This course looks at the most telling fixations-race, sex, gender, religion, economy, nationhood, and style (architectural, literary and sartorial)-that consume Hispanic society in the 16th and 17th centuries. Works of prose, poetry and theater from both sides of the Atlantic as well as tabloid press, historical documents and treatises, drive our explorations of this extraordinary period. Theories of the Baroque and its visual manifestations ranging from the sublime to the grotesque are also studied.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar's Office.
Please note: 400-level undergraduate courses may be taken for graduate credit.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Cultural Obsessions in Early Modern Spain and the New World
Instructors: Marina S. Brownlee
Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: The Long 19th Century: Mimesis, Alterity, and Representation
This seminar explores the role of mimesis in political representation and state
formation in Latin America, focusing on some of its most powerful and enduring symbolic articulations in the massive legal, literary, and scientific archive it generated during the nineteenth century-a long and turbulent century, characterized by revolutions, mass political mobilization, subaltern uprisings,utopian thinking, and sweeping modernization. Drawing upon Taussig's work on mimesis and alterity, we study how the modern political produces spaces of equality and of extreme differentiation.
Instructors: Maria Gabriela Nouzeilles
Seminar in Colonial Spanish American Literature: Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in the (Colonial) Andes
How do we theorize the practices of insurgency and resistance, apostasy and heresy, riots and boycotts? How are they recorded, if at all? Can they write themselves? We explore seminal texts of Colonial Latin America, with a focus on the Andes, to examine how these are both inscribed and erased from the Archive and, in so doing, question the category of the "colonial" itself and the various prefixes associated with it. Primary authors include Las Casas, Francisco de la Cruz (heretic), Vargas Machuca, Guaman Poma de Ayala, Francisco Vásquez, and Lope de Aguirre; theoretical works by Guha, De Certeau, Clover, Marx and Rocker.
Instructors: Nicole D. Legnani
Seminar in Literary Theory
WHAT IS THE MATTER OF THEORY - its basic content and scope? This seminar studies the main trends and interventions in modern theoretical thought through a cluster of keywords and core concepts such as realism, mass culture, image, body, memory, and power.
Instructors: Maria Gabriela Nouzeilles
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Topics in Luso-Hispanic Cultures: Brazilian-Iberian Countercultures
This course seeks to explore Brazilian and Iberian experiences of counterculture in a cross-cultural perspective that considers specific local developments and Transatlantic exchanges. The seminar discusses events and traditions from the 1960s to the present through a wide range of literary, political and artistic materials. Among the topics to be addressed are authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes, resistance and encryption, memory and loyalty, utopia and emancipation, revolution and revolt, politics, biopolitics and the popular.
Instructors: Germán Labrador Méndez, Pedro Meira Monteiro