Global Arc

As on the entire planet, the tragic coronavirus pandemic has profoundly affected social relations, the interpretations of the present, and the imagination of the future in Spain. In this course we will explore narratives around the COVID-19 as part of a cultural trend of using dystopian and apocalyptic imagery to represent contemporary reality and possible futures. Through the analysis of texts of different genres (literature, cinema, television, etc.) published between the beginning of the 21st century and 2020, we will discuss the role of culture in the current state of emergency as well as in other moments of crisis.

Latin America is a land of poets who believe in the power of language and the craft of verse. If, according to Vicente Huidobro, the poet is a little god who can create new worlds with words, revolutionary poet Roque Dalton believed that poetry could change history. "La poesía es como el pan; debe ser compartido por todos," said Neruda. This course offers a brief history of modern Spanish American poetry from modernismo to slam poetry through a stellar row of Latin American poets and Nobel awardees, including César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Roque Dalton, and Cecilia Vicuña.

This co-taught course will explore relations and contrasts between the Portuguese and Spanish colonial experiences in America from the late 15th to 18th century and their later uses in contemporary Latin American national discourses. The course will focus on the first texts of the conquest and the writings of figures such as Ercilla and Camões, António Vieira and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as on 20th-century novel, cinema, music, and essay. This comparative approach is intended to stimulate students into dialogue between the languages and cultures of both traditions.

Possible topics might include: modernity, empire, and colonialism, European travel literature in Latin America, the encounter of Latin America, and North American cultural traditions. One three-hour seminar. Prerequisite: a 300-level Spanish course or instructor's permission.

This course explores the [Quijote] within the context of key cultural and ideological debates from which Cervantes forged his text. Spain's imperial ambitions and domestic realities, issues of authorship and authority, the impact of print, and the representation of madness will receive particular attention.

This course will explore a wide range literary productions that concern the Spanish government's efforts to discursively forge a unified political body out of culturally disparate and distant territories and peoples during the early modern period. We will pay particular attention to the representation of individuals who were considered to be inferior members of the body politic or not to belong to it due to their gender, ethnicity, or low birth, and will examine their strategies for resisting or coping with marginalization.

This seminar explores darkening technologies in contemporary Latin America as the main tools of a new poetics that strongly challenges vision and its alleged ability to "clearly" generate knowledge. We will explore a variety of artifacts that discard the eyes in favor of experiences of blindness, obscured vision, and tactile sensation that interrogate the visual imperative. I propose that opacity, darkness, and blindness are poetic mechanisms that can stand up to the authoritarian regime of vision and question the insidious ways in which light suffuses peripheral knowledge, politics, and bodies.

This course is designed to serve as an advanced introduction to the study of contemporary Spain. It will provide students with methodological, analytic and bibliographical tools to conduct academic research in topics related to post-1898 Spain, such as colonialism, dictatorship, memory, violence, war, diaspora and exile, democracy, social struggles and cultural movements.

This seminar relates Caribbean music to historical and contemporary migratory issues. It examines questions of listening, memory, joy, diaspora, and the Anthropocene through genres like: son, bolero, calypso, salsa, reggae, merengue, bomba, and reggaeton. Attention to gender, sexual and racial inequities in portrayals of migrant cultures as symbolic of multiculturalism, while migrants are stigmatized as risks to security. Seminar speaks to current global context of displacement with focus on climate change's impact on the Caribbean. We study music, sound, performance, literary, ethnographic and historical texts, visual arts, and journalism.

This course, open to both undergraduate and graduate students, explores Cervantes' highly experimental fiction. Known as the author of the immensely innovative 'Don Quijote', Cervantes is credited with writing the first modern European novel, with a daring exploration of human madness, a satire of New World conquistadors, the Inquisition and more. Yet he is equally bold and experimental in his daring short stories, the `Novelas ejemplares', and the work that he was certain would be his legacy, the 'Persiles'. In this class we will consider Cervantes' rethinking of cultural models in his articulation of the modern human subject.