Spanish Spring 2018 Graduate Courses

Th 3:30-6:00PM in New Cabell 411

The course will deal with the “canonical” works of the Iberian Middle Ages and the early, early modern period. It will seek to provide an overview of current thinking regarding their nature and origin, while at the same time seeking to interrogate many of the prevailing assumptions and received ideas of Spanish literary historiography and, indeed, literary history itself. Works and topics to be addressed are: literacy and orality; manuscript culture and textual transmission; the medieval Iberian lyric in its Pan-European context plus its problematic connection to Arabic muwashshaat (i.e., the kharjas); the Castilian epic, especially the Poema de Mio Cid, in relation to the Romance epic in general; clerical poetry and the rise of literacy (Berceo, the so-called mester de clerecía, and the Libro de buen amor); the institutional rise and uses of vernacular prose (Alfonso X and the discourses of cultural authority: historiography, law, and science); the advent of imaginative prose and the class interests of the aristocracy (Don Juan Manuel and El conde Lucanor); medieval quest, sentimental, and etiological romances (Libro del cavallero Zifar, Cárcel de Amor); and, finally, humanistic comedy (Celestina) and courtly culture.

Course Requirements: Two papers (10-15 pp. each).

Th 3:30-6:00PM in New Cabell Hall 038

This course will present a panorama of contemporary Spanish American literature’s main trends through the study of novellas published between 1935 and the present. These texts raise issues related to literature and writing, as well as gender and family relations, the interaction between individual subjects and society, evoke political and social conditions, and follow the various literary developments of their era. Authors include María Luisa Bombal (La última niebla), Juan Carlos Onetti (El pozo), Julio Cortázar (El perseguidor), Felisberto Hernández (Las hortensias), Carlos Fuentes (Aura), Clarice Lispector (La hora de la estrella) Gabriel García Márquez (Crónica de una muerte anunciada), Elena Poniatowska (Querido Diego), Mario Vargas Llosa (Los cachorros), Luisa Valenzuela (“Cuarta versión” and “Cambio de armas”), Diamela Eltit (Los vigilantes), Senel Paz (El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo), Antonio Skármeta (No pasó nada), César Aira (Cómo me hice monja), Mario Bellatin (Salón de belleza), Horacio Castellanos Moya (Insensatez) among others. We will also watch some films on related topics and read theoretical essays. Class participation, critique and presentation of an article, research paper and peer review of a classmate’s paper.

We 3:30-6:00PM in New Cabell Hall 283

This class, taught in Spanish, will be a doctoral seminar focused on the complete works (articles) of Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837), Spain's best-known nineteenth-century journalist. We will read all of his published articles, which cover wide areas of costumbrismo and social commentary, political satire, theatrical criticism, and personal revelation. Students will use the Crítica edition (ed. Alejandro Pérez Vidal) and will access all of the rest of the articles in Collab. Supplementary readings, weekly presentations, and a final paper.

Tu 3:30-6:00PM in New Cabell 064

This seminar will be concerned primarily with the decade 1920-30 when Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel became close friends.  We will study a range of cultural activities, literary texts, paintings, films, etc. whose immediate context is provided by these friendships.  Starting with the Residencia de Estudiantes as the primary locus of these encounters, we will consider student activities at the “Resi” (e.g. production of Don Juan Tenorio), the literary avant-garde, Lorca’s literary output most influenced by Dalí and Buñuel (e.g. “Oda a Salvador Dalí”, Poemas en prosa), Lorca’s drawings, Lorca’s lectures, Dalí’s cubist and surrealist paintings, Dalí’s poems and prose poems, Buñuel’s plays, poems and prose poems, Buñuel and Dalí’s early films (Un chien andalou, L’Âge d’or), and much more.  Seminar participation and end-of-semester research paper.