Graduate Courses Spring 2010

SPAN W1113y
Rapid Reading and Translation in Spanish
Helene De Aguilar
T 6:10 - 8:00

3 pts. Prerequisites: Offered only to graduate students in GSAS.
This course, conducted in English, is designed to help graduate students from other departments gain proficiency in reading and translating Spanish texts for scholarly research. The course prepares students to take the Spanish Proficiency Exam that most graduate departments demand to fulfill the foreign-language proficiency requirement. Graduate students with any degree of knowledge of the language are welcome.

SPAN W4051
Introduction to Nahuatl
John Sullivan
M 2:10pm-4:00pm
WF 2:00pm-3:30pm

This introductory two-semester course in Older (Classical) and Modern Nahuatl will be taught live using distance technology. The learning objectives include: a) developing student oral comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and knowledge of language structure, as well as cultural wisdom and sensibility in order to facilitate their ability to communicate effectively, correctly, and creatively in everyday situations; b) providing students with instruments and experiences that demonstrate the continuity and differences between past and present Nahua culture through the study of colonial and modern texts and conversation with native speakers; c) penetrating into the historical, economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of Nahua civilization; d) preparing students to eventually take university-level humanities courses taught in Nahuatl alongside native speakers.
All students will be required to attend a language laboratory session on Wednesdays and Fridays at the Language Resource Center.

CLSP G6107
Medieval Iberian Saints
Patricia Grieve
T 12:10-3:00

3 pts. This course studies the literary, historical, religious and social conditions that produced Latin and Spanish broadly defined hagiographical narratives of the Iberian peninsula from the fifth century to the fifteenth, and considers the relationship between the production of hagiography and the development of popular and learned prose fiction in the medieval and early modern periods. We have learned over the past twenty years or so that hagiographic narratives provide windows into medieval beliefs and daily lives, and they have been particularly fruitful areas of study for our understanding of women and gender. In several cases, we will look at Greek, Latin, and French antecedents to the Spanish texts. Topics will include: Christian martyrs in al-Andalus, and Muslim converts to Christianity; relics and the trafficking of relics, authenticated and fake, and the special role of relics to nation-building; early Christian women’s travel narratives and how male confessors framed the women’s stories; martyrdom, miracles, pious lives; differences between male and female saints and their stories, monasticism, asceticism, and the function of time/space/ and place in hagiography; the relationship of Marian worship to courtly literature, and of both to the stories of converted prostitutes and secular misogynistic literature of the Middle Ages; historical documentation of peasants’ visions of saints and the Virgin Mary in thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century Castile. Reading knowledge of Spanish required, but the other texts are available in the original language and in English translation.

SPAN G6123
Justice and Injustice in Premodern Spain
Dale Shuger
R 3:10 - 6:00

3 pts. This course examines the representations of justice—divine and human—which are found at the heart of both literary and political discourses in the early modern Spanish period. Students will read canonical literary texts and will also read primary source discourses regarding the key juridical issues of the era: the prosecution/ persecution of religious, ethnic and political difference, the regulation of poverty, the rights and responsibilities of sovereigns before their subjects, and the regulation of supernatural and visionary experience. This course will give them the theoretical frame to consider literary and historical texts in dialogue.

SPAN G6293
Post-Abolition Brazil
Cesar A. Braga-Pinto
M 1:10 - 4:00

3 pts. In this course we will examine representations of (mostly inter-racial and male) friendship – and related concepts such as philanthropy, sympathy/ hostility, patronage and clientelism; fraternity, camaraderie, companionship, generation and bohemia; cordiality, nationality and (racial) democracy—between the abolition of slavery (1889) and the appearance of Gilberto Freyre’s main works in the beginning of the 1930’s. The goal is to understand how Brazilian writers struggled to imagine a modern nation in face of blatant social inequalities and the new exigencies of citizenship of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic and peripheral society. We will read works by authors such as Joaquim Nabuco, Adolfo Caminha, Machado de Assis, José do Patrocínio, Lima Barreto, Nestor Vítor, Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda and José Lins do Rego.

SPAN G6344
The Avant-Garde and Mass Media
Anke Birkenmaier
R 12:10-3:00

3 pts. This course explores the historical avant-garde’s involvement with the early mass media industry and its technologies, particularly radio broadcasting, cinema and photography. The rise of these media in the early twentieth century produced not only reflections on the total artwork and on the role of the visual and the aural, but in many cases a repositioning of authors and intellectuals in the public sphere. In this course we analyze early chronicles, poetry, experimental artworks, radio scripts, and movies to see how individual writers and artists engaged with the new possibilities offered by these media. Discussions of Frankfurt School criticism and recent media theory by Douglas Whitehead, Dominique Kahn, Hal Foster, Rubén Gallo, and Edmundo Paz Soldán will be paired with texts by Alejo Carpentier, Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Amado Nervo, among others.

SPAN G6420
Spanish Nationalism 1808-1898
Wadda Ríos-Font
T 3:10-6:00

3 pts. Most critical discussions of nationalism in Spain focus on the cases of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. However, the Spanish nation itself is a relatively recent historical construct, dating back to the end of the ancien régime in the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion and the Cádiz constitutional courts. Through analysis of theoretical works on nations, nationalism, national culture, and the role of literature in nation-building, in addition to close reading of literary and nonliterary primary texts, this course examines the political and symbolic figuration of the nation during the period leading up to the 1898 “Disaster”—the loss of the last colonies in the Spanish-American war.

SPAN G6509
Visions from Afar, Visions from Nearby
Alessandra Russo
W 1:10-4:00

3 pts. Between the 15th and the 17th centuries the expansion projects –and in particular the Iberian ones – stimulated an unprecedented fertile tension between the distant and the close, in geographical, historical and visual terms. Each session of this graduate seminar will be devoted to specific episodes – how to make a Jesuit mapamundi in Beijing (Matteo Ricci)? how to illustrate local plants and fruits in Mexico (Francisco Hernandez) or Goa (García da Orta, Cristovao de Acosta)? how to transform into copper plates the pages of the chronicles describing remote places for an European public (from the India of De Maares to the “Indies” of Las Casas through De Bry or Cornelis Claesz, but also Athanasius Kircher’ China Monumenta)? We will study also a number of textual and visual documents explicitly conceived to cross the ocean (Diego Muñoz Camargo from Tlaxcala, Guaman Poma de Ayala from Lucanas, both authors’ textual and visual works aimed to reach Spain), or the artistic “recipes” written in Spain but then used and reinterpreted by the Andean painters to prepare the colors and paint their canvases. From the Brazilian reframing of landscape or genre painting in Eeckhout’s or Frans Post’s masterpieces, to the display of farness through the objects of a Wunderkammern in Prague, or Naples, we will investigate how between the 15th and 17th centuries, new ways of making both remoteness and proximity visible were used and invented, tools that range from new challenges of ekphrasis to precise optical techniques of capturing.

SPAN G9811
Supervised Individual Research
TBA

3 pts. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus, typically in the fall and spring of their third year in the program.