Graduate Spanish Course Descriptions

Spring 2010

SPAN 560:Vanguardias / Avant-Gardes
José Quiroga
Tuesday 1-4 pm Max: 15

The course explores the different meanings and contexts around the notion of "vanguardia" or the "avant-gardes" in the Twentieth Century in Latin America, Europe, and the United States.  We will move in a somewhat chronological fashion, starting in 1914, until the 1990s, but the course is also organized around different clusters or problems that range from notions of originality, authorship, politics, center and periphery, globalization, media, melancholia, high culture and mass art. Special attention will be
paid to the notion of ³imprisonment²   or   ³escape² from tradition, and to
the question of poetry and technology. Authors and artists include: Vicente Huidobro, Nestor Perlongher, Octavio Paz, Arturo Carrera, Diana Bellessi, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Marta Minujin, Maria Moreno, Lorenzo Garcia Vega, Mario Bellatin and others.

SPAN 560: “The Locations of Latin American Writing”
Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat
Wednesday 1-4 pm Max: 15

Description. It’s been some time now that in Latin America, as everywhere else, literary and cultural production has ceased to be fully intelligible in the framework of the traditional nation-state.  This postmodern development is particularly dramatic in a cultural area in which national allegories were an important narrative genre into the 1960s. In contemporary cultural theory authorial subjects are no longer co-extensive with national subjects, and national canons are giving way to cosmopolitan ones.  Authors (and readers) may be exiles, expatriates, travelers, refugees, representatives of ethnic minorities, or members of a diaspora; texts may be written or published in a second language and retranslated into the “original” one; narratives may project an emergent regionalism different in kind than the centralized regionalism of the 1920s. This course surveys narratives and theories that illustrate and account for the post- or trans-national condition of contemporary literary and cultural production.

SPAN 530: Information Systems, Virtuality, and the Age of the Baroque: The Case of Don Quijote de la Mancha
Elena del Río Parra 
Thursday 1-4 pm Max: 15

Description: “Information Systems, Virtuality, and the Age of the Baroque: The Case of Don Quijote de la Mancha” will take this major primary source in order to establish its groundbreaking position in Western Civilization regarding the creation of new and alternative information systems. Close attention will be paid to how this baroque phenomenon extends to the very edge of Postmodernity, not only in reference to hypertexts and crawling engines, but as to how virtual lives and virtual times are being constructed, and History is, once again, reconsidered and rewritten. The displacement of reality in favor of virtuality (not opposing reality, but actuality), and symbolic representation will be traced along discussions of how information is transcribed, transmitted, disseminated, recollected, and archived as seen through Cervantes’ work. This concept of exchanging clusters of information materialize into ideas, people, goods, and capital (both material and non-tangible), which permits a reconsideration of the Baroque in light of the XXI-Century.

Theoretical and critical readings will address topics such as the Ultrabaroque and its artistic repercussions; cultural recycling and trashing; orality vs. writing; lying, misreading and forgetting; genres as systems; and debates on virtuality and construction of complex networks in the Baroque. Discussions of primary sources will be supplemented by theoretical readings (Pablo Jauralde, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Bruce Wardropper, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Ndalianis, Mijail Bakhtin, Robert Scholes, Manuel Castells, Severo Sarduy, Jan Kahre, José A. Maravall, Walter Moser, etc.)

Texts/films (partial list):
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”.
Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho.
Rubén Darío, “Letanía de nuestro señor Don Quijote”.
José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote.
Orson Welles, Don Quijote.
Juan José Arreola, “Dama de pensamientos”; “Teoría de Dulcinea”.
Terry Gilliam, Lost in la Mancha.

Particulars: Discussions of previously assigned critical articles and primary sources, and short reaction papers (40%), a presentation (20%), and a final research project (40%).