Spring '07 Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Spanish 322: Survey of Early Hispanic Literature
Professor Pablo Ancos
8:50 MWF
Este curso es una introducción al estudio de la literatura en español
de los siglos XIII al XVII. En él leeremos y comentaremos una selección
de textos fundamentales de la Edad Media y de los 'Siglos de Oro'. El estudio
y análisis detallado de los textos se completará con la presentación
de un breve panorama histórico y literario de la época que
situará las obras en su contexto y permitirá apreciar mejor
la calidad artística y el significado de las mismas.
Spanish 363: Revolutionary Icons
Professor Glen Close
11 MWF
This course will examine the iconic status of six Spanish American revolutionaries
whose careers span the nearly two centuries of Spanish America’s independence:
Simón Bolívar, Emiliano Zapata, Frida Kahlo, Eva Perón,
Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos. In addition
to surveying their revolutionary ideologies and activities, we will study
the intense iconization of these historical actors both during their lifetimes
and in the present. Course materials will be drawn from various media and
periods and will include writings by the revolutionaries themselves and
essays assessing their historical careers, as well as wide-ranging representations
and interpretations of them in painting and other visual arts, popular music,
film and literature.
Spanish 453: “España como problema: voces
de disensión y protesta en la literatura española moderna”,
Spring 2007
MWF, 11:00 a.m., 591 Van Hise. (Discussion section 301, W, 1:20 p.m., 487
VH).
Prof. Will Risley
This course takes up the rich, eternal tema de España, a.k.a. España
como preocupación, España como problema, etc., as manifested
in modern (chiefly 20th- and 21st-century) Spanish literature. After a brief
introductory overview of notable critics of the political, social and moral
fabric of Europe’s first unified modern nation and empire—the
anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Cadalso—the course
will trace the vein of national reflection, dissent and protest from the
Enlightenment and Neoclassicism (the satire of Ramón de la Cruz)
and then the nineteenth century’s Romantic period (the cleric José
María Blanco White on how the priesthood deforms young men and machismo
ruins young women, Larra on Spain’s backwardness) and its Realism
(Galdós and Clarín) to the Generation of 1898 (Unamuno, Baroja,
Machado, Valle-Incán), and then will focus above all upon the many
problems of Spain in the twentieth century: the Civil War, the Franco dictatorship
and the difficult Posguerra, the shift to democracy, the desencanto, etc.
It will study key spiritual crises and casos de conciencia which reflect
and symbolize national problems. While the four main genres (narrative,
poetry, drama and essay) will appear, the strong emphasis will be upon prose
fiction, and especially short narratives: essays, short stories and short
novels, and selections from longer novels (rather than these in their entirety).
The basic method of the course will be but primarily discussion, bolstered by occasional mini-lectures. Students will be required to write two 50-minute exams and either a final exam or a final paper, and to participate in class discussion, which, with this particular course topic, is very easy to do.
Probable texts (i.e. list of possibles from which the course texts will
be selected):
Don Ramón de la Cruz, Manolo, sainete [one-act satirical play]; Luis
Cadalso, Cartas marruecas [one carta, # VII]; selections from padre José
Francisco de Isla, Fray Gerundio [picaresque novel]; slide show of works
by Francisco Goya [large paintings, Caprichos and Desastres de la guerra];
Mariano José de Larra, “Vuelva Ud. mañana,” “La
sociedad,”“El casarse pronto y mal,” and possibly “Las
antiguedades de Mérida” [artículos de costumbres]; José
María Blanco y Crespo (“Blanco White”), Letters from
Spain [two short letters]; Carolina Coronado, two feminist poems; Benito
Pérez Galdós, Doña Perfecta (1876), novel; Leopoldo
Alas ‘Clarín’, “Adiós, Cordera” [short
story];
Unamuno, El Marqués de Lumbría and Nada menos que todo un
hombre [two short novels, one of which is, more accurately, a short story];
Pío Baroja, Paradox, rey [short dialogue novel]; Ramón del
Valle-Inclán, short scenes from Luces de Bohemia, “esperpento”
[grotesque farce]; poetry by Antonio Machado; possibly, short stories by
Ignacio Aldecoa and Jesús Fernández Santos; Carmen Martín
Gaite, El cuarto de atrás, novel; Francisco Ayala, El Inquisidor
(short novel); possibly Max Aub, “La verdadera historia de la muerte
de Francisco Franco” [short story]; selections from Luis Martín
Santos, Tiempo de silencio, novel, and Miguel Delibes, Parábola del
náufrago [Kafkaesque or Orwellian nightmare novel in the manner of
1984]; contemporary short stories by Javier Marías, Manuel Rivas,
and Cristina Fernández Cubas.
Spanish 468: Imagining Spain
Professor Juan Egea
12:05 MWF
This course explores the multiple ways in which Spanish culture have been
presented and represented visually. Drawing from film, art, graphic design,
urban planning, architecture, and literature the course will ask the student
to reflect on the relation between visual identity and nation.
