SPAN 397 - Literature of Spain Seminar

Credits: 3 Prerequisites: SPAN 220 and SPAN 275. A seminar focusing on a single period, genre, motif, or writer. The specific topic will be determined jointly according to student interest and departmental approval. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Winter 2021, SPAN 397A-01: Literature of Spain Seminar: Representaciones de la Guerra civil española (3). Prerequisites: SPAN 220 and SPAN 275. This course examines the fundamental importance of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in literary and visual texts of the Franco and contemporary periods of Spain.  Through readings and viewings of these texts, we will come to understand the evolution of often conflicting histories, ideologies, obsessions, and artistic notions surrounding the war itself and its consequences.  After a review of the events leading up to the Spanish Civil War and of the prelude to the Second World War, we will observe how the themes and issues of the war manifest in fiction, poetry, film, and other visual texts.  We will pay particular attention to the Franco regime, the pact of silence, historical memory, and the desire to uncover the past in myriad ways.  Literature includes works by Federico García Lorca, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carmen Laforet, Alberto Méndez, and Mercè Rodoreda.  Visual texts include posters, newspapers, letters, government documents, documentaries, fictional and documentary films, and NO-DO reels from the Franco era. (HL) Mayock.

Winter 2021, SPAN 397B-01: (Re)Reading Don Quijote: Cervantes from La Mancha to the Borderlands and Beyond (3). Prerequisites: SPAN 275 and Span 220. Even 400 years after the publication of Cervantes’s masterwork, the image of the bedraggled knight tilting at windmills remains recognizable to many worldwide. Why does Don Quijote persist as such a cultural touchstone, a “global classic”? In its own time, the novel served as a highly specific satire of the Spain of its day; its lasting legacy, however, lies in its interrogation of various tensions still central to modern life. This seminar will consist of a close, historically contextualized reading of Cervantes’s text as it probes early 17th-century Spain’s preoccupation with national and religious “purity,” widening social and economic imbalance, and forced expulsions of large groups of citizens—themes still strikingly relevant today. Students will also conduct a semester long experiential-learning project tracing the 400-year trajectory of Don Quijote’s global transformations and its intersections with contemporary issues including the migration crisis at the US border and this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. (HL) Hernandez.

Fall 2020, SPAN 397A-01: Literature of Spain Seminar: Gender, Desire and Social Repression in Early Spanish Literature (3). Readings of classic texts of early Spanish literature: Cantar de mio Cid, Libro de buen amor, Celestina, writings by Santa Teresa de Jesús, and María de Zayas’ Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. Discussions focus on the portrayal of women as objects of male desire, as agents of their own desire, its repression in response to social strictures, and women’s voices as conveyed by others and by themselves. (HL) Bailey. FDR: HL