Courses in Spanish
Spring 2010
[Please see the Directory of Classes for the timetable of courses with multiple sections. Readings, assignments, and class discussion in Spanish unless otherwise noted.]
SPAN 1101y
Elementary Spanish I
(multiple sections)
4 pts. Prerequisites: placement score 0-279 in the department's Placement Examination. An introduction to Spanish communicative competence, with stress on basic oral interaction, reading, witting, and cultural knowledge. Principal objectives are to understand and produce commonly used sentences to satisfy immediate needs; ask and answer questions about personal details such as where we live, people we know and things we have; interact in a simple manner with people who speak clearly, slowly and are ready to cooperate; and understand simple and short written and audiovisual texts in Spanish.
SPAN 1102y
Elementary Spanish II
(multiple sections)
4 pts. Prerequisites: SPAN W1101 or a score of 280-379 in the department's Placement Examination. An intensive introduction to Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on basic oral interaction, reading, witting and cultural knowledge as a continuation of Spanish W1101. Main objectives are to understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of immediate relevance; communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a direct exchange of information on familiar matters; describe in simple terms aspects of our background and personal history; understand the main point, the basic content, and the plot of filmic as well as short written texts.
SPAN 1120y
Comprehensive Beginning Spanish
(multiple sections)
4 pts. Prerequisites: a score below 379 in the department's Placement Examination or some previous exposure to the language. One-term intensive coverage of the contents of SPAN W1101 and SPAN W1102. A student may not receive credit for both SPAN W1120 and the sequence SPAN W1101-SPAN W1102.
SPAN 1201y
Intermediate Spanish I
(multiple sections)
4 pts. Prerequisites: SPAN W1102 or SPAN W1120, or a score of 380-449 in the department's Placement Examination. An intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on oral interaction, reading, writing, and culture as a continuation of SPAN W1102 or SPAN W1120.
SPAN 1202y
Intermediate Spanish II
(multiple sections)
3 pts. Prerequisites: SPAN W1201 or a score of 450-624 in the department's Placement Examination. An intensive course in Spanish language communicative competence, with stress on oral interaction, reading, witting and culture as a continuation of SPAN W1201.
SPAN 1208y
Spanish for Spanish-Speaking Students
Jesús Suárez García
MWR 10:35-11:50
3 pts. Prerequisite: a score of 450-624 (a placement recommendation of SPAN W1202) in the department's Placement Examination and oral fluency in Spanish. Designed for native and non-native Spanish-speaking students who have oral fluency beyond the intermediate level but have had no formal language training. (If you place below Spanish W1202 in the placement exam you should follow the placement recommendation received with your test results. If you place above Spanish W1202, you should take Spanish W3300. If in doubt, please consult the Director of the Language Programs.)
SPAN 1220y
Comprehensive Intermediate Spanish
(multiple sections)
4 pts. Prerequisites: SPAN W1102 or SPAN W1120, or a score of 380-624 in the department's Placement Examination. One-term intensive coverage of the contents of SPAN W1201 and SPAN W1202. A student may not receive credit for both SPAN W1220 and the sequence SPAN W1201-SPAN W1202 or the equivalent Barnard sequence SPAN BC1203-SPAN BC1204.
SPAN W3265y
Latin American Fiction in Translation
Alfred MacAdam
MW 9:10-10:25
3 pts. This course presents approximately 100 years of Latin American prose fiction and includes such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, and Machado de Assis.
SPAN W3300y
Advanced Language through Content
(descriptions of individual sections)
3 pts. Prerequisites: Fulfillment of the language requirement. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies unless exemption is granted by the Director of the Language Programs or the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
SPAN W3330y
Introduction to the Study of Hispanic Cultures
(multiple sections)
3 pts. Requirements: SPAN W3300. The course constitutes a wide-ranging consideration of cultural production with a view to making students aware of its historical and constructed nature. Students will explore concepts such as language, history and nation; culture (national, popular, mass, and and high); the social role of literature; the work of cultural institutions; globalization and migration; and the discipline of Cultural Studies. The course is divided into weekly units that address these subjects in turn, and through which students will also acquire the fundamental vocabulary for the analysis of cultural objects. Spanish W3330 gives students the conceptual framework with which to engage in the study of Hispanic culture in Spanish W3349 and Spanish W3350. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
SPAN W3349y
Hispanic Cultures I: Islamic Spain through the Colonial Period
(multiple sections)
3 pts. Requirements: SPAN W3330. This course provides an overview of the cultural history of the Hispanic world, from eighth-century Islamic and Christian Spain and the pre-Hispanic Americas through the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period until about 1700, and covering texts and cultural artifacts from both Spain and the colonial areas that would eventually become the various countries of Spanish America. Students will become familiar with major events and significant political, social and cultural trends in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas before the eighteenth century, including such topics as oral vs. manuscript vs. print culture, elite vs. popular culture, conquest and resistance, transculturation, and the links between cultural production and ideology. Emphasis will be placed on the historical context and on the development of close reading skills. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
SPAN W3350y
Modern Hispanic Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Present
(multiple sections)
3 pts. Requirements: SPAN W3330. This course surveys cultural production of Spain and Spanish America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students will acquire the knowledge needed for the study of the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic world in the context of modernity. Among the issues and events studied will be the Enlightenment as ideology and practice, the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the wars of Spanish American independence, the fin-de-siècle and the cultural avant-gardes, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century (Spanish Civil War, the Mexican and Cuban revolutions) and the Hispanic presence in the United States. The goal of the course is to study some key moments of this trajectory through the analysis of representative texts, works of art, and film. Emphasis will be placed on the historical context and on the development of close reading skills. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
SPPO W3410y
Language and Ideology
Ricardo Gualda
TR 11:00-12:15
3 pts. This course focuses on the most influential developments in discourse analysis in the context of language and ideology, applied to relevant discourses in Latin America. The five theoretical modules are: a) basic concepts in linguistics (Saussure and Benveniste), b) dialogue in discourse (Bakthin), c) Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough), d) discourse and ideology (van Dijk), and e) Cognitive Sciences (Lakoff). For each module, there will be a discussion session applying the methodological approaches to actual discourse. Students will write a 5-page essay (module notes) for each module either applying the theoretical framework at hand to a discourse corpus (related to Latin America) or relating the framework studied to another. They will also write a 15-page analysis of a discourse corpus (related to Latin America) as a final essay. In the final 2 sections of the course, they will have the opportunity to present their analysis and receive input from the class. Through the course, students will be required to meet with the instructor several times to tailor their module notes and final essay to their particular interests.
SPAN W3491y
Latin American Humanities II : From Modernity to the Present (in English)
(multiple sections)
3 pts. An introduction to the history and culture of Latin America, from the advent of modernity to the present, that is, after the foundational period of nation formation. The course will begin by addressing the phenomenon of modernity in a peripheral context in order to understand the specificity of cultural production in Latin America. The relationship between metropolitan discourses and their creative transformation in Latin America will provide a fertile ground for the study of the continent's history and cultural movements. The overarching concern will be to study how notions of Latin American culture were negotiated at certain historical turning points by different agents such as writers, artists, and politicians. Among the themes and topics examined will be positivism and cosmopolitanism, the close and contentious relationship between art and political engagement during the Mexican and the Cuban revolutions, the Boom of Latin American literature in the 1960s, the military dictatorships of the 1970s, and the migrations that have characterized the new global realities. Students are encouraged, but are not required, to take Latin American Humanities I (Spanish W3490). This course is on the "A list" of courses for the Major Cultures Core requirement. No knowledge of Spanish required, but students with knowledge of Spanish may read the works in the original. This course may count toward the major or concentration in Hispanic Studies and the concentration in Portuguese Studies.
SPAN W3566y
Cuba Inside and Out
Gustavo Pérez-Firmat
TR 1:10-2:25
3 pts. The class will study works of Cuban literature, mostly fiction, written inside and outside of the island during the last half-century. Authors to be discussed include: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Miguel Barnet, Zoé Valdés, Leonardo Padura, Mayra Montero, Reinaldo Arenas, Chely Lima, Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina García, and Richard Blanco.
SPAN W3574y
Realism in Hispanic Film
Alberto Medina
TR 2:40-3:55
3 pts. This course traces the development of a certain style and idea in Hispanic film. The conception of the film image not as a visual artifice or a vehicle of imagination but rather as an ethical representation of reality is at the chore of some of the most important films in Spain and Latin America. The assimilation of Italian Neorealism to different geo-political contexts offered Hispanic film-makers a privileged vehicle, not only to portray a social context in constant conflict but also to offer scripts of change from an aesthetic threshold conceived as always already political.
SPAN W3689
The Temple as a Cultural Artifact
Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco
MW 1:10-2:25
3 pts. In this course we are going to examine texts and other cultural objects produced during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period that deal with the creation of the politician as a public person, and politics as an occupation and a business. We will also be exploring the crucial relationships between politics and theology, and we will therefore be examining issues that are central to our own time and life experience. This course will have an interdisciplinary and transatlantic character, insofar as it involves texts, images (paintings, etchings, etc.), architecture, legal codifications, etc., that will lead us from the Iberian Peninsula and its cultural, religious, and linguistic differences, to the transoceanic expansion of the Hispanic Empire in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We will read, primarily, authors like Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Alfonso X, Gracián, or Cervantes, among others. We will also make comparative approaches with similar texts produced all over Europe, as Machiavelli, Erasmus, Hobbes, etc. Our mission is not only historical. We will also create the theoretical links with contemporary issues regarding politics as a public occupation as well as its consequences.
SPAN W3795
Surrealism
Anke Birkenmaier
TR 4:10-5:25
3 pts. This course familiarizes students with surrealism in its multiple media manifestations (poetry, narrative, visual arts, cinema). We will discuss notions such as the surrealist metaphor, automatic writing, convulsive beauty and manifesto art, and look at the trajectory of surrealism from its beginnings in France and quarrels with DADA artists to its popularization and adoption by artists and the mass media culture in Spain and Latin America. We will also consider recent works that engage in a dialogue with historical surrealism. Works by André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, Roberto Bolaño, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Remedios Varo.
SPAN W3991y
Senior Seminar: Travel, Empire and Cosmopolitanism in the Hispanic World
Ronald Briggs
W 5:40-6:55
4 pts. This course will work retrospectively through the transatlantic Hispanic tradition, analyzing essays, poems, novels and movies that locate themselves against the larger structure of an empire (be it US, British or Spanish) and its corresponding webs of translation and trade. While “travel writing” in the Hispanic tradition has long included accounts of the New World written back to Spanish readers, we will examine other vectors as well: texts written back to the New World by American travelers in Europe, Spanish and Spanish American impressions of the burgeoning US empire, and textual and cinematic attempts to position the local within a global community of observers, readers and/or viewers. Central topics include the manipulation of the trope of civilization vs. barbarity, the peripheral critique of global capitalism, the question of local vs. universal perspectives on culture, and, above all, the aesthetic and political agendas that further (and are furthered by) the notion of cosmopolitanism, that “placeless place” (in the words of Camilla Fojas) “that remains to be thought.”
SPAN W3998
Supervised Individual Research
Instructor: TBA
Time/Day: TBA
SPAN W4996
Spanish for the Legal Profession
Helene de Aguilar
MTWR 9:00-9:50