This course explores the originary discourses and cultural parameters of Iberian literary expression in Medieval and Early Modern texts. Works to be considered include the Cid, the Libro de Buen Amor, Celestina and Don Quijote, as well as the poetry of Garcilaso and Quevedo. Special attention is given to questions of generic innovation, self-representation, mimesis, realism, and social contexts.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar's Office.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Seminar in Medieval Spanish Literature: Foundational Fictions
Instructors: Marina S. Brownlee
Seminar in Modern Spanish Literature: Repression and resistance in Spain, 1950-1975
Through fiction, poetry, film, painting, comics, music, etc, the course has repression and resistance as its main thread. Among the topics to be covered are: the memory of the Civil War, internal dissent within Francoism, exile, economic development, the country and the city, immigration and emigration, tourism, forms of indoctrination, social unrest, construction of gender, and the role of religion in both repression and resistance
Instructors: Manuel-Angel G. Loureiro
Narrative Prose in Latin America: Cuban Cultural History 1868-2017
This course provides an overview of Cuban cultural history from the Ten Years War to the present (1868-2017). Reading widely across historiography, cultural studies, literature, ethnomusicology, and art history, the course also examines primary documents ranging from constitutions to poetry, ethnography, novels, film, and essays. Topics include black political activism in the Republic; women's participation in pre-revolutionary movements, essays and films from the 1960s; post-Special Period genres, etc.
Instructors: Rachel Lee Price
Synthetic Skin
Dolls are human creations whose "disgrace" is their birth itself. They are not born according to the principles of sexual reproduction and biological identity: motherless, they form outside of the uterus. Dolls are different from other artificial matters in their close relationship to childhood. But the even more definitive distinction is that they have been assigned to a sex: they are female bodies. This seminar proposes to explore the specificity of these synthetic lives, considering dolls in their relationships with toys, monsters, mannequins, automatons, puppets, virgins, and mommies, through the work of diverse contemporary artists.
Instructors: Javier Enrique Guerrero
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Luso-Brazilian Seminar-Visual Arts & the Humanities (Half-Term)
The seminar challenges students of literature, cultural studies, and history to "read" images. We often see photographs, drawings, caricatures, and engravings as mere illustrations, which confirm preconceived ideas. However, just as culture does not merely reflect reality, images can be understood as documents endowed with their own agency, thus able to create new contexts, habits, and even political and cultural mores. Through scholarly discussions on the visual arts, history and literature, we focus on a wide array of visual works in Brazil, from colonial times to our contemporaneity.
Instructors: Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz