Issues of race, religion and gender-and their bearing on the myths and realities of empire in the writing of both history and fiction serve as the focus for discussion of texts and ideas that have had a remarkable impact on the Old World and the New. Influential thinkers such as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Anthony Pagden, Mary Louise Pratt, J.H. Elliott, Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur offer points of departure for our exploration of cultural issues in the writings of such authors as, el Miguel de Cervantes, Pedro de Corral, Inca Garcilaso, Antonio de Guevara, Lope de Vega, Miguel de Luna and María de Zayas.
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: National Myths/Imperial Realities
Instructors: Marina S. Brownlee
Main Currents of Spanish Thought, 1848 to the Present: Cultures and (Post)-Nationalisms
This course seeks to explore the cultural logics of the Spanish Modernity since 1789 to the present, studying the historical configuration of contemporary Iberian cultures from the perspective of (post)national discourses. Among the topics to be addressed are nation-building, states and empires, geopolitics and colonialism, hegemony and resistance, memory and necropolitics, identities, constitutions, monarchy and citizenship, in a wide range of texts and materials.
Instructors: Germán Labrador Méndez
Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Mario Vargas Llosa:Literature and Politics
This seminar discusses a selection of Mario Vargas Llosa's major political novels in dialogue with the works of political philosophy that shaped his thinking. Our discussion begins with Vargas Llosa's engagement with radical Marxism in his youth, his active participation in the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, leading up to his turn towards liberalism in the 1980s. Political theorists discussed include: Marx, Mariátegui, Sartre, Fidel Castro, Edmund Wilson, Karl Popper, Octavio Paz, Isaiah Berlin. Topics include: guerilla warfare, class struggle, the market, social justice.
Instructors: Rubén Gallo
Seminar in Literary Theory
What is the matter of theory? This course is an introduction to literary and cultural theory and to some of the key problems that animate theoretical discussion among scholars today. These include questions about the production of cultural value, about form and structure, about subalternity and power, and about the status of the cultural object and of theory itself. In addition to examining texts by Adorno, Irigaray, Barthes, Fanon, and Spivak, we perform theoretical readings of specific literary texts and visual objects.
Instructors: Maria Gabriela Nouzeilles
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Luso-Brazilian Seminar: Amerindia, Literature and Perspectivism
This seminar establishes links between literary theory and contemporary ethno-anthropology through an intensive reading of Amerindian Perspectivism and Multinaturalism and its potential to renew our understanding of literature from the 16th century to current debates on Indigenous lives and ecological survival. Writings by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tania Stolze Lima, Pedro Cesarino, among others, are read in conjunction with literary texts by Oswald de Andrade, André Vallias, Josely Viana Baptista, Ana Miranda, and the work of contemporary indigenous authors such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak.
Instructors: Marilia Librandi