purposes. While this class will focus on late-twentieth and twenty-first century acts of resistance and searches for justice, it will also situate those acts and searches within historical conversations surrounding the meaning of democracy, politics, and protest. These debates and conversations will be addressed through a range of primary sources, including but not limited to feature film, documentary film, photography, truth commission reports, and testimonial narratives.

Prerequisite: SPANISH 220-0

Spanish 395-0 – Justice and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America

This class will provide an overview of debates surrounding the meaning of “justice” and “resistance” in contemporary Latin America. It will also interrogate how these terms have been used and, in some instances, appropriated for political purposes. While this class will focus on late-twentieth and twenty-first century acts of resistance and searches for justice, it will also situate those acts and searches within historical conversations surrounding the meaning of democracy, politics, and protest. These debates and conversations will be addressed through a range of primary sources, including but not limited to feature film, documentary film, photography, truth commission reports, and testimonial narratives. Student assignments will be workshop and project based and will form part of a larger final quarter project.

Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.

Spanish 395-0-Latin-American-Feminism – Latin American Feminism and Latinx Feminism

This course aims to encourage students to recognize two different ways of intellectual work produced by women from Latinx Communities in USA, Nuestramérica/Abya Yala. Through the readings of some of the seminal works of Anzaldúa, Lugones, Sor Juana Inés, Rosario Castellanos, and others, students will recognize how different feminism is depending on its social localization. The second part of the course will be an overview of ideas, discussions and recent debates of feminism and women's social mobilizations from Bravo River to Patagonia. The main aim is showing some of the most representative works done about/by indigenous and black women. 

(The class will be taught in Spanish but students with intermediate Spanish are welcome.)

Prerequisites:  SPANISH 250, 251, 260 or 261

Spanish 397-0-1 – Transnational Américas: from Migrantes to Latinx

Migration is not just a movement across borders, it is a process of becoming. By examining trajectories of intra- and inter-national migration within and out of Latin America, this course will explore the social, cultural, economic, and political histories that reveal relationships between migration and larger global and postcolonial socio-economic forces. We will reflect on the reasons why individuals choose to become mobile, as well as the structural conditions that might compel them. Specifically, we will look at disparities between urban and rural populations, clashes over ownership of job markets in urban settings, and the formation of individual and collective migrant identities. The course will begin by studying how waves of migrants (within and across frontiers) after independence shaped contemporary ideologies of race and belonging in Latin America, and end with a reflection on what these trajectories can teach us about studying Latin American migrants in the "Global North" today. Furthermore, the course will investigate how migration pathways challenge accounts of unified Latin American and Latinx “identities,” yet also allow for diasporic coalitions. Course materials include canonical readings from anthropology and history, along with media texts such as films and other visual media.

Spanish 397-0 – Critical Theory in Latin America

This course reviews some of the most important ideas and arguments produced in Latin American Philosophy and Critical Theory. Latin American Philosophy was born out of aims to understand how geopolitical conditions produced intellectual coloniality –understood as the impossibility of reaching an age of majority due to dependence on western thinking. Most recently, Latin American critical theorists —such as Santiago Castro-Gómez, Rita Laura Segato, Verónica Gago, and the Zapatistas,—have asked : What discourses of power lie behind the understanding of Latina American as otherness to Europe? What is the relation between war and the increase of femicide? How do aesthetic practices, social movements, and the exercise of memory change politics? How can those practices be understood as part of a "potencia feminista”? With which theoretical sources should we understand Latin American experiences such as "zapatismo" and its political principle of “governing obeying”?

In this course, we will understand how the Philosophy of Liberation, and other Latin American productions, form part of a “knowledge dispositive” (a term in dialogue with the French philosopher Foucault) engaging the political needs of colonial and colonized nations. Students who have enjoyed the study of foundational critical theorists such as Marx, Nietszsche and Freud (and frameworks such as historical materialism, genealogy and psychoanalysis) will encounter authors in critical dialogue with these methodologies. This is a creative dialogue, given that theories produced in western traditions do not always attend to the current realities of Latin American countries. We will consider how gender-based critique has formed an important part of recent Latin American critical theory and address the role of race, gender, and class intersectional critique in this context.

Thus, the course moves from Anibal Quijano’s critique of coloniality of power to María Lugones’ critique of this category in light of her parallel account of a modern gender system. We will study projects to overcome intellectual coloniality by concentrating on the debate, and differences, between Dussel and Santiago Castro-Gómez, and their respective theories of a philosophy of liberation and a genealogy of coloniality. Further keywords from this course on decoloniality and critical theory include gore capitalism, coloniality and transmodernity, potentia/potestas, endebtedness, and baroque identity.

Spanish 397-0 x Port 396 – “Where Memory Dwells”: The Memory Debate within Contemporary Latin America

Taught in English

This class will introduce students to the various roles that memory, as a concept, has played in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American politics and society. To consider such roles, this class will address a range of sociopolitical contexts, such as Argentina’s and Brazil’s authoritarian regimes and Guatemala’s civil war. At the same time, it will not be limited to instances of state-sponsored violence but will interrogate broader systems of repression to explore how memory is constructed and what its limits are. While this class will focus on a range of primary sources, it will focus primarily on feature films, novels, and sites of memory.

May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Spanish 397-0 – Topics in Latin American, Latina and Latino, and Iberian Literatures and Cultures

Taught in English

Aspects of the literatures and cultures of Latin America and Spain. Possible topics include postcolonial criticism and its reception in Hispanic cultures, notions of translation, theories of poetics, orality and oral culture, the memoir, and travel writing. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

Graduate

SpanPort 415-0 – Objects of Desire

This course will provide students with a nuanced understanding of topics of fin-de-siecle Latin American culture related to the market, aesthetics, and politics. We will explore the relationship between nineteenth-century cultural productions and material objects, focusing on the circulation and textual description of these objects. The idea is to understand how certain objects-including but not limited to gloves, watches, umbrellas, books, magazines, newspapers,  photographs, albums, cloth, brooms and irons-and parts of the body-including hands, feet, and anuses-revealed an urgent new sensibility regarding material culture and a subsequent reorientation toward objects. 

SPANPORT 420 – Indigenismos and Indigeneities in Latin America

This course explores the intersections, connections, and contradictions between the literature of indigenismo and a theoretical and critical corpus that turns on notions of indigeneity.  We will review the long production of lettered indigenismo, from the 19th century to the present, and will select works from a variety of countries, such as Bolivia, Peru, México, Guatemala, and Brazil. Critical sources will include selections from scholarship on indigenismo and indigeneity, as well as significant interventions from related fields, such as subaltern studies and testimonial studies.

SPANPORT 420 – Studies in Twentieth-Century Literatures and Cultures

Analysis of movements, trends, and issues in twentieth-century Latin American, Iberian, and/or U.S. Latino literary and cultural production. Topics vary. May be repeated for credit with different topic.

SPANPORT 425-0 – Poetics of the Archive: Reading in and against the Archive in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Documents, files, photographic albums, found footage, forensic evidence, dockets, briefs, letters: we propose the archive as a social machine that organizes and administers both the texts as well as our bodies through different forms of technology that archive our present.  All these forms of archival materials and its contemporary availability through digitalization have incited new forms of experimentation in artistic and literary practices. In this seminar, we reflect critically on the politics of archive construction and the uses of archival documents by leading Latin American artists and writers to rethink the meaning of history, memory and loss, technology and subjectivity. Following Derrida’ s Archive Fever and his lead on the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, we delve into art and literature engagements that erode of the archive’s former boundaries, stability, function and meaning and perform political interventions and subversions that proves increasingly recombinant and generative.

Readings include critical essays by Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Taylor, Enzewor, Rolnik; literary texts by Borges, Bolaño, Cabezón Cámara, Fonseca, Dillon and artworks by Muñoz, Restrepo, Rennó, among others.   

Spanport 425-0 – Masculinities in Latin American Literature and Culture

This seminar will examine representations of masculinity across Latin America. The theoretical readings will offer working concepts in the study of masculinity toexamine Hispanic literature and film in ways that reflect on the construction of gender: the idea of "hegemonic masculinity," the notion of male "wholeness," "homosociality," the effect of a colonial heritage in gender construction, issues of fatherhood, male sexuality, and the role of men in war and in national discourses.

Spanport 450-0 – Exile and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Film

This course will explorehow the experiences of exile and diaspora (both political and economic) have helped shape Caribbean literary and cinematic production. We will examine a diverse array of texts –poetry, novels, short stories, films and critical essays –produced in both Spanish and Englishboth in the Caribbean and in the United Statesby 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 thesesituations 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, Sylvia Wynter, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Pedro Pietri, Reinaldo Arenas, Manuel Ramos Otero, Aurora Arias, Josefina Báez, Pedro Cabiya,Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Rita Indiana Hernández, Frank Báez, and Urayoán Noel, among others.Cinematic texts will be drawn from the work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Miguel Coyula, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, and Alejandro Brugués.

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

SpanPort 480-0 – Seeing, Saying, Witnessing: Latin American Testimonial Figures

Taught in English

The course will focus on how Latin American testimonial narratives theorize as well as dramatize witness figures and scenes of witnessing that exceed the critical concepts and proposals brought to bear on such works; how specific testimonial texts not only construct but also interrogate their own witnesses. Reading and discussion will be anchored in close reading.

The class will be conducted in English. Advanced reading knowledge of Spanish required (English translations of required Spanish originals will also be available, as needed).

SPANPORT 495 – Practicum in Scholarly Writing and Publication

This required seminar focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of scholarly writing and publication. Reading and discussion, as well as writing assignments, aim to help students become more familiar with different ways in which they will be able to engage with other scholars and critics in their respective fields and areas of specialization. Students will take up the mechanics of scholarly publication, modes of scholarly research and reading, and genres of scholarly writing. The primary goal for each student will be to produce a draft of a publishable scholarly article, based on a paper written for a previous course. Other requirements include: a book review linked to the seminar paper; a formal abstract of the seminar paper; and written feedback on other students' writing. Seminar meetings will combine group discussion and oral presentations, workshop sessions focusing on written assignments, and, as needed, individual-tutorial meetings.

Spanport 560-0 – Foreign Language Teaching: Theory and Practice

A foundation of theories and research in second language acquisition and second language pedagogy, along with analysis and practical application for the Spanish language classroom. The course is required of all graduate students in the Department of Spanishand Portuguese before they start teaching language courses in the program. In addition, undergraduate students who are planning to become Spanish instructors can also take this course. One 3-hour class meeting a week.

Registration Requirements: Being a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. If undergraduate, having taken SPANISH 204 or equivalent at Northwestern University.

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.