SPAN 110 is an introduction to Spanish and Spanish American cultures. This course is recommended for students who have either no previous training in Spanish or no more than two years of high school Spanish. It gives the student a basic understanding of and ability to use the language. Grammar is used as a point of departure for development of oral and written skills.
This course strives to teach students to understand sentences and common expressions and to communicate in simple terms simple aspects of their background (e.g., very basic personal and family information), the immediate environment (shopping, local geography, employment), and matters of immediate need. Three hours a week with the lecturer, plus two hours with a teaching assistant. For students without previous training in Spanish. This course prepares students for SPAN 120.
Limited to 15 students per section. Fall semester: Lecturers Aldea-Agudo, Twardy and Assistants. Spring semester: Lecturer Aldea-Agudo and Assistants.
2023-24: Not offeredSPAN 120 is a continuation of SPAN 110. This course is recommended for students who have the equivalent of three or four years of high school Spanish. This course will expand Spanish language skills with exercises in conversation, oral comprehension and composition, based on cultural and literary readings.
This course teaches students to understand the main points of conversation on familiar matters regularly encountered at work, school, leisure, etc., how to deal with situations that may arise while traveling in a Spanish-speaking country, and how to compose simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Students will learn how to describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. The class will be conducted entirely in Spanish. Three hours a week with the lecturer, plus one hour with a teaching assistant. This course prepares students for SPAN 130.
Requisite: SPAN 110, Spanish Placement Test or consent of the Language Coordinator. Limited to 15 students per section. Fall semester: Lecturers Aldea-Agudo and García and Assistants. Spring semester: Lecturers García and Twardy and Assistants.
2023-24: Not offeredWhile expanding on the grammar essentials covered in SPAN 120, this course helps the student further develop listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in Spanish. It is directed toward students who already have a good linguistic-communicative competency, broadening their contact with different kinds of texts, deepening their grammatical understanding, and enabling them to communicate through a variety of forms and registers. Upon completing the course, students should be able to make themselves understood with accuracy and fluency and participate easily in a wide range of formal and informal communicative situations. An array of literary texts and readings, not ordinarily considered literature and films, will be used. Three hours a week with lecturer plus one hour with a language assistant. Conducted entirely in Spanish. Prepares students for SPAN 199 and literature courses. This course counts for the major.
Requisite: SPAN 120, Spanish Placement Test or with permission of Language Coordinator. Limited to 15 students per section. Fall semester: Senior Lecturer Maillo and Assistants. Spring semester: Lecturers Garcia and Twardy and Assistants.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course emphasizes fluency speaking and is designed to provide students the opportunity to practice the language through discussion of selected texts and topics of interest. SPAN 135 prepares students to express opinions, ideas, points of view and critiques on debates, readings and films. With this goal in mind, this course will also provide exposure to other language skills important to the development of fluency in speaking Spanish. The course will meet for three hours per week with the lecturer and one hour with a teaching assistant. This course counts for the major.
Requisite: For students who have completed SPAN 130, Spanish Placement Test or with permission of Language Coordinator. Limited to 15 students per section. Fall semester: Lecturer García and Assistants. Spring semester: Senior Lecturer Maillo and Assistants.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course is designed specifically for native or heritage speakers of Spanish with oral proficiency but little or no formal training in the language. Generally, these are learners who were raised in homes where Spanish was spoken. The course is designed to build on the language base students already possess. Spanish-speaking students are not viewed as using an “improper” form of Spanish that is incorrect or needs to be eliminated. Rather, their language is viewed as an extremely valid means of oral communication. The primary purpose of this course is to develop reading and writing skills, although all of four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) are emphasized via cultural and community activities.
Limited to 15 students. Both semesters. Lecturer Twardy.
2023-24: Not offeredIn this course students will learn how to approach writing as a process. The emphasis is on writing as a communicative act rather than as a mere language exercise. As such, emphasis is given to the interaction between the author and the text, the target audience, and the purpose and message of the final product. In order to develop the necessary skills that good writers should have, the course will focus on expanding vocabulary, exploring rhetorical techniques for organizing information, developing strategies for writing, and characterizing the target audience(s). At the same time we will insist upon critical readings, and the processes of revising and editing. In addition, this course includes the study of written texts (narrative, description, poems, reports, essays, letters, etc.), and of literature's many genres and subgenres (prose, poetry, drama, etc.). This course counts for the major. Conducted entirely in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 130, Spanish Placement Test or with permission of Language Coordinator. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester: Senior Lecturer Maillo. Spring semester: Lecturer Aldea-Agudo.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course provides an introduction to the diverse literatures of the Spanish-speaking world over the course of six centuries, from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Students will learn the tools and critical vocabulary for advanced work reading the canon of Hispanic literatures from Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean Basin, identifying aesthetic trends and historical periods such as the Renaissance, the Golden Age, the Romantic era, realism and modernism. The syllabus will include a wide variety of authors of different national, political, and artistic persuasions and an array of linguistic styles. A medium- to high-level knowledge of the Spanish language and reasonable proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Spanish are required. This course counts for the major. Conducted entirely in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester: Professor Brenneis. Spring semester: Professor Suárez.
2023-24: Not offeredA survey course that provides an understanding and appreciation of the Spanish-speaking world (including both North and South America and Spain) through language, geography, history, economics, sociopolitical issues, folklore, literature and art. The different units in this course are geographically oriented, and they will focus on individual countries or particular Hispanic groups. Writing skills will be refined by the completion of research papers, and communication skills will be developed further by class discussions and oral presentations. Comprehension will be enhanced by presenting students with literary texts, movies, documentaries and periodicals. The course is conducted entirely in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, Spanish Placement Test or consent of Language Coordinator. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Senior Lecturer Maillo.
2023-24: Not offeredA survey course that focuses on the polyphonic literary production of Latinos in the United States, from the colonial period (Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca) and the age of independence (Eugenio María de Hostos, José Martí), to the Chicano Movement (Cesar Chavez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles), the Nuyorrican Poets (Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, Tato Laviera), the Puerto Rican Young Lords (Iris Morales, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán), and the contemporary period (Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, Esmeralda Santiago, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Junot Díaz). Attention will be given to various genres—poetry, fiction, chronicle, memoir, essay, and theater—exploring the continuity and change in a tradition made of distinct, often incompatible national groups like Mexican Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans in the mainland. Conducted in English.
Omitted 2011-12. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SPAN 228 and EUST 228.) Readings of plays by Spanish, English and French playwrights of what has been, in the modern world, the great century of the stage. Works of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Webster and Wycherly. Conducted in English. Students will read plays in the original languages whenever possible.
Limited to 40 students. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offeredThis class will introduce students to four fundamental literary and ideological periods of Dominican letters: late nineteenth-century nation formation essays, twentieth-century writing under the Trujillo dictatorship, mid-century women's poetry, and contemporary diaspora fiction. By examining a select series of essays, poetry, short stories, and fiction, we will explore the political construction of race, the implications of a brutal dictatorship, the impact of traumatic memory, and the calls for human rights action. The class will be conducted in Spanish (readings, assignments, and discussion).
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Suárez.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SPAN 232 and WAGS 232.) Twentieth-century Spanish women writers have carved out a particular niche in the canon of Spanish literature. Often envisioned as a single entity, they have distinguished themselves as individual writers, just as their male counterparts have. In reading contemporary novels, short fiction, essays and poetry authored by women, this course will consider how one defines an escritura femenina in Spain and what, if anything, differentiates the escritura femenina as a gendered space from other modes of writing. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offeredA critical overview of the role filmmakers from varied backgrounds have taken in interpreting similar trends in contemporary Spanish culture and society. By analyzing recent Spanish cinema along with selected fictional and non-fictional texts on current issues in Spain, we will explore such questions as women's roles in contemporary society, immigration and exile, globalization, and experiences of war and violence, among other themes. This course will take a transatlantic approach, examining how these issues are imagined within Spain as well as by filmmakers and writers from the Americas, and study the sociological, cultural and political forces that have inspired such cinematic representations. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offeredA panoramic, historical study of poetry and its aesthetic movements in Latin America (including Brazil) from the colonial period to the present. The course explores the way Spanish and Portuguese became the main language of aesthetic expression after the Iberian conquest but also analyzes forms of poetic resistance that aboriginal languages like Nahuatl, Mayan, Quechua, Mapuche, and Aymara have employed. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the astonishing seventeenth-century Mexican nun, starts a journey that continues with Modernistas like José Martí (Cuba) and Rubén Darío (Nicaragua), the Christian meditations of César Vallejo (Peru), the cosmopolitanism of Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), the motherly vision of Gabriela Mistral (Chile), the negritud of José Guillén (Cuba), and the symphonic endeavors of Pablo Neruda (Chile), Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil), and Octavio Paz (Mexico). Contemporary trends by poets born between 1930 and 1970 are also contemplated. In the region, poetry and politics always go hand in hand and the crossroads is the leitmotif of the course. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredA study of Spanish consciousness from the beginning through the Golden Age. Emphasis on the chivalric and picaresque traditions, mystical poetry, sacred and secular drama, and the invention of the novel. Conducted in Spanish.
For students who have completed SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offeredReadings from major writers of the Spanish generations of 1898 and 1927: Baroja, Machado, Valle-Inclán, Miró, García Lorca, Salinas, Alberti, Guillén, Cernuda. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offered(RC) Seventy years ago, the Spanish Second Republic was engaged in a civil conflict that had become a holy war to the European left and right. This course will examine the effects of the war and its passions upon the lives and works of several exemplary writers and artists in England (Orwell, Auden, Romilly, Cornford), France (Malraux, Bernanos, Simon), Spain (Machado, Hernández, Lorca, Picasso), the United States (Hemingway, Dos Passos), and South America (Neruda, Vallejo). Students are encouraged to read texts in the original languages whenever possible. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offered(RC) In 1989 the Berlin Wall was chiseled away, changing global culture and politics forever. In Eastern Europe, the rhetoric and divisions necessitated to fuel the cold war were transformed into new discourses of democracy and capitalist opportunities. In contrast, Cuba, remaining an iron-clad communist state, fell into a deep “periódo especial,” which ushered in a two-tiered economy greatly dependent on the European tourist industry. The revolutionary dream, many would argue, was then voided. Arguably, “fin-de-siglo” Cuba is a state in crisis. And a new, rich, often hypnotic, production of culture, film, and literature is available to give us a sensational glimpse of the latest of Cuban conditions. In this class we will be reading and screening some of the most outstanding materials from this period. Authors will include Abilio Estévez, Zoe Valdés, Pedro Juan Guttiérez, and Daína Chaviano. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Suárez.
2023-24: Not offered[RC] As a global city with a local identity, Barcelona resides both literally and figuratively at the border between Spain and the rest of the world. This interdisciplinary course will explore the in-between space this vibrant city inhabits at the turn of the 21st century, at once imagined as a tourist's playground in films and popular novels, while also actively guarding its particular Catalan cultural roots. Students will study architectural, literary, cinematic, linguistic and political movements set amid the urban cityscape of Barcelona, focusing on the city's role in the exportation of a unique Spanish and Catalan identity beyond Spain's borders. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offeredConsidered the heart of Spain by some and an authoritative figurehead by others, Madrid is unquestionably a space of cultural and political conflict while serving as a visible intermediary between the Iberian Peninsula and the world. Incorporating an interdisciplinary study of film, popular music, fiction, art, political movements, history and topography of the city, this course will seek to explore the place of Madrid in the Spanish and global popular imagination. Particular emphasis will be placed on the city's role in the Spanish Civil War, the urban culture of the Franco dictatorship, the movida madrileña of the 1980s, and the present-day role of Madrid in global politics, particularly as pertains to the 2004 terrorist attacks and their political and cultural aftermath. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 of consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offered[RC] In this class we will examine the historic and political settings that have shaped Puerto Rican migrations, as well as the constructions of Puerto Rican national and diaspora identity through seminal literatures and films. Industrialization of Puerto Rico, discourses of national transformation, economic failures, barrio culture, representations of moral decay, and manifestos of survival and new modalities of bi-culturalism will be interrogated in order to achieve a nuanced understanding of Puerto Rican realities both on the island and the mainland. Some of the authors to be explored include Pedro Rivera, Julia de Burgos, Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, and Piñero. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Suárez.
2023-24: Not offeredAn in-depth, multifaceted analysis of the philosophical, theological, esthetic, and political trends of the Argentine hombre de letras Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The course starts with his early poetry in Fervor de Buenos Aires, and concludes with world fame as one of the most influential 20th-century writers. Special attention is paid to his mid-career works, especially Otras Inquisiciones and Ficciones. Borges’ aesthetic and intellectual development is looked at against the current of Argentina’s political events and in the context of Latin American history. His views on God, death, memory, nationalism, and translation are explored as are his connection to the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the Icelandic sagas, Dante, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Nazism, and Gaucho literature. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(RC) An exploration of the Chilean writer’s life and work in the context of the Pinochet coup, the effects of the Cold War, and his exile in Mexico and Spain. Attention will be given to Bolaño as a self-professed outcast from the mainstream tradition in Latin American literature and his connection to Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Roberto Arlt, and Nicanor Parra, among other precursors. His stories (Last Evenings on Earth), novellas (Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, etc.), and portions of The Savage Detectives and 2666 will be analyzed in detail. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredAn exploration of the life and work of the prolific Chilean poet (1904-1973) and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work will be read chronologically, starting with Twenty Love Poems and a Song Of Despair and ending with his five posthumous collections. Special attention will be paid to Residence On Earth and Canto General. The counterpoint of politics and literature will define the classroom discussion. Neruda’s role as witness of, and sometimes participant in, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, the workers’ and students’ upheaval in Latin America in the sixties, and the failed presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile will serve as background. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offered(RC) A detailed study of the novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1967. Although other works written by the Colombian author will also be discussed (stories, essays, reportage, and fragments of other novels), the course will concentrate on the structure, style, motifs, historical and aesthetic context of the masterwork that brought him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Stavans.
2023-24: Not offeredDon Quixote de la Mancha and some of Cervantes' "exemplary novels" will be read, along with other Spanish works of the time, which were present at the novels' birth. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Not open to students who have taken SPAN 364. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Maraniss.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as SPAN 385 and WAGS 309.) [RC] In this course we will study the writings of women of Spanish America from 1556 to the end of the 19thcentury, focusing on writers who came from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Peru and Colombia. Their writings cover the colonial period as well as that of post-independence, and trace the ever-strengthening role of the female voice in Spanish American literature. There are the voices of an early settler in Argentina and Paraguay, three nuns (Catalina de Erauso, transvestite and soldier; the incomparable Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and the visionary Madre Castillo) followed by an important group of 19thcentury women who were finally able to make a living by their pen. The most famous of these is Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who wrote the first antislavery novel of the Americas, eleven years ahead of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most of them knew and supported each other by ties of friendship and a strong professional network. In all of these voices one will hear articulated the desire for the right to express themselves as women and to be heard in a field that was decidedly masculine and often hostile to their efforts. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2011-12. Visiting Professor Scott.
2023-24: Not offeredThis course will look at some of the most important texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century in order to trace the importance that food played in the colonization and development of Spanish America: Columbus (his initial encounters; search for spices; concerns about feeding his fleet); Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Miguel León Portilla (the conquest of Mexico--are you what you eat?); Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's odyssey of hunger in the U.S. Southwest; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, first official chronicler of the Indies and their flora; the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (first important mestizo historian) on the beginnings of the food exchange; Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela on the association between coca and witchcraft in colonial Potosí.
Nuns had their own rules about fasting and discipline of the body: we will look at Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her late seventeenth-century contemporary Madre María de San José and also examine the turmoil caused by nuns’ unwillingness to give up drinking chocolate. We will study the famous eighteenth-century Castas Paintings, which pair racial mixtures and autocthonous foods, as well as Concolorcorvo’s travels and his descriptions of the food practices of the gauchos. While poet Andrés Bello celebrated the fertility of the tropical American land, Argentina´s foremost woman writer, Juana Manuela Gorriti, created a celebrity community cookbook which offers a fascinating glimpse of her social, literary and economic context. We will read works by both writers. Since travel literature was an important genre in this century, we will also read Argentine Eduarda Mansilla de García´s 1861 narrative of her visit to the United States and her impressions of the country and of the food. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Scott.
2023-24: Not offeredPostwar Spanish novelists were often subject to censorship and overt oppression by the Franco dictatorship while they struggled to understand their own history and translate it onto the page. In this course, we will study the historical and cultural background of dictatorship and democratic Spain (1940-present), reading novels and short fiction that reflect the diversity of modern Spanish literature and its authors. In addition, students will read historical accounts and critical/theoretical materials in order to gain a more complete understanding of how scholars approach the era and its reflection in literature, and view films that attempt to grapple with questions of history and narration in postwar Spain. Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offered"Exile" is both a person who is forced to leave his or her native country and a state of exclusion; both an individual and an experience. In this course, our study of exile will encompass the individual writers, artists and thinkers who were exiled from their homelands as well as the reasons, confusions and consequences that the experience of exile produces. We will trace poets such as Cristina Peri Rossi, the authors Jorge Semprún and Gabriel García Márquez, works of art like Pablo Picasso's Guernica, and films such as Luís Buñuel's Viridiana, among other examples, as they enter into states of exile and self-consciously examine their own limbo between two countries. Many of these individuals and works of art left Spain or Latin America because of their political opposition to the ruling regime; we will delve into the historical, political and cultural backgrounds that resulted in their exile. In addition, we will linger over the larger questions exile raises: Can the exile ever return home? Are the children of exiles also exiles? Can we generalize about the exile experience? Conducted in Spanish.
Requisite: SPAN 199, 211 or 212 or consent of the instructor. Omitted 2011-12. Professor Brenneis.
2023-24: Not offeredThe Department calls attention to the fact that Special Topics courses may be offered to students on either an individual or group basis.
Students interested in forming a group course on some aspect of Hispanic life and culture are invited to talk over possibilities with a representative of the Department. When possible, this should be done several weeks in advance of the semester in which the course is to be taken.
Fall and spring semesters.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024One single course.
Fall semester. The Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025