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 Works of prose, poetry and theater from both sides of the Atlantic as well as tabloid press, historical documents and treatises, drive our explorations of this extraordinary period.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: Documenting the Real: Truth, Representation, and the Latin American
This course focuses on documentation and the returns of the real in Latin American fiction, art, photography, theater, and film that seek to represent, record, or enact the real, social life, and/or the natural world in an accurate, truthful way, and that claim to embody some kind of epistemological or evidentiary truth. We cover from debates about history and the local in the nineteenth century to Mexican surrealism and the /real maravilloso/ to more recent developments in documentary photography, theater, and film. Readings include texts by Barthes, Borges, Brecht, Carpentier, Foster, Garro, Menchú.
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
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