A Sample of Graduate Seminar Courses

Except where indicated, all courses are conducted entirely in the target language. Check the Graduate Catalog for more listings.

THE THEATER OF MOLIERE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION IN 17th-CENTURY FRANCE

Some scholars consider Molière’s theater pro-feminist because it champions the cause of ingenues against the tyrannical power of a father or guardian who seeks to prevent them from exercising their "natural" right in the choice of a husband. But Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes have generally been considered anti-feminist because they ridicule women who seek to break away from the role assigned to them within marriage and the family and to enter the male world of words and ideas. Other scholars argue that Molière confines women to the feminine sphere of feeling and self-realization through love, that he favors women's desire to follow the dictates of their emotions, so long as they do not challenge the intellectual and cultural superiority of men or their authority within the family. But this analysis does not apply to Molière's two most elusive masterpieces Le Misanthrope and Dom Juan, which portray women who dare to rebel against the established order to pursue a will of their own. Our reading of Molière’s major plays will be enhanced by our viewing of films versions by the Comédie Française, France’s oldest and best-known theater.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH SHORT STORY

In this course we will read examples of the fascinating movements within the French short story during the nineteenth-century. We will begin with funny realist stories, “L”Illustre Gaudissart” by Balzac about an early nineteenth-century traveling sales who thinks he can sell anything to anyone, but finds himself in a town where everyone doubts what he says, “L’Inutile beauté” about a woman who learns to dominant her despotic husband and “le Signe” about an artistocratic woman who imitates the signs that a prostitute makes to men outside her window, both by Maupassant. We will then pass to a romantic story of love by Nerval, “Sylvie” and to Flaubert’s rewriting of a medieval legend, “La Légende de St. Julien.” We will finish with a hybrid genre, the fantastic, which combines realistic and somewhat frightening surrealistic elements: “La Fille aux Yeux d’or” by Balzac, “Le Rideau cramoisie” by d’Aurevilly, and “le Horla” by Maupassant.

SPANISH PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY

This course treats the core components that comprise the Spanish sound system. The objectives for this course are two-fold. First, the student will learn the basic components of Spanish Phonetics and Spanish Phonology for both ‘Standard Spanish’ and regional varieties. Second, the student will compare these components to English and his/her own pronunciation of Spanish. By learning these basic components and applying them to his/her own Spanish, the student will gain insight into the Spanish language and s/he will also improve upon his/her own language skills. This course will be conducted in Spanish. Though not expected, it is preferable to have basic knowledge of the main field of linguistics and/or have taken a course on Introduction to Linguistics.

INTRODUCTION TO SPANISH SEMANTICS

The field of semantics deals with meaning in language. This course is an introduction to the role of meaning in the structure, function, and use of the language. In particular, we will focus on the core aspects of the representation of meaning in Spanish. We will examine how Spanish speakers combine basic linguistic units (e.g. words or lexical items) into larger linguistic expressions that allow them to represent the complex aspects of reality and thought in this language. An emphasis will be made on problematic meaning issues for learners of Spanish.

THE SPANISH-AMERICAN NOVEL

Novels were officially banned in Colonial Spanish America, and although novels—such as Don Quixote—certainly circulated, the genre was not cultivated until the nineteenth century when European forms—romanticism, realism—were imbued with the sociopolitical and cultural concerns of the writers of the newly formed nations. By the mid-twentieth century, Latin American writers not only explore Latin American realities in their fiction, their narrative experimentation and renovation of form reach new heights and international acclaim while challenging the structures of power that have dominated throughout the continent. In this course we will read a series of novels that will allow us to examine a variety of issues that have defined Latin American culture over two hundred years, from the foundational fictions of the new nations—politics revealed through melodrama and romance—to the devastating critiques of failed political programs and persistent social injustice on the basis of class, gender, race and ethnicity. We will thus work to connect our careful analysis of the formal and thematic elements of the novels with broader sociohistorical concerns of the different periods in question and we will discuss the possibilities inherent in the genre of the novel for sociohistorical critique. Authors may include José Marmol, Rómulo Gallegos, Juan Rulfo, Cristina Peri Rossi, Roberto Bolaño.

PICARESQUE ITINERARIES: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Between 1500 and 1700, two crucial events occurred in Spain and Latin America which helped to define “modern” civilization: the creation of the world's first modern, bureaucratic state, designed to ensure the smooth functioning of a global, colonial empire; and the emergence of the “novel” as a new literary genre. Through a close reading of several Spanish and Latin American “picaresque” novels, whose roguish first-person narrators largely operate on the margins of society, this course will explore such issues as the rise of an anti-heroic, upwardly mobile protagonist who stands in opposition to the archetypal hero of earlier literary genres; the development of an abrasive, “picaresque” aesthetic in stark contrast to the more idyllic literary forms of the period; the representation of “deviancy” (usually viewed through the prism of race, ethnicity, and class) and its role in undermining many of the social, cultural, and religious foundations of the Hapsburg empire; and the way in which the essentially “urban” picaresque spaces of Spain become the “open road” of the Americas, thus transforming the pícaro into a kind of adventurous travel writer and ethnographer.

TRANSATLANTIC ENCOUNTERS: NEW WORLDS, REAL, IMAGINED, AND CONTESTED
As a steady stream of explorers set sail from Spain and Portugal beginning in the fifteen century, they encountered a world stranger and more complex than their medieval cosmologies had allowed them to imagine, a world inhabited by diverse cultures whose own cosmologies had not prepared them to be suddenly “discovered” by European conquistadores. Through a close reading of a variety of both historical and imaginative texts this course will examine the ways in which the “encounter” between the so-called Old and New Worlds initiated a process of colonization and globalization that has yet to fully run its course.

THE SPANISH AVANT-GARDE

Twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as futurism, cubism, dada, and surrealism struck out against aesthetic conventions that had been in place for centuries—single-point perspective in painting, documentary-style realism in prose, the lofty themes of lyric poetry. Spain joined the rest of Europe in seeking a means to express the imperative of its age, one that included scientific discovery, cinema, technology, and urban life, but also war and physical and psychic displacement. In this course we will begin with an overview of the international avant-garde, before going on to explore the phenomenon in Spain. We will look at verbal and visual texts as they address four overarching themes: expression of a new sensibility, cinema, city life, and modern identity. At the same time, we will discuss what elements of the 21st century might be characterized as avant-garde today.

STUDIES IN 18TH AND 19TH CENTURY SPANISH LITERATURE: Ángeles (del hogar) y demonios (de hombre)
This seminar will focus on the theme of angels and demons in their literal (supernatural) and rhetorical incarnations (as tropes for earthly concerns). Through close readings of poetry, drama, and prose across three literary periods (romanticism, realism, and modernism), we will explore how vice and virtue are enacted in figures such as the domestic angel, the femme fatale, and the Don Juan character: are we meant to interpret the tensions among them as epic struggles between Good and Evil, evidence of the inexplicable--satanic or divine--in the world; or as representations of sociopolitical conflict, cultural transformation, gender politics, or even literary battles metaphorically conveyed?