2014-15 Graduate Courses
FALL 2014
SPANPORT 401: Intro to Literature and Cultural Theory - The Letter in Latin America
This course has two goals. First, it seeks to familiarize students with Latin American intellectual traditions in the modern period. In order to do so, it surveys a representative selection of pivotal figures in three different, and crucial, historical moments: the post-revolutionary 19th century and its responses both to Independence and an emerging neocolonial order; the frenetic 1920s and 30s and the articulations of a properly Latin American identity and culture; and the late 20th century, which has witnessed an attempt to reckon with the failure of the revolutionary projects of the mid-century. Second, within and across these historical constellations, the course will analyze prominent conceptual paradigms that have defined intellectual discourse in the region, such as mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity, focusing particularly on their evolution and metamorphoses. As we consider the advent and waning of elite, lettered production’s influence and power to shape national and regional conceptualizations, we will pay special attention to how alterity, gender, and coloniality inflect the region’s intellectual production. Readings will be derived from a list of primary texts with supplements from other sources.
Instructor: Jorge Coronado
Offered: Th 2-4:50pm
SPANPORT 425: Studies in Contemporary Literature and Culture - Exile and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature
This course will examine 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 experiences as lenses through which to interrogate other aspects of Latino-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.
Instructor: Emily Maguire
Offered: TU 2-4:50pm
SPRING 2015
SPANPORT 415-0 Studies in 19th Century Literatures and Cultures
The course will discuss theories and practices of 19th-century European Realist novelists. It will explore the aesthetic and ideological foundations of Realist mimesis and representation. In particular, it will focus on the problematics of desire in Realist writing and the Realist construction of the modern image of the city. The literary city will be analyzed in relation to the development of urban planning and new spatial practices. We will read works by Honoré Balzac, Charles Dickens, Narcís Oller, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Émile Zola. All works will be read in their original language whenever possible, or in English or Spanish translations. We will visit the Art Institute to discuss Realist painting and nineteenth-century representations of the city and the urban experience.
Instructor: Elisa Marti-Lopez
Offered: M 2-5pm
SPANPORT 455-0 Comparative Studies in Latin America and/or Iberian Literature and Cultures: Latin American Avant-gardes: Poetics and Polemics
This course will host a critical discussion on the aesthetic and political dimensions of Latin American vanguardias, paying equal attention to the theories and programs of artists as to the polemics that stemmed from their work. Readings include manifestos, poetry and fictional prose along numerous thematic axes: the reconsideration of the popular; indigenismo, negrismo, antropofagia; nationalism/internationalism; rupture/continuity; utopias; the city and its relation to heterogeneities and confluences.
Instructor: Viviana Gelado
Offered: T 2-5pm
SPANPORT 496-0 Dissertation Prospectus Writing Workshop
Course Description: 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.
Instructor: Emily Maguire
Offered: TH 2-5pm
Winter 2015
SPANPORT 450-0 Cultures of the Image. Literature and Visual Culture in Contemporary Latin America
Course Description: This course will trace a possible genealogy of the rapport between literature and visual culture by looking closely at a number of literary and theoretical texts that differently address questions central to both literature and image culture: questions about how we experience and represent the world around us, perception, reproduction, memory and forgetting, history and knowledge. In particular, we will explore how photography has been since its advent a privileged figure in literature’s reflection on its own modes of representation. Reading texts by Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Jay, Didi- Huberman, Rancière we will pay close attention to their explicit discussions on the aesthetic image, photography, film and how they account for what is cultural about vision and what is visual about modern culture. Guided by these questions, we will throughout think about the relation between vision and language in the fiction of Borges, Cortázar, Onetti, Saer, and Puig.
Instructor: Maria Alejandra Uslenghi
Offered: TH 2-5pm
SPANPORT 495-0 Practicum in Scholarly Writing and Publication
Course Description: 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 to 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.
Instructor: Lucille Kerr
Offered: T 2-5pm