SPAN 398 - Spanish-American Seminar

FDR: HL
Credits: 3

Prerequisites:SPAN 240 and SPAN 275. A seminar focusing on a single period, genre, motif, or writer. Recent topics have included “Spanish American Women Writers: From America into the 21st Century,” “20th Century Latin America Theater,” and “Past, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Argentina’s Cultural Products.” May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Winter 2016, SPAN 398: Spanish-American Seminar: Fictions of Self-Representation (3) Prerequisites: SPAN 240 and 275. The course examines forms of self-representation through the reading of literary and non-literary works. In addition to conceptual discussions of how artists use fictionalized forms of self-portraiture in diverse Latin-American contexts, we pay special attention to issues of subjectivity, self-empowerment, authority, and reader recognition, among others. Primary texts focus mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries. (HL) Botta.

Fall 2015, SPAN 398-01: Spanish-American Seminar: Poetry and Power (3). A course about reading power; more properly, a course about critically reading Spanish American poetry as a site for revealing, rethinking, and resisting enforced inequality. It is a poetic inquiry into social justice, including an exploration the ways in which poetry might help us to realize, reckon, and contest unjust and unequal distributions and codifications of power. We interrogate four major configurations of inequality – sexism, racism, colonialism, fascism – studying each in depth, to illuminate through poetry our potential to conceive of and live in more egalitarian, inclusive, and pacifistic worlds. Besides the close reading of poetry, coursework includes listening to music, reading critical theory, viewing documentary footage, and participating in lively discussions. (HL) Michelson.

Planned Offering: Fall, Winter