Graduate Spanish Course Descriptions

Fall 2009

SPAN 530/CPLT751/WS585 Burning the Stage: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Theatre, Film, and Performance Art
Carrión            CANCELLED

SPAN 550 History, Fiction, and Memory in Modern Spanish Narrative
Gold                      TH 1:00-4:00 PM  Maximum enrollment: 15

Description: This course will examine the ramifications of Carlos Fuentes's injunction to “remember the future, imagine the past” by focusing on the relationship between history, fiction, and memory as reflected in Spanish narratives of the nineteenth through twenty-first century.  While tracing the changing nature of historical inquiry since the 1800s (for example, the shift from positivist to genealogical historical models, contradictory conceptions of what constitutes historical evidence, the replacement of History by histories), the course will examine the ways in which the novelistic rewriting of Spain’s contested past(s) problematizes key aspects of narrative: truth and meaning, representation, authority, temporality. Of special interest are the ways in which these texts work to legitimate or undermine a mythic vision of national history.  Hence, close attention will be paid to the role of collective and private memory–an arena of symbolic-cultural display–in the construction of national identities, a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified in the “memory wars” of present-day Spain. Theoretical and critical readings will address topics such as the politics of (imposed) memory; nostalgia and mourning; the critiques of historical knowledge found in modernist and postmodern fictional narratives; and the poetics of the genre of the historical novel.

Texts: Benito Pérez Galdós, La de los tristes destinos; Miguel de Unamuno, Paz en la guerra; Ramón del Valle-Inclán, La corte de los milagros; Camilo José Cela, La colmena; Luis Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio; Juan Marsé, Si te dicen que caí; Juan Goytisolo, La reivindicación del conde Don Julián; Lourdes Ortiz, Urraca; Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad; Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina, or comparable texts based on availability.  Discussions of these texts will be supplemented by theoretical readings (Hayden White, Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Le Goff, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Andreas Huyssen, Svetlana Boym, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur) and by selections from the writings of Spanish historians who are contemporaries of the novelists that form the core of the course.

Films: Selections from newsreel documentaries (“NO-DOs”) of the Franco period.

Particulars: Evaluation is based upon participation in seminar discussions, interventions via Learn Link or oral presentations, and a final research paper.  For the latter students may explore narrative texts or alternative constructions of historical memory (monuments, photography, museums, etc.).   

SPAN 560/CPLT752: End of Neoliberal Empire?  The Revolutionary 60s in Our Global Field of Vision
Reber               Wednesday 1-4               Maximum enrollment: 15

Cultural production in 1960s Latin America universally denounced the plunder of a continent.  García Márquez playfully imagined nature itself being sold back as a ‘technological invention’ to a Latin America foundationally estranged from its own resources when Melquíades brings ice to Macondo in Cien años de soledad.  In “La estética del hambre,” Glauber Rocha characterizes, far less playfully, the history of Latin America as one in which the entire continent itself is passed from one colonizer to the next, a vision that assumes sinister proportions in Terra em transe, where the invisible “Explint”—Company of International Exploitation—buys the political future of Brazil, much as Julio García Espinosa figures an American clad in a Hawaiian shirt as the ‘back-door’ owner of the Latin American land-owning elite in Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin.  This is the thesis that Che Guevara intones from the Bolivian jungle, urging Latin America to rise up as “one, two, many Vietnams” in order to stem the extractive neoimperialist flow out of what Eduardo Galeano bitterly denounces as “the open veins of Latin America.”  Then this utopia was violently “disarmed” (Castañeda 1994) and left for dead.

Suddenly, after a long hiatus defined by Reaganomics and the Washington Consensus, the “idea of the 60s” has returned to the forefront of the global psyche of the Americas and beyond: Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005), and Emilio Estevez’s Bobby (2006) have brought Che Guevara, Bob Dylan, and Robert F. Kennedy back to the big screen (Salles’s On the Road has Beat Generation and 60s precursor Jack Kerouac scheduled for 2009), while soulful British singing sensation Amy Winehouse has so successfully resurrected the beehive hairdo as to inspire Karl Lagerfeld’s 2007 haute couture line for Chanel (“Amy is the new Brigitte [Bardot]”), two years after the Gap rolled out a kindred “Summer of 1969” clothing line. But this “idea of the 60s” is not solely aesthetic; the wave of leftist presidencies of Chávez, Lula (with tropicalista Gilberto Gil as Minister of Culture), Tabaré Vásquez, Bachelet, Morales, García, and Kirschner has brought back the idea of revolution, just as Obama has evoked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the U.S. war in Iraq has brought back the idea of Vietnam.  (For its part, the Pentagon held an in-house screening in 2003 of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 Battle of Algiers as a refresher course on guerrilla warfare.)

We will read the reemergence of the idea of the 60s in the context of the two major hemispheric crises that have marked the twenty-first century in the Americas: 9/11 and the Argentine economic collapse of December 2001.  The first resuscitated the critique of U.S. imperialism; the second resuscitated the will to anti-imperialist resistance.  Now that critics—and economic analysts—warn that the end of neoliberalism (as imperialism) might be near, might we claim that we are returning discursively to the 60s in search of an anti-imperialist political aesthetic?  If we are, in fact, at the end of neoliberal capitalism as we have known it, are we gravitating to the point in time just before its brutal imposition, a time “when the left thought paradise was just around the corner” (La Nación 1997)?  In order to hazard answers to these questions, we will focus particularly on the aesthetic definition of social dissidence in the New Latin American Cinema of the 60s and its recent “new new” avatars, which rework the concept of revolution for the global age.

Texts/films (partial list):

New Latin American Cinema:
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Glauber Rocha
Santiago Álvarez
Julio García Espinosa
Fernando “Pino” Solanas
Miguel Littín

“Neoliberal” cinema:
Fernando “Pino” Solanas
Walter Salles
Martin Scorsese
Steven Soderbergh
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein
Alfonso Cuarón

Particulars:

Class discussion will be in English, with two weekly film screenings outside of class.  Short weekly reaction papers and intensive writing workshop on final research project in the last weeks of class.

SPANISH 620: Seminar on Pedagogy
Robyn Clarke     Monday/Friday 1:00-2:15pm Maximum Enrollment: 15

Content: This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the practice and theory of teaching foreign languages and cultures, with particular attention to the issues of teaching Spanish language and Hispanic cultures in US academic contexts. We will explore proven teaching methods and practices, discuss some of the theory and research that inform such practices and apply these theories to practical issues such as classroom management, teaching techniques (particularly those necessary for the teaching of lower-division courses), lesson planning, test design, etc. The course aims, not only to help teachers clearly define goals and develop good practices to support the achievement of stated goals, but also to help new teachers articulate justifications for these goals/practices. Students will be asked to participate in class discussion of readings, micro-teachings, video self-recording/analysis, observations and analyses of other classes, observations and feedback sessions on their own teaching.  All students are required to teach a lower-division Spanish course concurrently in order to help them further develop their understanding of pedagogical theory and practice.
Texts: Alice Omaggio Hadley, Teaching Languages in Context; other required readings in the form of journal articles and chapters from books that will be provided to you electronically or distributed in class.

Particulars: Graduate student status in Spanish or permission of instructor.