Winter 2024 Courses

Winter 2024 Courses

Undergraduate Upper Division Courses

SPA 100 Principles of Literary Criticism
Charles Oriel

SPA 113 Spanish Pronunciation
Travis Bradley

Este curso se centra en la fonética y la fonología del español moderno. Se explorarán de manera sistemática y formal las similitudes y diferencias entre los sistemas fónicos del español y del inglés. También se prestará atención a las diferencias dialectales que existen entre las principales variedades de español que se hablan en el mundo. Este curso es de particular interés para futurxs docentes que buscan formalizar su comprensión de los sistemas fónicos del español y del inglés para ayudar a lxs futurxs estudiantes en cuestiones de pronunciación. Este curso se impartirá enteramente en español.

Pre-requisitos: SPA 24 or 33; no es obligatorio pero se recomienda LIN 1

SPA 114N Contrastive Analysis
Agustina Carando

SPA 123 Creative Writing
Jonathan Mulki

SPA 131N Span Lit 1700 to Present
Charles Oriel

SPA 139 Modern Spanish Theater
Diana Aramburu

SPA 142 Spec Top: Spanish Cul/Lit
Cristina Martinez-Carazo

SPA 150N Latin Amer Lit to 1900
Leo Bernucci

SPA 167 Borders Hispanic World
Emily Vazquez Enriquez

SPA 175 Topics Latin Amer Cul
Michael Lazzara

50 Years after the Coup: Politics, Memory, and Culture in Contemporary Chile

Fifty years after General Pinochet’s military coup (1973-1990) that violently overthrew President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected, socialist government (1970-1973), Chile stands as an international symbol of the horrors of dictatorship, the power of grassroots mobilization, and the struggle to forge democracy in the aftermath of political violence and state-sponsored repression. Since October 2019, Chile has again figured prominently in world news as massive protests have broken out in which citizens are questioning the very fabric of Chile’s social and economic system; they are demanding deep change and an end to discrimination and socioeconomic inequality as the country seeks to create a new constitution. This course will start with the “October Revolution” of 2019 and work backwards in time to understand the past that led to it. It will introduce students to the battles that have been waged in Chile over history and memory, the struggles of human rights activists, the tireless quest for truth and justice, and the emergence of powerful social movements. From an interdisciplinary perspective, students will analyze topics such as the revolutionary experience of the 1970s; political violence under dictatorship; censorship; the role of film and literature in the battle for truth; forms of social resistance; the idea of justice; and the consolidation of democracy after periods of political upheaval. Students will also work to connect the Chilean case to a broader understanding of Latin American and global realities, particularly the current moment we are living in the United States.

Students need not know anything about Chile to enroll in this course. They will work closely with excerpts from novels, short stories, songs, poems, films, testimonies, historical accounts, essays, political speeches, and journalism produced in Chile since the 1960s.

SPA 178A Spanish for the Professions
Agustina Carando

Portuguese Undergraduate Courses

POR 003 Elementary Portuguese
Eugenia Magnolia Da Silva Fernandes

POR 021 Portuguese Composition I
Eugenia Magnolia Da Silva Fernandes

POR 031 Portuguese for Spanish Speakers
Robert Newcomb

POR 136 20th C Masters in Brazilian Literature
Leopoldo Bernucci

Graduate Courses

SPA 207 History of the Spanish Language
Travis Bradley
Mondays, 4:10-7:00 pm Hart 1106
Este seminario presenta un estudio de la variación lingüística en el español a través del tiempo. Se examinarán los principales cambios estructurales desde el periodo del latín hablado, provocados por el cambio natural de la lengua y por influencias externas, hasta dar con la lengua moderna. Se prestará especial atención al judeoespañol, conservado durante más de 500 años por los judíos sefardíes, expulsados de España en 1492. El judeoespañol servirá de "laboratorio diacrónico" que permite explorar tanto la estructura lingüística del español medieval como la naturaleza del cambio lingüístico en general. Esta visión diacrónica permite comprender mejor la estructura dialectal del mundo hispanohablante contemporáneo.

Required text:

Ralph J. Penny, 2014, Gramática histórica del español: Edición actualizada.

Prerequisite:

Spanish linguistics or phonetics/phonology is recommended but not required.

 

SPA 224 Studies of a Major Writer, Period, or Genre in Spanish Literature-Examining the madre rebelde: A Transatlantic Study of Motherhood in Contemporary Luso-Hispanic Fiction.
Diana Aramburu
Wednesday, 4:10-7:00, Olson 109

In recent years, maternal chronicles, oftentimes autobiographical texts examining any aspect of mothering, have experienced an extraordinary boom in the editorial market of the Spanish-speaking world. Critics consider this boom to be intimately connected to the popularity of mommy blogs and more recently, of mommy influencers on Instagram. While scholars are certainly taking note of this editorial phenomenon and research has been done on maternal writing more generally, one area that requires further investigation is the representation of women’s prenatal and postpartum lives. In the intersection of medical humanities and maternity studies, this course will investigate the portrayal of the pregnant and postpartum body in maternal narratives of the Luso-Hispanic world that document women’s physical, emotional, and mental transformations during these periods. Maternal chronicles reveal how prenatal care and childbirth often involves converting the pregnant woman into a spectator of her pregnancy and labor, requiring her docility and the acceptance of the medicalization of her body. And yet, while prenatal care and childbirth are characterized by medical oversight, maternal chronicles illustrate that postpartum care relies heavily on popular culture, replacing healthcare professionals, but also requiring a silencing and docility during the postpartum experience in favor of prescribed maternal performances. By adapting their own prenatal or postpartum experience, the maternal chronicles that we will analyze in this course break free from the male “I” (voice) and the male gaze (image) that has dominated the representation of the pregnant and postpartum body and experience, and instead, it is the mother’s words (text) and body (image) that take centerstage, replacing narratives that are not written from the female body.

To arrive at redefinitions of maternity and caregiving, feminist critics and researchers propose that we start by giving visibility to motherhood and everything it entails, be it infertility, pregnancy, miscarriages, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childrearing, among others. One of the questions we will attempt to answer in this course is: What spaces are there currently in which the emotions and experiences of these stages can be shared, and what are the new spaces that need to be created for narrating motherhood and for maternal protagonism? What are the fictional spaces where mothers can be the protagonists of their motherhood narratives without succumbing to a patriarchal or neoliberal motherhood or to the medical institutions that commodify or pathologize maternal bodies? What does it mean to politicize motherhood and to be/become a madre rebelde?

 

SPA 279 Mexican Narrative
Emily Vazquez Enriquez
What does it mean to be human? Drawing on the fields of the environmental humanities, disability
studies, indigenous studies, animal studies, crip theories, and posthumanism, this course examines
cultural representations and lived experiences of the intimate and complex relationships between
bodies, environments, and extractive systems. Central to our discussions will be the study of 20th
and 21st-century Mexican, Central American, and Latinx literary and artistic productions that portray some of the most recurrent ways in which human and nonhuman beings are affected by anthropocentric formulations. We will analyze the different systems of exclusion that are not only sustained but many times produced by mainstream definitions of the human. Because of this, we will attend to the legal, ethical, and affective dimensions of the most commonly accepted ontological categories. In our discussions, we will rethink the boundaries established by the human/nonhuman binary. We will pay special attention to the gendered, ableist, and racial dynamics produced within the human-centered frames of extractive practices.

POR 031G - Portuguese for Spanish-Speaking Graduate Students
Eugenia da Silva Fernandes
Mon/Wed/Fri 10:00-10:50, Hart 1116

This course follows an in-person format. Class time is used to build social interactions and theoretical foundations through the Portuguese language. Outside the in-class interactions, students are required to complete homework assignments, readings, and projects. POR 031G aims to develop graduate students' contrastive and interactional competencies, focusing on pronunciation features, vocabulary, and grammar. Unit topics will be presented contemplating Portuguese-speaking communities' contemporary issues with underlying comparative themes such as accentuation, official orthography, verbal tenses, lexical differences, treatment pronouns, cognates, adverbs, linking words, determinants, discourse markers, direct and indirect speech, numbers, and gender agreement under the Pluricentric theories. Oral proficiency will also be practiced with peers from the Federal University of Acre (Amazonia, Brazil). Upon successfully completing this course, students will be able to communicate in oral and written Portuguese at an intermediate-high proficiency level, according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Textbook: Plural: Português Pluricêntrico (Fernandes, Eugênia; Silva, Leonardo; Mello, Tatiana; Almeida, Camila, 2023).