Graduate courses offered Fall 2005 - Spring 2006
Port 5540 - Fall 2005
Literatures & Cultures of Lusophone Africa
Prof. Russell G. Hamilton, Jr.
This course will be an advanced-level introduction to the cultures and literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa, namely: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and S?o Tome & Principe. Through an interdisciplinary focus that includes history, literature, and intellectual thought/critical theory, students will become acquainted with the key cultural problematics related to Lusophone Africa and the various individual countries in question. This will be a unique opportunity for students to become acquainted with a cultural reality that is rarely studied in the context of African Studies or even in Portuguese courses throughout the United States. In this course, some of the more compelling topics in the humanities today will be studied through the cultural and historical prism of the Lusophone African experiences: colonialism and (post-) or (neo-)colonialism; Pan-Africanism and Negritude; wars of liberation and Third World Marxism; national identity formations; the politics of race, gender, and sexuality; the travails of democratization and modernization; the challenges of re-construction and peace-making; and a possible future for (Lusophone) Africa in a globalized world. Throughout this course, important cultural links will be established with other regional or national realities such as Africa (as a whole), Brazil, Portugal, Spanish-speaking America, and the United States.
Work load: This course will be taught in Portuguese but discussions may take place in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.Reading material will be primarily in Portuguese with some critical readings in English.
SpPt 5999- Fall 2005
Teaching College-Level Spanish and Portuguese
Prof. Carol Klee & Dr. Susan McMillen Villar
The main purpose of SPPT 5999 is to help Graduate Instructors engage in reflective foreign language teaching by providing them with an understanding of language acquisition theory as applied to foreign language instruction at the college level and an understanding of how current theory translates into practice. The latter will be accomplished through a series of hands-on "practical application" activities. In addition to coming to class prepared to discuss assigned readings, students will be expected to complete three class observation reports, biweekly teaching journals, a pedagogical materials portfolio, written exams, and a course project.
Span 5106 - Fall 2005
The Lit. of Reconquest & Feudal Spain
Prof. Barbara Weissberger
This course surveys the medieval literary canon, from the jarchas to Celestina. Our study of these texts will address their complex sociohistorical context: the conflictive convivencia of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish culture, the struggle for power between the aristocracy and the monarchy and between clerical and secular/court culture, and the ongoing interaction of orality and literacy. We will focus on the gradual emergence of a national identity founded on a masculinist warrior ideology of Christian and Castilian hegemony and partially achieved through the exclusion of stigmatized Others. The course begins with an introduction to the theoretical formulations of the "new medievalism" which are helping reshape the foundations of Spanish national identity and culture. At the end of the course we will briefly consider modern appropriations of "the medieval" such as Becquers use of medieval settings or Borges’s retelling of a story in El Conde Lucanor, in order to understand both the alterity and continuity of Spain's medieval culture.
Span 5111 - Fall 2005
Contemp. Spanish Literature Since 1915
Prof. Ofelia Ferrán
Span 5526 - Fall 2005
Creole Consciousness & Mercantilist Cultures
Prof. René Jara
Span 5711 - Fall 2005
Structure of Modern Spanish—Phonology
Prof. Timothy Face
This course provides an introduction to some of the major topics in Spanish phonology and their treatments within modern linguistics. A working knowledge of Spanish articulatory phonetics is assumed. Throughout the course we will build on this previous knowledge and examine the various approaches taken to phonology, from experimental methods to different formal theories. Following this course, students will be prepared for more advanced study in phonology including undertaking their own research projects in this area. While lecture will be used to introduce concepts, the majority of class time will be spent discussing the course readings.
Span 5716 - Fall 2005
Structure of Modern Spanish—Pragmatics
Prof. Francisco Ocampo
This course constitutes an introduction to the field of pragmatics. The main topics of the discipline are discussed: deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts and conversational analysis. The target audience is graduate students.
Required Text: Stephen Levinson. /Pragmatics/. Cambridge University Press.
Span 8900 - Fall 2005
Spanish Seminar [Feminist Approaches in Spanish, Latin American and Latina/Chicana Studies]
Prof. Joanna O’Connell
Spring 2006 Course descriptions
Port 5910 - Spring 2006
Topics in Lusophone Cultures—Fictions of Empire
Prof. Ana Paula Ferreira
This course will introduce students to a set of literary and visual texts from Portugal and Brazil featuring empire as fantasy to be fulfilled, historical reality to be denounced, exorcised or further mythified, and/or ever returning unsettling phantom. Readings will follow a chronological order, and will be discussed along with interpretative materials in a comparative, cross-cultural framework, informed by postcolonial theory and, especially, critical race theory. The course will begin with the study of epic and counter-epic representations of Portuguese maritime expansion in the Renaissance and their echoes in Portuguese and in Brazilian Romanticism. We will then move on to a parodic epic of the discovery of urban, modern Brazil, and to poetic reflections of post World War I Portugal in the context of late European imperialism. The last part of the course will focus on re-readings of colonial history from the perspectives of contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian writers, film makers, and cultural commentators. The course will close with a short story by a self-fashioned Portuguese-American ethnic writer and a look at Barbie Doll "Princess of the Portuguese Empire" in the context of the new imperial order of globalization. Two oral presentations, three reading journals, and a final paper required. Students present and discuss final papers on the last day of class.
Spanish 5528
Popular Literary Consciousness 1900-1950
Prof. Luis A. Ramos-García
Relevant, and drawing on the theoretical perspectives and methods used in a variety of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as on the established field of Cultural Studies, this course will focus on the critical assessment of Spanish-American literature between the eve and aftermath of two world wars. Ranging from traditional textual analysis to ethnographic observation, this pluralistic approach will also build up coursework and further examination of cultural trends deeply ingrained in Latin American fictional texts (novels and short stories), generated by the clash between tradition and modernization, and the treatment of nationalistic, populist and neo-indigenous thought.
Students will confront topics concerning the understated importance of rural / urban everyday life and their relationship with issues of identity, popular memory, and resistance, as expressed through ritual, the body, social movements, myths, and by the foundation of an incipient Latin American canonical literature. Although it is apparent that all themes and subject matters addressed here will emphasize both historical and contemporary familiar perspectives since the 1900s on, the main focus of our attention will attempt to answer questions dealing with the early establishment of mainstream ideologies and the reinforcement of power relations; the construction of civic spaces for negotiation and contestation between people of unequal power; the fabrication of themes expressed by popular culture throughout history; the uneasy invention of modern consciousness molded by the encounter between Popular Culture and Human and Civil Rights movements in Latin America (state violence and impunity, rights of indigenous peoples, women, and ethnic and gender minorities).
Students will be exposed to narratives that present particular viewpoints of the above mentioned questions, applying the insights of some discourses against others to challenge, extend, or simply reorganize them in a better fashion. The ultimate goal is to help us better understand the crucial role popular literatures and cultures played in shaping the way Latin Americans perceived and interpreted the world.
Grades will be determined by:
Mid-term (Take-home) Exam: 30%.
Essay: 30%.
Oral presentation: 20 %.
Participation: 20 %.
Spanish 5717
Spanish Sociolinguistics
Prof. Carol A. Klee
The focus of this course is on sociolinguistic variation and cross-dialectal diversity in different varieties of Spanish in Latin America and Spain. It includes a critical examination of the relationship between language use and social factors in the Spanish-speaking world. In addition, field methods appropriate for the investigation of sociolinguistic issues within Spanish-speaking communities will be analyzed. The two textbooks for this course, Silva-Corvalán’s Sociolingüística y pragmática del español (2001) and Blas Arroyo’s Principios de sociolingüística y sociología del lenguaje (2005), will be supplemented with primary research articles focusing on current issues in Spanish sociolinguistics.
Spanish 5721
Spanish Laboratory Phonology
Prof. Timothy Face
Throughout this course we will study many of the ways that experiments of varying types (acoustic, perception, acquisition, etc.) can be used to investigate issues in Spanish phonology, from reconsidering traditional issues in Spanish phonology to examining issues not able to be considered without an experimental approach. We will read much of the (very recent) literature that takes an experimental approach to Spanish phonology, discuss the issues involved with conducting experiments, learn to design different types of experiments, and learn to critique experimental methods. The majority of class time will be spent in critical discussion of studies based on experimental methodologies. Each student will also design and carry out an experimental phonology study that will result in a substantial final paper.
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Span 8900
Spanish Seminar (Cross-Listed with CompLit 8910, Sec. 03) Spanish/Spanish American Baroque Professor Nicholas Spadaccini
Seminar on Peninsular/ Spanish American Baroque/ NeoBaroque for advanced MA and Ph.D students. Focus on dialectic of containment and freedom. Substantial amount of reading of theoretical/critical materials available in the reserve room of Wilson library. There will also be two volumes of essays available for purchase at the University bookstore. Precise calendar of presentations by seminar participants and flexibility with research papers and areas of emphasis (17th /20th centuries). Students interested in contemporary Spanish/Spanish-American literature and culture may propose papers in either of those areas. For additional information, please check directly with instructor.
Please note:
--MA students may take a total of two courses (one in Peninsular; the other in the Spanish -American area) designated either as Seminars and/or Topics. Those courses count toward the core requirements.
Spanish 8960
Workshop—Research in Hispanic Cultural Issues
Prof. Ofelia Ferrán
In this course we will explore various theoretical discourses that are relevant to understanding the way history and fiction are inter-related. We will use these theoretical readings to analyze various representative literary texts and movies from contemporary Spain.