SPAN 398 - Spanish-American Seminar

FDR: HL
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter
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.

Fall 2016, SPAN 398A-01: Poetry and the Politics of Immigration (3). Corequisite: SPAN 200. Prerequisites: SPAN 240 and 275. This seminar explores the politics of immigration through poetry through literary-centered cultural studies. All students must also register for the one-credit, service-learning practicum to take place in a local juvenile facility housing undocumented, unaccompanied youth. In class on campus, we perform and debate close readings of poetry written about, from, and beyond immigrant experiences. In class at the correctional facility, we join incarcerated juvenile Latino immigrants in an inside-out poetry workshop pairing each W&L student with an incarcerated student in a term-long literary partnership within our greater collaboration as a transinstitutional, transnational, and transcultural community. We enhance our ability to conceive, understand, analyze, and discuss the complexities of immigration, while also developing our abilities to read, write, speak, and listen in Spanish. (HL) Michelson