The aesthetic production of the Baroque period is frequently figured by the Library, the Ruin, and the Labyrinth-three architectural structures that collectively offer a negative progression from an image of an ordered, encyclopedic knowledge (the library), to a disordered, decayed structure that was formerly whole (the ruin), to the epistemological and existential quandry (the labyrinth). Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Baltazar Gracián offer abundant aesthetic representations of all three environments. They are paired with key theoretical concepts by Davidson, Deleuze, Buci-Glucksmann and Wigley.
Graduate Courses
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar Office's course offerings page.
Note: 400-level undergraduate courses may be taken for graduate credit.
Spanish Graduate Courses
Seminar in Golden-Age Literature: The Library, the Ruin and the Labyrinth in the Hispanic Baroque
Instructors: Marina Brownlee
Seminar in Modern Spanish Literature: City in Disarray: Apocalyptic Imaginaries in Spanish Neoliberal Crisis
In Spain, the economic, social, and political crisis (now reopened by covid19 crisis) entails the proliferation of apocalyptic narratives. The last two decades of neoliberal policies of dispossession, intensified by the 2008 economic depression, have transformed the Spanish territory and, therefore, the ways people inhabited it and perceived it. In that regard, imaginaries on doomsday occupied a central place in cultural representations. This course explores through characteristic tropes of the apocalyptic imaginaries (related to space degradation) the reasons, effects, and affects generated by these representations projected on the city.
Instructors: Natalia Castro Picón
Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Psychoanalysis for Cultural Critics
Since the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, psychoanalytic theory has emerged as a key tool for analyzing culture. This seminar will examine how psychoanalysis has been a model for various forms of criticism - literary, artistic, architectural, filmic, sociological, anthropological - and how these tools have been applied to understand Latin American culture in the 20th century, with special emphasis on Mexico and Cuba. We will discuss how psychoanalytic theory has been used to read the work of architects (Luis Barragán), filmmakers (Luis Buñuel), artists (Remedios Varo), and writers (Octavio Paz).
Instructors: Rubén Gallo
Spanish Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
Dark Matters
This seminar explores darkening technologies in contemporary Latin America as the main tools of a new poetics that strongly challenges vision and its alleged ability to "clearly" generate knowledge. We will explore a variety of artifacts that discard the eyes in favor of experiences of blindness, obscured vision, and tactile sensation that interrogate the visual imperative. I propose that opacity, darkness, and blindness are poetic mechanisms that can stand up to the authoritarian regime of vision and question the insidious ways in which light suffuses peripheral knowledge, politics, and bodies.
Instructors: Javier Guerrero
Portuguese Graduate Courses
Luso-Brazilian Seminar: Modernismos Negros
Modernism in Brazil is about to turn 100. Like similar artistic movements in Latin America, it was initially influenced by the primitivism of the European avant-garde, which saw Black and Indigenous people as the unconscious, unwitting bearers of modernity. In this seminar, we will examine how modernism has evolved and how those who were mere objects became subjects, and how today we may refer to Black modernisms, rather than a single modernism produced by a largely White elite.
Instructors: Pedro Meira Monteiro, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
Portuguese Undergraduate Courses for Graduate Credit
No Portuguese undergraduate courses are currently being offered for graduate credit.