Psychoanalysis has theorized the uses of pleasure. Of those, reading and writing can be sources of jouissance when performed appropriately. This seminar presents an overview of various analytic theories, including Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Sarduy, Paz, focusing on the bonds uniting reading, writing, and pleasure seeking.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar's Office.
Note: 400-level undergraduate courses may be taken for graduate credit.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Reading for Pleasure: Psychoanalysis for Literary Critics
Instructors: Rubén Gallo
Seminar in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Juana Inés de la Cruz, fénix de América
Studies a variety of texts (poetry, comedia, mystery play, apologia, letters) written by the most
celebrated female Hispanic writer of the seventeenth century, widely considered to be the first feminist of the American hemisphere. Discussions include rhetoric and feminism; Sor Juana's literary forbearers;freedom and repression in the convent; correspondence with other writers in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru; performances of gender and sexuality in colonial Mexico; polemics and representations of the figure of Juana Inés de la Cruz today.
Instructors: Nicole D. Legnani
Mimesis and Difference in Modern Latin American Literature and Art
This seminar explores the role of mimesis and alterity in political and cultural representation in modern Latin America, focusing on some of its most enduring symbolic articulations in the literary, artistic, and scientific archives from the nineteenth century to the present-a long durée history characterized by revolutions, mass political mobilizations, subaltern uprisings, developmentalism, economic inequality, and utopian thinking. We focus on racial and sexual difference and subalternity in Latin America's contradictory foundational fictions and some of its more powerful and controversial rewritings.
Instructors: Maria Gabriela Nouzeilles
Spanish Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
Contemporary Spain: An Advanced Introduction
This course is designed to serve as an advanced introduction to the study of contemporary Spain. It will provide students with methodological, analytic and bibliographical tools to conduct academic research in topics related to post-1898 Spain, such as colonialism, dictatorship, memory, violence, war, diaspora and exile, democracy, social struggles and cultural movements.
Instructors: Germán Labrador Méndez
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Luso-Brazilian Seminar: The Story as Gift
In one of his broadcast writings for children, Walter Benjamin says that the more we understand something, the more we can rejoice in it, and the less we're fixated on possessing it. In this Luso-Afro-Brazilian seminar we discuss how stories are crafted as gifts, as if, by sharing the story through a narrator, the author wanted to give it away, thus avoiding its possession. We test Benjamin's hypothesis: is literature an act of sharing, rather than keeping knowledge to ourselves?
Instructors: Pedro Meira Monteiro