Global Arc

This course offers a close listening to some of the most important Brazilian songs. Each class will be dedicated to one or more artists (composers and interpreters) offering an in-depth study of their songs and styles. Samba, Bossa Nova, Tropicália, and other movements will be studied through listening and lyrics training, and a weekly writing blog in Portuguese. Each student will build a repertoire of favorite songs to be presented in a final collective podcast.

Brazilian cinema has experienced a major resurgence since the late 1990s, exhibiting a wide array of thematic concerns and formal approaches: from critically acclaimed documentaries to the commercial success of "City of God." After an introduction to the Cinema Novo of the 1960s in the context of other contemporary movements, this course will focus on how more recent filmmakers have engaged questions of Brazilian cinema's relationship to the state, to social conditions, and to the international marketplace. Recurrent and emerging trends will also be discussed (e.g. a preoccupation with the Amazon, urban violence, literature, and music).

Among the questions that define the nature of nonfiction film, one of the principal ones is the question of responsibility towards those one wants to film. Documentaries about the "enemy" or the "adversary" constitute the most extreme manifestation of this problem, and can therefore be seen as the most radical testing ground for nonfiction film. This seminar will explore the dilemmas faced by documentary filmmakers who choose to represent the enemy, be it a war enemy, a class antagonist, a political opponent, a social monster, a dictator, a torturer, or an ambivalent friend.

This course will focus on the work of the best known Brazilian writer, Machado de Assis (1839-1908). We will read and study one of his masterpieces, [Epitaph of a Small Winner] (1881), some of his short tales, as well as his last romance, [Counselor Ayres' Memorial] (1908). Through the analysis and discussion of recent critical texts on Machado's work, we will be able to perceive that some of the most disturbing social issues of contemporary Brazil can already be found in his plots, thus raising questions on the relationship between literature and society, present and past, writing and politics.

This course will examine the role played by spatial forms and representations, topographies, landscapes, and urban cities in Luso-Brazilian poetry. The Lisbon of Fernando Pessoa, the landscapes of Recife, Sevilha in the poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto, and the modernity of Brasilia as conceived by the Concrete avant-garde will be the main focus of analysis. The course will be taught in Portuguese, but translations of the texts in English and Spanish will be available.

Designed for students already fluent in Spanish, this course aims to introduce them to the Portuguese language and its literatures. Through intensive work with grammar and extensive reading, students will develop a reasonable competence in the language in just one semester. Using short stories, essays and sample texts drawn from various sources of the Portuguese-speaking world (mainly Brazil, Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa), they will learn to practice different styles in creative, argumentative, and analytical writings. During the second half of the course, special emphasis will be paid to literary texts, both in prose and poetry.

This seminar will focus on how intellectuals phantasize the uniqueness of Brazil and Latin America, and how they conceive the differences between "Iberoamerica" and the United States. The centuries-old Shakespearean geography in The Tempest will be studied, in order to situate, in the imagination of those intellectuals, Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero. The goal of this seminar is to understand how the North-American mirror works in shaping an alluring Latin American (Brazilian and Spanish American) "difference" that can be at once enchanting and deceptive.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores different writers' representations of urban experience, and how the evolution of cities has been shaped by writing. Issues to be approached will include the impact of technological developments and urban transformations on literary imaginaries and city life; the interface between literacy, orality and visual cultures; relationships between fiction, poetry, and social history; dichotomies between urban and natural; intersections between modernity, writing, and city planning.

Do plants think? Do forests have a language? Are our bodies separate from the environment? Are we substantially different from what we once called "nature"? Such questions have been emerging in philosophy and literature, bringing to light new forms of knowledge that are both integrative and holistic. This seminar will discuss the visual arts, literature and musical experiments produced by thinkers (Indigenous or otherwise) who can help us imagine a planet where, differently from our current world, we may still be able to survive.

This course examines the history, cultural production, and revolutionary thought of Portuguese-speaking Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, during the liberation process broadly conceived, from the first expressions of nationalism in the late 1800s to the post-colonial challenges of today. By examining mainly literature and social thought, but also music, cinema, the press, diaries, letters, and pieces of legislation, among other objects, we will explore the imaginations of class, race, gender of revolutionary movements and moments of Portuguese-speaking Africa.