Graduate Courses Fall 2012

SPAN W4415
Spanish American Poetry
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
TR 10:10 - 11:25am

3 pts. The aims of the class are twofold. 1) to explore the language of modern Spanish-language poetry and ways of approaching it; 2) to study major figures of the post-modernista Spanish-American poetry. Topics for discussion will include: theories of the lyric; the aesthetics of affect; hermeticism and colloquialism; the dramatic monologue; the prophetic voice; afro-cubanism; glossolalia; antipoesía. Critical/theoretical readings from Giorgio Agamben, Amado Alonso, Charles Altieri, Mark Edmunson, Roberto Frenández Retamar, Gustavo Guerrero, Frank Kermode, Octavio Paz, Michael Riffaterre, Guillermo Sucre, Leo Spitzer, Helen Vendler.

SPAN G6000
Didactics of Spanish Language and Culture
José Ruiz Campillo
F 1:10- 4:00pm

A course on the didactics of language that covers general questions about teaching methodology and the teaching of Spanish specifically. The course is composed of fifteen units that will address the following abstract and practical issues among others: the epistemology of language teaching and learning as reflected in the various methodologies, general and applied linguistics, the role of the teacher and the student, the planning of a curriculum, the preparation of syllabi, the evaluation of textbooks, the focus on form, and the cultural component of language teaching. Each topic will be accompanied by a bibliography, both in English and Spanish, produced by specialists from the United States, Latin America and Spain. Weekly class sessions will be complemented by class observation of student performance by the instructor.

SPAN G6112
New World Savants and Pedagogues
Ronald Briggs
W 3:10 - 6:00pm

From José Cecilio del Valle’s call for a legion of savants to study Spanish America and publicize its results to Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the school as an organizing principle of local government, Enlightenment blossoms in the New World as proposals for transformational schools—schools that will create new citizens and a new body politic.

At the same time that it takes on intrinsic importance as a social and political project, the school develops a rich analogical relationship with notions of personal and historical destiny. Life narratives (Sarmiento, Franklin) become metaphors for the national and regional independence, and the narrative structure of the bildung leaves its mark in essays, novels and magazines concerned (overtly or not) with the problem of public Enlightenment and popular education.

Focusing on the historical period between U.S. independence and the post-1898 consolidation of a firm north-south opposition, we will read essays, novels, autobiographies and magazines from the U.S. and Spanish America. In a time period marked by collaboration, multinational publishing projects, and lively expatriate communities, we will explore both the interactions between north and south and the broader hemispheric ramifications of the era’s most pressing questions: the relationship between education and aesthetics; the moral and political influence of the novel and life narrative; and the Enlightenment paradox of emancipation on the one hand, and educational coercion and control on the other. The course will be taught in English. Written assignments may be completed in English or in Spanish. Readings will be in English and Spanish with translations and/or alternate texts available.

SPAN G6224
Two Beginnings: Cinema/TV
Alberto Medina
R 1:10 - 4:00pm

An interval of sixty years (1896-1956) separates the arrival of Cinema and TV to Spain. Nevertheless, a reading of the polemical reactions to both moments presents us with constant and symptomatic analogies: the obsessive need to draw the lines that define the new media and defend the old ones from contamination or degradation; the fear of its uncontrollable effects on an un-prepared and defenseless audience or, conversely, its potential uses as a tool of indoctrination; the need of the intellectual and the critic to position himself as a necessary mediator to defend that same audience from the excesses of the new; the voices for and against institutionalized censorship. Simultaneously, for a brief period of time, the fear or the enthusiasm for the new media were fed by the expectations made possible by its initial lack of codification and constant technical evolution. Future possibilities, being more important than the present, limited achievements, were the focus of discourses of utopian or dystopian undertones. In a parallel way, the aesthetic and technological uncertainties were the sources of an explosion of experimental practices by those who ventured into the new media or assimilated its formal innovations in old media. Both dates coincided with two different waves of “Avant-Garde” movements.

The comparative study of both moments allows us to trace the evolution and continuities in the interactions between high and low cultural production (the need to question the limitations of such categories) and the positioning of intellectuals, critics and creators in a socio-cultural space reacting to a sudden irruption. The theoretical work of Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Jesús Martín Barbero, Jacques Ranciére or Pierre Bourdieu will allow us to frame the comparative study of two constellations of cultural materials:

The intellectual reaction to the arrival of Film in Spain would have, initially, three main groups as protagonists: The conservative intellectuals around Eugeni D’ors and its cultural nationalist Catalan movement, the “Novecentismo”; Two recently arrived Mexican writers (Alfonso Reyes and Martín Luis Guzmán) that, along with a Spanish Professor (Federico de Onís) received the commission of writing the first film criticism in Spain from Ortega y Gasset and, finally, young avant-garde writers such as Giménez Caballero, Francisco Ayala, García Lorca or Benjamín Jarnés (many of them also supported, influenced and published by Ortega).

Their polemical writings, film critiques and literary works (thematically focused on or aesthetically influenced by cinema) will be analyzed simultaneously to the work of the first Spanish film-makers such as Chomón, Gelabert or Soldevila or the first surrealist works by Buñuel.

Sixty years later, the reaction caused by the arrival of TV would have an extraordinary effect on left-wing writers and intellectuals that identified the new media with the Francoist regime and the pernicious Capitalist and American values that threatened to maintain the old regime with a new make-up. Oppositional figures such as the writer Vázquez Montalbán developed a radical and politicized critique of TV. On the other hand, many of the young film directors associated to both the “Nuevo cine español” and The “Escuela de Barcelona”, coming from similar ideological left-wing positions would get professionally involved in the new Spanish TV (Icaza, Aranda, Martin Patino, Armiñán, Zulueta). Hence they would be forced to negotiate a complex balance between the realization of minority, often experimental and politically combative films and commercial TV under the direct control of Francoist authorities. Political reticence would nevertheless be simultaneous to the discovery of new aesthetic possibilities in TV (new techniques of montage, alternative uses of time and rhythm, domestic settings) that soon would find a place in their feature films contributing to their experimental drive.

Polemical writings, cultural analysis, TV critiques, essays on Film Theory of the period will be studied along essential titles of the “New Spanish Cinema” and “The Barcelona School” and the TV programs that the same directors were simultaneously producing.

SPAN G6454 (cross listed as CPLS G6454)
Blood/Lust: Staging the Early Modern Mediterranean
Patricia Grieve
W 12:10 - 3:00pm

The period of bourgeois revolution framed by the 1812 Cortes de Cádiz and the 1868 Gloriosa uprising lays down the ideological foundations later crystallized in the Spanish First Republic and subsequent Bourbon Restoration--two periods of relative continuity which can be considered the advent of the modern Spanish state. A new concept of the individual as citizen and a complex process of civil and criminal codification produce novel conceptions of crime, criminals, and state power that find their way into the public imagination through the rise of the press and many works of high and popular literature. This course combines the study of cultural theory and criticism with that of primary sources (legal discourse, journalism, fiction), to examine the way in which crime becomes a veritable discursive formation that permeates and grounds modern Spanish culture.

SPAN G6530
Barbarisms in Latin America
Graciela Montaldo
T 1:10 - 4:00pm

The purpose of the course is to study the relationship between culture and politics in Latin America. In this sense, we suggest “Barbarism” is a main category to show the complex articulations during the modern period in two countries: Mexico and Argentina. This is a category consolidated in the modernizing discourse. We will focus on some concepts: violence, politics, intellectuals, transculturation, hybrid identities. We discuss canonical and non-canonical texts of Latin American Cultures and some visual representations. Literary texts have a lot to do with this visualization. It is doubtless in the Nineteenth century when the “barbarians” begin to exercise a clear political protagonism, but it is with the consolidation of the unified and centralized power of the State that they appear as a dangerous subject with which it becomes progressively necessary to come to terms and the works of art and literary texts made clear its presence. Since their appearance as a modern phenomenon, barbarians are seen as a danger, the source of social chaos, the root of violence and a threat to established institutions. Disciplines such as social psychology emerge in order to control, and to offer “scientific” explanations of, this menace to the elites.

Latin America is plagued with political movements which cannot be understood without taking into account the alliances with those barbarians on the margin of society and politics. Latin American intellectuals have considered this phenomenon ever since it first appeared and their reflections are registered in the literature and cultural discourses. Within the framework of the problem violence/politics/modernity, this category was used in cultural and political terms as the emblem of the nation in many texts regarded as crucial for the modernizing process in Latin America. Main authors to be discussed: S. Zizek, G. Agamben, H. Arendt, W. Benjamin, A. Cavarero (on violence); D.F. Sarmiento, M. Azuela, R. Fernández Retamar, O. Lamborghini, J.L. Borges, J. Revueltas.

SPAN G9811
Supervised Individual Research
Alberto Medina
TBA

SPAN G9901
Seminar on Literary and Cultural Theory
Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco
M 1:10 - 4:00pm

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to a set of theoretical questions and problems and to discuss the place of theory in literary and cultural studies. What does "theoretical thought" mean? The course will examine main authors and categories of the history of criticism, with texts organized into two sections. The first section will produce a discussion of categories and problems of the literary institution that will imply critically reviewing some keywords: culture, literature, author, intellectual, fiction, reading, genre, discourse. This section will evince a historical scope of theoretical problems. The second section will contain texts that will focus on different areas of literary and cultural reflection and on their relationship with each other. Within the frame of Modernity we will see how literature as an autonomous practice plots its links with culture, State, politics, hegemony, institutions, mass culture, and other exclusions. We will conclude by considering the problem of centers and peripheries in the production of theoretical knowledge.