Spanish (ROSP)

This is an introductory, first-year language sequence with equal focus on the four skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. An appreciation for Hispanic cultures is also encouraged through readings and class discussion. The sequence is to be followed by ROSP 10102. The first step in obtaining approval for this class is to take the Spanish Language Placement Exam.

This is an introductory, first-year language sequence with equal focus on the four skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. An appreciation for Hispanic cultures is also encouraged through readings and class discussion. The sequence is to be followed by ROSP 20201 or ROSP 20215. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 281 and 340 to enroll in this class.

This is a six-credit hybrid introductory language course which combines traditional classroom with online instruction. Students attend class with an instructor (M-W) and work on-line (T-R-F). Equal emphasis is placed on spoken and written Spanish. The course is followed by ROSP 20201 or 20215. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 0 and 340 to enroll in this class.

This is an intermediate second-year language sequence with equal focus on oral and writing skills. It includes a review of basic grammar and then transitions into more difficult features of Spanish. Students learn to discuss and write about Hispanic cultural topics, current events, and literary texts. Student must have a Language Exam Score between 341 and 393 to register for this class.

This is an intermediate second-year language sequence with equal focus on oral and writing skills. It includes a review of basic grammar and then transitions into more difficult features of Spanish. Students learn to discuss and write about Hispanic cultural topics, current events, and literary texts. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 394 and 439 to enroll in this class.

This course is an accelerated language and culture course, combining the study of more complex language structures, communication tasks and cultural concepts in a stimulating classroom environment. This course covers Intermediate I and II content in one semester, and completes the language requirement. It is also recommended for students who wish to advance their linguistic preparation before studying abroad. Pre-requisites: ROSP 10102, 10110 or by placement.

Intended to develop writing proficiency through literary and nonliterary texts from Spain and Spanish America while continuing to promote the development of oral skills in Spanish.

This course is designed for the student who wants to learn and study Spanish terminology, phrases, and cultural conventions used in business situations in Spain and Latin America.

This course introduces students who have mastered the rudiments of Spanish grammar to a vocabulary allowing them to discuss medicine and health care with the Spanish-speaking population in the United States.

This course is designed for learners who have a personal connection to the Spanish language, having been exposed to it at home or in their community from a young age, and as such already understand and/or speak the language. The main focus is on language awareness, with the goal of enhancing language skills and deepening cultural understanding. Emphasis will be placed on practical language use, cultural exploration, and critical analysis of cultural artifacts. This course is founded on the principle of respecting, validating and legitimizing all modes and registers of speech that students bring with them to the classroom. Students will be introduced to linguistic variants of Spanish in the pursuit to foster awareness of linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects related to Spanish in the United States. The specific objectives are to further develop proficiency/competence in reading and writing skills, while expanding the whole linguistic repertoire needed in academic settings. Students will become aware of certain norms of written Spanish, such as the use of spelling, punctuation, accent marks and certain grammatical points particular to heritage speakers. It will expose students to a variety of text formats: short stories, poetry, songs, visual arts and film from the Spanish-speaking world.

Telenovelas are a major form of entertainment in Latin America and around the world. In this course, we will study the telenovela in an integrated multidisciplinary learning environment. We will begin by exploring the genre of the telenovela and its significance as a social, cultural, political, and economic force in Latin America and in the United States by reading about the genre (in Spanish) and watching two condensed telenovelas (also in Spanish). We will learn the formulas of the classic telenovela and its archetypal characters. You will demonstrate your understanding of the telenovela and its place in Hispanic culture through writing and discussion, and you will also engage in the linguistic and technical aspects of screenwriting, production (basic videography), acting, and post-production (computer based video and audio editing) techniques through the creation of a class telenovela; This course taught in Spanish.

This is an upper-intermediate cultural conversation and writing course designed to follow the four-semester language sequence and to act as a bridge to more advanced courses. In order to improve oral and writing language skills, this course engages students intellectually by using challenging, authentic materials and focusing on the exchange of ideas. Through the reading, discussion, and analysis of these materials, students will develop more sophisticated oral expression and expository writing as well as critical and abstract thinking skills. Being a content-driven course, topics could include, but are not limited to questions from the domains of politics, history, art, music, literature, film, religion, pop culture, etc. This course may be used as one of the two 20000-level electives for the Spanish major. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 440 and 600 to enroll in this class.

Horror movies have historically been much more than a genre of fear: they can be a powerful medium of social critique and cultural analysis. In this course, students will explore and analyze the genre of horror films beyond surface-level scares – they will learn approaches and theoretical frameworks to unravel the complexity of social, political, and cultural meaning hidden behind monsters, zombies, vampires, and other icons of the genre. We will also investigate the literary tropes and influences for many of these films. Through a multidisciplinary learning environment, students will analyze horror films from Latin America and the United States, studying how these films address issues such as social inequality, racism, sexism, institutional violence, power dynamics, and cultural tensions. The course will combine cinematographic analysis, critical theory, cultural studies, and hands-on audiovisual production.

This course is a comprehensive study of Spain's cultural identities from prehistoric to contemporary times. Civilization and Culture of Spain offers the possibility of getting to know the most important intellectual aspects of Spanish society while furthering the student's knowledge of the Spanish language. We will examine the geography, the history, the art, the literature, and the social development of Spain from its beginnings to the present period. We will also analyze the salient characteristics of the autonomic regions that represent the Spain of the new millennium. Popular culture will also be introduced in the form of music, typical cuisine, main holidays and celebrations, and relevant traditions. In order to complement the readings and class discussions, students will watch movies or documentaries, create oral presentations and projects, and examine closely each of the most representative communities that comprise Spain today.

This fifth-semester language and culture course is designed for students who want to improve their communication skills in Spanish and broaden their understanding of the Hispanic world through connecting with the local Spanish speaking community. Each section may focus on different topics, such as health care, education, social services, history of immigration, and intercultural competence. The course has a required Community-Based-Learning component in which students engage with the Latino community through placements in such areas as health care, youth mentoring or tutoring programs, English as a New Language (ENL) classes, and facilitating educational workshops with parents. In this course, students integrate their service experiences with the academic components of the class through readings, research, reflective writing, and discussion. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 440 and 600 to enroll in this class.

This is a fifth semester Community-Based Spanish course that bridges the language and literature sequences in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. The course is intended to develop and promote oral and written proficiency and cultural awareness. In this AI dominant era, people are increasingly lonely. In this class, we will correspond locally with elders from an assisted living facility and internationally with young people experiencing incarceration in Costa Rica. By employing the nearly lost art of letter writing (in the target language, with some in-person meetings with our local partner), our embrace of the low tech approach will yield high impact outcomes by fostering academic growth while combating the global epidemic of social isolation. This class will take you on a journey of connection as you improve your Spanish while exploring a variety of texts, reflective assignments, and community engagement.

This mini-course in Spanish offers both informal and structured conversation practice. Conversation on a variety of topics such as politics, society, and culture will be based on authentic materials. This course meets for group discussions on contemporary issues and with guest speakers. Conducted in Spanish.

Students will explore translation theory, ethics, preparations, procedures and techniques by means of Monica Baker's In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. Together with an advanced language text to improve language skills, and selected readings to provide a strong preparation for meaningful interaction with their community partners, the course will provide real-world opportunities for application and feedback for the skills the students develop. Students will be expected to work with the community partner for 10-12 hours per semester, which typically entails a visit once per week to the partner site.

This is an advanced-intermediate fifth-semester culture-based Spanish course designed for students who want to improve their communication skills in Spanish and broaden their understanding of the Hispanic world. Students will work with selected Latino families to preserve and document their histories, creating a lasting record that they can proudly pass down to future generations. By being involved in this important project, students will not only enhance their language skills, but also their cultural awareness, of and sensitivity to, this growing demographic group, as well as further develop their civic engagement. Through literature, film, current events, and guest speakers, students will develop knowledge about migration issues, family immigration histories, and problems facing our Latino communities in general, and particularly in South Bend. Students through ethical engagements will work on a collaborative creation and preservation of memory (memory of an experience that shapes everyday life and the future). Using storytelling techniques, students will work with families to create a collaborative book detailing their life and path to our community. The dispositions that the students will further develop through this class are a better understanding of the Latino culture and appreciation for our customs, an awareness of the diversity of Latino culture, an intercultural competence as well as a reflective sensibility.

Students will be introduced to Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (LIJ) in the Spanish-speaking world through a combination of considerable reading of LIJ across genres and levels and a critical perspective of LIJ via academic text and articles. Books read will include many award winners by prolific writers and illustrators of LIJ, as well as widely known writers for adults who have also written children's books. Among genres read will be folklore, narrative, fiction (representing afro-latino, indigenous and other multi-cultural groups; contemporary, realistic, historical), short story, and poetry. In addition, students will develop criteria for evaluating quality LIJ through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Finally, there is a Community-Based Learning (CBL) component where students will share LIJ with the local Latino community through CBL projects and a reading program with Latino youth. Pre-requiste: ROSP 20202 or above or placement by exam. This course can count as an advanced elective towards the major. Taught in Spanish. Students must have a Language Exam Score between 440 and 600 to enroll in this class.

This course examines the development of Creole societies in the French, Spanish, Dutch, and British Caribbean in response to colonialism, slavery, migration, nationalism and, most recently, transnationalism. The recent exodus of as much as 20 percent of Caribbean populations to North America and Europe has afforded the rise of new transnational modes of existence. This course will explore the consciousness and experience of Caribbean diasporas through ethnography and history, religion, literature, music, and culinary arts.

This course will examine the Latino experience in the United States, including the historical, cultural, and political foundations of Latino life. We will approach these topics comparatively, thus attention will be given to the various experiences of a multiplicity of Latino groups in the United States. This course has an optional community-engaged learning component with La Casa de Amistad.

Despite the growing presence of Central Americans in the United States in the last four decades, Central America and its people have occupied a paradoxical presence in the popular U.S. imaginary. As noted by literary scholar Yajaira Padilla, they are hypervisible as “threatening guerillas,” undocumented migrants, domestic workers, and “gang-bangers,” yet their lived experiences remain illegible in the dominant culture. This course traces the literary and cultural narratives of Central American experience within and in relation to the United States. We read fiction, poetry, film, literary nonfiction, theater, performance art, and music alongside literary and cultural studies scholarship. We begin by anchoring ourselves in key scholarship of U.S. Central American literary and cultural studies and the travel narratives of those who “witnessed” Central America in the mid 19th century. We fast-forward to writers from the U.S. and Central America who witnessed and experienced the effects of U.S. imperialism in the region, from the making of the Panama Canal to Cold War-era military interventions. We then focus on the creative narratives of Central American diasporas from the 1990s to the present. Each week is anchored by a short lecture that situates readings in historical context. We cover works by and about Central Americans from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama, as well as Garífuna and Maya territories. In final papers/projects, students will have the opportunity to explore authors, topics, and regions of interest not included on the syllabus.

This is an upper-division course for students with advanced preparation. It serves as the introduction to the analysis and explication of Spanish-language literary texts. Short texts in prose, poetry, and theatre from a variety of periods and countries within the Hispanic world are read, presented, and discussed. The course is a prerequisite for the survey courses, and must be completed by the end of the junior year.

Advanced Grammar and Writing offers an intensive review and refinement of Spanish grammar and instructs students in the nuances of specific genres of composition: description, report, complex narration, and argumentation. The composition genres studied directly inform the application of grammar and vocabulary; with respect to vocabulary, special emphasis is placed on problematic translations from English. This course is taught in Spanish.

A survey of Spanish literature through 1700. Readings of selected texts in prose, poetry, and theater from the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods. Recommended prerequisite: ROSP 30310.

Telling a story can be done in different ways. The stories we tell shape who we are, how we relate to our community, and help us understand the complexities of our culture and our time. Currently, one of the most popular ways to tell a story is the podcast phenomenon, where a group of people research, discuss, and present, using different strategies, an attractive story to an audience eager to learn about and enjoy a good oral narration. This class proposes an original and innovative approach to the literature and culture of the Spanish Baroque. During the semester, we will explore the different ways a life was recounted in the 17th century. At the same time, we will explore the podcast format as a model of contemporary mass communication. The final objective of the class will be to create a series of original podcast episodes, composed by the students, about different figures of the Spanish Baroque.

Since its first uses in the Sixteenth Century, the term utopia meant both "good place" and "no place." Thus, the concept carried two different ideas in its own meaning, an ideal society and an unreachable one. In the past years, the concept—as well as its opposite, dystopia—has been applied to explain literary representations of imagined worlds that hold a mirror up to our own "real" world. Analyzing and discussing cultural products that create, depict, and represent invented societies is, without a doubt, a good path to understand and to critique key aspects of this complex world we live in today. In this class, we will study Early Modern Hispanic texts (written by Late Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque authors) as well as contemporary fictions (films, short stories, plays) that have in common their way to create and describe imagined/utopian/dystopian universes. We will pay specific attention to descriptions of imagined places in order to see how they explore real tensions around class, gender, society, religion, racial identities, imperial subjects, and power. During the semester, we will read texts written by Cervantes, Colón, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Cortés, Gracián, Vespucio, Nieremberg, and Fuentelapeña and will watch and analyze films such as Children of Men, Blade Runner, Pan's Labyrinth, Avatar, Elysium, among other contemporary works.

This course will examine a panorama of vastly differing depictions of women in Medieval Iberia, in texts written almost exclusively by men. Through a selection of prose and verse from the 13th to 16th centuries, we will consider questions such as loyalty and betrayal, submission and rebellion, piety and blasphemy, and love and rejection.

This course will address the development of the legends of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (el Cid), the Seven Knights of Lara, and Bernardo del Carpio, from the thirteenth century to the twenty first. Our analysis will center on the portrayals of love and affection, betrayal, and vengeance, and how and why the presentations of such concepts change throughout the legends’ retellings in chronicles, narrative poetry, ballads, theater, and film.

This course is an invitation to explore problems of social representation and aesthetic expression through contemporary Spanish literature and cultures. Readings include texts produced since the beginning of Spanish democracy in 1978 through the present, and draw from different literary styles and overlapping themes, including: the self, the question of alterity or ‘the other', violence, memory, biography, feminism and post-feminism, nation and racism, the European community, globalization, colonialism and migrations, rural life, and contemporary capitalism. In order to consider voices that traditionally have been excluded for nation building discourses in Spanish democracy, a variety of genres (poetry, articles, columns, novel, short stories, tales, drama, film) are incorporated in this course. Taught in Spanish.

This course aims to provide students with an introduction to Catalan culture and to the major authors, works, and trends in Catalan literature from the medieval period to the 21th century. We will be reading representative work from such vibrant cities as Barcelona and Valencia, as well as the Balearic Islands, and other Catalan-speaking territories. The study of Catalan literature represents a dynamic and unique opportunity for students to enhance their knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula, and to foment a better understanding -particularly in light of the recent developments in the conflict between Catalonia's regional government and the central Spanish government- of the cultural, linguistic and political reality of today's Spain. While learning about Catalan literature and culture students will also have the opportunity to explore a wide array of topics, such as history, sociolinguistics, politics, the origins of Catalan nationalism, the Catalan separatist movements, and identity politics. This course will place special emphasis on the relationship between Catalan and Spanish literary traditions from the Middle Ages to the present. No previous knowledge of Catalan language is required: Spanish will be the language of class instruction and readings. Primary and secondary sources will be complemented with the use of films and other audiovisual materials. Fulfills 30710 or 30720 requirements or can count as a 30000-level elective.

During the 19th and 20th centuries many European intellectuals attempted to explain and define “religion” often in an effort to explain it away. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman famously declared that God was dead and Sigmund Freud maintained that religion was nothing more than an illusion. Others assured that religion was soon to disappear and that science and art would occupy the space that it once held. In this course we will examine how several 19th- and 20th-century Spanish writers attempted to represent the changing definitions of religion, challenges to them, and religion’s supposed disappearance. Through an exploration of the fictional worlds these authors create, we will grapple with the questions these writers so desperately tried to answer: Was religion disappearing? Was it being replaced? Was it transforming? If so, what did this mean for Spain during this time? What would it mean for Spain’s future?

What do female characters from 16th-17th century Spanish literature have in common with contemporary women facing challenges such as gender inequalities or the Me-Too Movement? This course allows students to explore the portrayal of women in connection to gender violence as an element that shapes their individual identities according to socio-cultural and religious expectations. We will read canonical Early Modern Spanish works by authors such as Cervantes, Zayas, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, and Fray Luis de Leon. Besides studying the sociohistorical context in which these texts are produced, we will approach this corpus from feminist theories, disability and violence studies. By engaging in discussion and critical thinking, students will reflect on topics such as marriage, gender, body representations, inequality, identity and violence in both Early Modern and contemporary periods. This course can fulfill the Modern Peninsular area requirement. Taught in Spanish.

This course is an invitation to explore problems of social representation and aesthetic expression through contemporary Spanish literature and cultures. Readings include texts produced since the beginning of the Spanish democracy in 1978 through the present, and draw from different literary styles and overlapping themes, including: the self, the question of alterity or "the other," violence, memory, biography, feminism and post-feminism, nation and racism, the European community, globalization, rural life, contemporary capitalism, and migrations. In order to consider voices that traditionally have been excluded from nation building discourses in Spanish democracy, a variety of genre (poetry, novel, short stories, tales, drama, film) are incorporated in this course. Taught in Spanish.

Fascism as a political movement and ideology emerged in Europe in the 1920s and reached the peak of its power in the 1930s before its "official" institutional collapse in 1945. In Spain, its legacy survived longer than in any other European country as one of the foundations of General Franco's prolonged dictatorship (1936-1975/78). This course will explore the history of fascism in Spain, from its roots in Spanish and European political developments in the 1920s and 30s to its rise to power under General Francisco Franco. It will also consider the mutations of fascism during the recent decades. We will try to define fascism in general and map its Spanish iterations as manifested in art, literature, photography, history, philosophy and film. The guiding questions of this class include but will not be limited to: what is fascism? what were the core ideas of the movement? What were its roots and who formed its social basis? How was an ideal society envisioned by Spanish fascists? What is the role of violence and power in fascist ideology? How did it reach the government? How did Franco's dictatorship transform society? What does fascism mean today? What are the remnants and/or mutations of Spain's fascism today? Taught in Spanish.

As one of Europe's main frontiers, Medieval Iberia was a space characterized by constant contacts, encounters, and exchanges between ‘East' and ‘West', and between different political, national, cultural, linguistic, and religious identities. Long after the Spanish Reconquista was officially completed in 1492, and the actual frontier had disappeared, however, the notion of inhabiting a liminal space that emerged from the reality, as well as the idea, of being Europe's frontier continued to shape not only the Iberian imagination, but also the way in which different Iberian communities constructed and codified their collective identities. This course is devoted to exploring the legacy, both visible and invisible, of the Iberian past and how the notion of being a ‘frontier' has shaped, and continues to shape not only Spain's identity as a nation, but also other Iberian and Mediterranean national identities. Class materials will focus on Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary Iberian literatures and cultures, but will also include readings and/or films that explore the notion of ‘frontier' as a theoretical framework by comparing Iberia with other ‘frontiers', both Medieval and Contemporary. Taught in Spanish.

A general introduction to and survey of major works of colonial and 19th-century literature up to Modernismo. Recommended prerequisite: ROSP 30310.

A survey of literary trends and major figures in modern Spanish-American literature from 1880 to the present. Readings of selected texts in prose, poetry, and theatre. Recommended prerequisite: ROSP 30310.

The crime narrative, a large category that includes the mystery novel, detective fiction, testimonial, and other subgenres, is often thought of as a minor genre limited by its formulas. It may be entertaining, but it isn't "serious" fiction. This course pays serious attention to the genre and its development in Latin America from its origins in the late 19th century to today. We focus on crimes stemming from dictatorships, crimes against women and LGBTQ people, drug trafficking, and abuse of the rights of indigenous peoples. We also look back at some key earlier texts that expand the genre and make it even more relevant. The goal is to see what these narratives can tell us about the societies they represent, the traumas and conflicts they dramatize, and the losses and mysteries that attend them. Taught in Spanish. Must be enrolled in one of the following Levels: Sophomore and Juniors only. This course can fulfill either the Early or Modern Latin-American area requirement.

This course will explore a representative corpus of Latin American cultural production from the 20th-21st centuries that questions the politics of representation of trans*-travestis subjectivities: how have trans*-travestis subjectivities and corporealities been represented in the Latin American cultural archive and how are they self-represented in the present? Through various cultural artifacts (short stories, poetry, short novels, graphic novels, films, performances, songs, and photography), the course will trace a journey from the external representations of trans*-travesti subjectivities -often constructed as a mere trope- to the self-representations that show us the current scene of trans* figurations produced in the continent. Some of the topics to be discussed are: construction of trans*-travesti subjectivity/identity, body and nominal politics, trans*-travesti motherhood and kinship, community, care, regimes of visibility/opacity, transnormativity and neoliberalism, migration, among others. These issues will be discussed and analyzed, based on a transhemispheric and localized dialogue between Latin American travesti theory and trans of color critique.

This course starts with an assumption: poetry is useless. Unlike medicine, it does not cure sick people. Unlike engineering, it does not help us build bridges. Unlike data scientists, it does not help a business sell more. In the past, poetry might have played a very important role in society, but that is definitely not the case today. At bookstores, poetry shelves are the smallest, and poetry books rarely (if ever) make it to a bestseller list. There are many novelists and non-fiction writers who make a living out of their work, but no poet makes a living out of poems (some might make a living out of teaching poetry, but not out of solely writing poems). People who try to read poetry often complain about its difficulty; they feel that they do not understand it. Even poets complain about a lack of audience. It is not an absurdity to ask whether poetry today has any readers beyond poets themselves. However, it still exists: dozens of poetry collections are published each year (including new translations of classical works), poetry readings are organized at universities, bookstores and coffee shops, dozens of prizes are awarded each year to poets, and many articles are published by scholars who specialize in the field. In the Spanish-speaking world, most prestigious literary journals do not pay poets anymore when they publish one of their poems, signaling that the genre is not in good shape when it comes to readership. Heriberto Yépez, an important literary critic and a poet himself, famously wrote at the beginning of this century, "the verse is an anachronistic structure, a historically exhausted structure". Focusing on Hispanic poetry, this course will trace the role played by poetry since its beginnings until the early XXI century, aiming to answer the following questions: How did poetry lose its fundamental role in our societies? What does that mean for literature, culture, and poets themselves? What motivates poets to write even when they know that only a few (at best) will read their work? Will poetry become a field like Logic in mathematics, where only a handful of experts publish and read among themselves? If so, what knowledge is the one possessed by those experts in poetry? Will poetry lose something by becoming a specialized field? Or will poetry just disappear due to a lack of general interest? If so, will society lose something? All these questions will be treated within the context of larger debate on how we assign value today and the distinction between that which is useful and that which is not in our lives.

We have recently witnessed a wave of debates about monuments (statues of military figures, explorers, conquerors, rulers, etc.). Moreover, many of those monuments have been intervened, "vandalized" moved, covered, and even topped down, fueling a series of controversies that invite us to reflect about the constantly shifting politics of memory and about the political effectiveness of pursuing symbolic justice in the public space. This is a Cultural Studies undergraduate research seminar devoted to a selection of important public monuments in Latin America; this is, statues, monoliths, and architectural visual signs that attempt to memorialize historical events and people as well as cultural and political values. We will examine their history as well as their paradoxical semiotic fate: no monument is able to install the memory it pretends to make eternal. Monuments are floating signifiers destine to be appropriated, re-signified, toppled down, and, eventually, forgotten.

This course offers a panoramic yet focused review of the literary work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), commemorating the 35th anniversary of his death. The goals of this class are twofold: 1) a literary interrogation of the limits of moral, religious, political, philosophical and scientific certainty through a critical survey of Borges's work and of the fluid relation of his writings with twentieth-century philosophy and cultural theory; and 2) a study of the paradoxes, crises, and dangers of certainty vis - vis Borges's radical emphasis and corrosive poetics of indetermination. Rather than making an argument for nihilism or postmodern disenchantment we will study how Borges' epistemological, metaphysical and philosophical "unavoidable option" of uncertainty may entail (and even uphold) a myriad of other ethical, religious, and political options. Taught in Spanish. This course may count for either the Early or Modern Latin-American area requirement.

This course focuses on understanding literary expressions of luxury and natural resource extraction in South America. Through a reading of colonial, modern, and contemporary texts, we will explore the representation of the acquisition, manipulation, and circulation of natural resources and their derivatives within and from South America. This course will offer an opportunity to examine the relationships between the productivity of the region, the influence of the market on cultural production, and contemporary environmentalist conversations. The course also seeks to develop the skills of writing, critical analysis and teamwork to generate informed opinions that students can communicate effectively. The course is taught in Spanish.

This course invites students to consider traditional and emerging definitions of race and human rights, and contextualizes these concepts against the history of literary depiction of slavery, abolition, Blackness, mulatez and mestizaje in late 19th- to 21st-century texts. The novels, short stories, and poetry included in the course come from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the 20th-century Caribbean diaspora to the US, covering a range of related topics. Can fulfill Modern Latin-American area and taught in Spanish.

This course examines the material and discursive relation between race and communication technologies in Latin American literatures and cultures. It focuses on the contributions made by indigenous and Afro-descendant people’s political actions and communicational tactics to the foundation and transformation of the Latin American literary canon. Through readings of literature, film, and other cultural artifacts, students will explore the ways in which race and communication technologies were intertwined throughout the birth of Latin American “writing”, and how the political and artistic practices performed by racialized groups shaped the cultural production of the region. Additionally, students will analyze how new media technologies have influenced power dynamics and cultural production in contemporary Latin America. By the end of the course, students will have developed a basic understanding of the foundation of Latin American literary tradition, focused on the tense and dynamic relation that it had with racialized groups, and communication technologies.

Departing from Michel Foucault's controversial theory of "race war", this class will examine the historical relations between the idea of race and material practices of violence. To do this we will focus on a selection of "debates about race" from across the Americas that in many ways define American modernity. These might include: Las Casas and Sepúlveda on the humanity of indigenous Americans; slavery and the formation of American nation-states; nineteenth-century race science, eugenics, and their rejection; the race-and-culture debates (e.g. Boas, Dubois, Freyre, against the race scientists); the so-called "problema indígena" debates in Latin America; race and rights struggles in the post-WWII era; immigration and migrant labor; Negro Sim (Brazil), Black Lives Matter (USA), and related protest movements worldwide; social media and the consolidation of white supremacist paramilitarism. Which selection of these topics we pursue will be guided by student interest. Language of instruction is Spanish and English. Comparative work is encouraged. This course can count for the Modern Latin-American area requirement for Spanish Major/Supplementary Major.

The focus of the course will be on representations of indigenous peoples and the issue of Spanish American identity. This course may count for either the Early or Modern Latin-American area requirement, depending on the subject of the student's final paper. Taught in Spanish.

Required co-reg for ROSP 30051

Students wishing to enroll in this section MUST be enrolled concurrently in ROSP 30201/ILS 20710: Introduction to Latino Studies. Students who have completed the Notre Dame language requirement in Spanish are eligible to sign up for an additional single credit discussion section as part of the Languages Across the Curriculum (LxC) initiative of the College of Arts and Letters. Choosing this option means that students will do some additional reading in Spanish language materials (approximately 20-25 pages a week), and meet once a week with a graduate student or faculty tutor from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures who will guide a discussion in Spanish and grade some brief writing assignments. The LxC discussion section in Spanish associated with this course will be graded on a pass/fail basis and will be credited on the student's transcript. Up to three LxC discussion sections can be applied toward a major, secondary major or minor in Spanish. Please talk to the instructor if you are interested in adding this supplemental credit.

This course provides students with an opportunity to pursue special studies under the direction of an assigned faculty member.

A close textual analysis of Cervantes' novel in its literary, historical, and cultural contexts.

What constitutes an extraordinary life? What can we learn about a particular historical moment by examining the fictional and real lives of the remarkable characters who populated their society? This seminar will analyze the various modes of representation and social control exerted by Spanish institutions during the Baroque period. Specifically, we will read a series of real and imaginary lives of men and women who challenged this power structure by living and writing extraordinary lives. These fictional accounts of an individual's life together with real accounts of imaginary individuals will give us the opportunity to face the complexity of Baroque Spain. Infamous men and women, marginalized subjects, persecuted personae are some of the examples of the extraordinary characters that we are going to meet in the class. Through the looking glass of their fantastic lives, we will analyze important concepts and categories such as subjectivity, subject formation, power/knowledge relations, gender, race, religious intolerance, persecution. We will focus on the creative responses forged by a heterogeneous community of people who wanted to reaffirm their individual freedom. The seminar will pay special attention not only to the discursive mechanisms used by the Spanish elite in order to maintain the status quo, but also will analyze how persecuted people of the same era were able to resist and challenge the dominant discourse. During the semester, we will read canonical literary texts (Poetry, drama, narrative) as well as other cultural artifacts (Manuals, treatises, chronicles, biographies, autobiographies, inquisitorial cases and movies).

This course departs from Erving Goffman's notion of "cultural frame", which shows how social existence is an ongoing "negotiation" about which cultural frame should encompass and thus ascribe meaning to various events and actions. Bearing this perspective in mind, this seminar focuses on different models of Spanish citizenship by examining the educational emotional value of various modern Spanish cultural artifacts, whose representational mode (melodrama and/ or comedy) provides a peculiar affective frame within which ordinary socio-historical experience was interpreted and given meaning.

This course offers an introduction to some of the recent thinking and cultural phenomena on the Anthropocene. Although we will pay particular attention to the Iberian Peninsula and contemporary Spain in particular, we will ultimately attempt to come to terms with our current geological and civilizational epoch as mainly humanly driven. For that purpose, under examination and question will be primitive accumulation and Capitalism, humanism and posthumanism, rural depopulation, consumerism, energy use, industrial relocation, technology (social networks, smartphones, big data, Google, etc.); droughts, wildfires, human and planetary finitude, etc. This discourse will combine literary and cinematographic studies with conceptual perspectives that will ultimately seek to bear witness through thinking and the arts to the Anthropocene, if such thing is still possible. Taught in Spanish.

This course offers an introduction to some of the recent thinking and cultural phenomena on the Anthropocene. In order to do that, we will pay particular attention to contemporary Iberian Cinema, Cultural Critique, and Critical Theory. Although we will focus on contemporary Spain in particular, we will ultimately attempt to come to terms with our current geological and civilizational epoch as mainly humanly driven. For that purpose, under examination and question will be primitive accumulation and Capitalism, humanism and posthumanism, rural depopulation, consumerism, energy use, industrial relocation, technicity (social networks, smartphones, big data, Google, etc.); droughts, wildfires, human and planetary finitude, etc. We will ultimately seek to bear witness to the Anthropocene and its consequences through cinema, culture and thought, if such a thing is possible. Taught in English and Spanish

This course studies how contemporary Iberian literature and culture is trying to come to terms with the coming of “Surveillance Capitalism;” namely, a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales. Thanks to Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, etc., this “Surveillance capitalism” could be also understood as an economic and societal logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to an unprecedented global architecture of behavioral modification (Heidegger, Stiegler, Zuboff, Balibar, etc.). Ultimately, we will ask what kind of civilization the third modernity of technics and surveillance foretell, and we will explore how literature and culture bear witness to the subsequent shifting of the fundamental inherited notions of modernity such as: human self-representation and artistic expression, progress, social bond, sovereignty, freedom, planetary finitude, inequality, as well as to the new discontents of civilization. We will combine literary and film studies with conceptual perspectives and will closely examine: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) as well as the novels Kentukis (Schweblin, 2019) and Horda (Menéndez Salmón, 2021). Taught in Spanish.

Through the use of film and text, students will gain a better understanding of late 20th and 21st Centuries in Spain. Students will develop an understanding of cinematic tools, strengthen argumentative Spanish, and cultivate a critical awareness towards cinema and Spain's cultures. The course is divided into three parts: the "classical filmmakers" of Spanish cinema (such as Bu'uel, Berlanga and J. A. Bardem); mainstream and popular movies; and contemporary independent and experimental cinema of the country. Class meetings will help to develop and better understand the art of filmmaking, grasping the specificities of each film genre and style, while critically reviewing some of the most important landmarks of the nation building and social life in contemporary Spain. Taught in Spanish.

This course will introduce the student to modern Mexican film. The trajectory of the course covers a basic canon of essential works from the incipient years of Mexico's so-called "Golden Age" up until the present (roughly 1930 - 2015). Lecture and discussion will be driven by the aesthetic, cultural and political problems and themes invited by the films themselves, which will be the center of the course: no less than fifteen feature films will define our agenda for the semester. Alongside the films we will read two kinds of documents: on the one hand, a selection of film scholarship, dealing with both the specific films and the history of Mexican cinema more generally; on the other hand, a set of essays on Mexican cultural politics relevant to the themes engaged in the cinematic work. Comparative work is encouraged. Language of instruction: Spanish. Readings in Spanish and English, films generally in Spanish with English subtitles.

Colonial Modernity and the Conquest of Yucatan. This is a class that focuses on a selection of historical and literary narratives as well as modern texts and films about different forms of colonialism and counter-colonial resistance in the Yucatan Peninsula since the 16th century until today; from the invasion of Cortés in 1519 ato the contemporary cyclical invasion of 16 million tourists a year.

The twentieth century was the century of women, feminism, and the feminist novel in Latin America. The history of Latin American feminism presents three milestones: first, the women's movements that demanded political and civil equality at the beginning of the century and culminated in the 1950s with what Julieta Kirkwood called "the years of silence"; second, the violent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when women challenged their historic exclusion from political life, showed how authoritarian regimes replicated patriarchal oppression, and developed feminist theories and practices; and third, the 1990s, when women focused on the damaging effects of neoliberalism, which impacted the activism of women and the development of feminist ideas. This course, designed as a seminar for advanced students in Spanish, will focus on the feminist novel since the 1950s, when women ventured into a genre they had barely published in the past, and will trace its course through the multiple positions that Latin American feminism took during the twentieth century. This course will be taught in Spanish and requires the active participation of all students.

The goal of this undergraduate seminar is to analyze Latin American literature in the cultural-historical period of the so-called "modernizing impact," which covers the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century and is commonly known as Modernismo. The journey will focus on the birth of the genre of the modern chronicle, a hybrid zone between literature and journalism, between information and imagination, between politics and the market. In Latin America, this complex object has brought together numerous critical perspectives that read local modernization against the backdrop of global modernity, whether as a dyschronic modernity (Ángel Rama), a disconnected modernity (Julio Ramos), a peripheral modernity (Beatriz Sarlo), a dissonant modernity (Gwen Kirkpatrick), a translinguistic modernity (Julio Ortega), or a modernity in translation (Mariano Siskind). From the discussion of these fundamental perspectives for the study of the field, specific prose texts by Rubén Darío, José Martí, Julián del Casal, and Julio Herrera y Reissig will be addressed. The chronicles of modernity will serve as a platform to reflect on current and relevant problems in literary studies, such as the representation of American cities, the crisis of modern subjectivity, the tension between the Eurocentrism of global modernity and American nationalisms, migratory processes, the phenomenon of secularization, the emergence of mass culture, the transition from the model of the "nineteenth-century literary man" to that of the "professional writer," the role of translation, and the assimilation of cultural traditions foreign to the Latin American sphere.

The objective of this undergraduate seminar is to analyze the work of two Chilean Nobel Prize winning poets from the present. This means that we will reread their poetic work from the urgencies of our present to see if the poets illuminate with their aesthetics particular and universal concerns, among them sexism, racism, classism, nature and the persistent legacy of the colonial past. Both authors were misunderstood at different times. Mistral, Nobel laureate in 1945, was read as an asexual teacher/mother of the nation, silencing her rich, profound and complex poetics. The 1971 Nobel, Neruda, occasion in which he was identified as "the poet of violated human dignity", and who in life had to face many times the State for his political and ideological convictions and his love for the people, now, after his death, must face the judgment of women, part of the people he loved, but whose rights and voices were generally disregarded by patriarchal societies and their idiosyncrasy, as a sexual predator. Their poetry read from different theoretical perspectives will show us their universal voices as Latin American authors and intellectuals of the 20th century.

One hundred years ago, Chile's greatest poet, Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) published Desolación (1922) in New York. This upper-level seminar will celebrate the centenary of the publication of her first book by analyzing Mistral's work in light of the political, social and economic crises of the new millennium, which will allow us to appreciate the validity of her thought: equal rights for women, the recognition of indigenous American peoples, the struggle for democracy and peace in contexts of war, the protection of children, the care and defense of the environment, among others. Mistral was read and misread, understood, and misunderstood, in different contexts and times, however, the beauty and strength of her poetry and her essays create a voice that is an undeniable contribution to the debates of our present. The seminar will try to answer questions such as: Why Gabriela Mistral is today an indisputable figure for thinking about indigenous struggles; What are the reasons to understand Mistral as a woman of vanguard; What are the reappropriations that social movements such as feminism and sexual dissidence in Chile and Latin America have made of Mistral's figure and work; Why her thought attracts new generations of young people; Is it possible to think of Mistral as a "trans" author because she crosses different borders (geographical, gender, social); According to the readings of Mistral's work, what advantages does it give the Chilean poet to elaborate a poetics of ambiguous writing; Can we think of Gabriela Mistral within the panorama of Latin Americanist thought, what would be her contributions to the discussions made by her male peers, among others. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of Mistral's development as a writer and historical subject, as well as the geopolitical history in which she writes. Students will hone their ability to think critically about literature by receiving a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. The language of the class is Spanish.

This course is dedicated to a semester-long study of a masterpiece of narrative fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's _Cien años de soledad_ (1967). Through careful and systematic reading, our discussions will move in two directions: On the one hand, toward the ways in which the central themes of the text--including but not limited to love, family, war, nation, science, travel, narrative, and writing itself--both illuminate and are illuminated by questions central to Western philosophy. On the other hand, the way in which the novel negotiates its own specific context--Western culture, the Cold War, the Americas, Latin America, Colombia--and how it confronts us to rethink that context. At the end of the course, besides having experienced one of the great artworks of the modern age, you should feel that your perspective on the world has been altered, at least a little. Students will write papers. Comparative and interdisciplinary work is encouraged. Language of instruction: Spanish.

The goals of this class are twofold: 1) an introductory yet focused review of the literary work of renowned Argentine poet, essayist and writer of short stories Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986); and 2) the literary interrogation of moral, religious, political, and cultural betrayal through a critical survey of Borges? work (poetry, essay and short story) and the study of the fluid relation of his writings with 20th century philosophy and cultural theory. We intend to explore in his work the fragile discursive boundary that both separates and connects perfidy and fidelity, traitors and converts. This course satifies the Modern Spanish-American Literature requirement or the 40000-level elective.

While she was living in exile in Cuba in the 1890s, Puerto Rican Poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió wrote the following lines, which are among the most iconic in Hispanic Caribbean verse: "Cuba y Puerto Rico son de de un pájaro las dos alas, / reciben flores y balas en un mismo corazón...". At the time these lines were seen as a testament to the the similar histories that these two Caribbean islands had developed after some four centuries of Spanish rule, but, as one critic has put it, "they can also be seen as a chilling presage of what was to come after the U.S. won the Spanish American War in 1898 and became a consistent presence in the future of both countries." In this class we will explore, through the study of Cuban and Puerto Rican History and Literature, the islands' many shared legacies such as colonialism, slavery, political unrest, and US intervention. Moreover, through readings of works by a variety of authors and literary genres, we will examine the many political, economic, social and cultural factors that have served to shape each island's identity over the past five centuries. Students will be required to write journal entries for each class, several short papers, and a final essay. There will also be a mid-term exam.

In this course we will examine the relationships between the United States and the Hispanic Caribbean and Central American nations as seen through the eyes of writers, intellectuals, political figures, etc.. Though we will focus primarily on literary texts, we will also consider works from other fields such as politics, history, economics, law, anthropology, and music. Through their readings, students will come to appreciate that despite the diversity of opinions that the people of the Caribbean and Central America have of the United States, there has long been an overwhelming sentiment that their neighbor to the north is an aggressive nation with self-serving and imperialistic ambitions. We will study works by authors, political figures, musicians, historians, etc. who hail from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Puerto Rico.

This course invites the students to explore the issue of identity as it is lived and thought by a number of Hispanic Caribbean thinkers and artists (essayists, playwrights, film makers, poets, and performance artists). We will pose the following questions: Is "identity" a useful concept for thinking about the culture of a nation, territory, region or community? How are the following factors used in identity politics or in the project of thinking identity: landscape and place, history (heroic history, the histories of suffering), the body, sacrifice? We will consider essays by Fernando Ortiz, Antonio Benítez Rojo and José Esteban Muñoz; poetry by Virgilio Piñera, Nicolás Guillén and Reinaldo Arenas; performances by Ana Mendieta, Carmelita Tropicana, Tania Bruguera and Carlos Martiel. All class discussions in Spanish. This course satisfies the modern Spanish-American area requirement.

In this class we will study a number of aspects of popular culture in the modern Cuban literature.

The first waves of feminism in South America during the late 19th and early 20th century were led by many women in the medical profession. Julieta Lanteri and Sara Justo in Argentina, Ernestina Lopez in Chile, or Paulina Luisi in Uruguay, to name a few, claimed for women's rights in terms of health and hygienism. At the same time, medicine emerged as a dominant and masculinized discourse within the nation-states that sought to control women's and non-binary bodies and behaviors. In the 20th and 21st century, medical discourse was also in the center of feminist debates about motherhood, reproductive rights, obstetric violence, among others. This course will explore the connections between medicine and feminism through the life and works of women writers and activists from South America, from the late 19th to the 21st century. We will read fictions, essays, journal articles, and medical treatises from the 19th and 20th century and debate on the role of medical knowledge in the context of recent feminist movements. Theoretical readings include Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, and numerous scholarly works on feminism, the history of medicine, and gender and sexualities in South America (Salessi, Lavrin, Marino, Guy, Ben, among others).

This advanced Spanish course explores the cultural and intellectual contributions of women in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin America, examining how gender ideas shaped ideas of citizenship, sexuality, and education in post-independence societies. Through literary texts written by women, alongside essays, fiction, and other cultural narratives that portray women’s roles in nation-building, we will critically analyze the category of woman and question traditional binaries of womanhood. Course materials include novels, essays, films, visual culture, albums, cookbooks, correspondence, diaries, and periodicals. Students will engage in archival research at the Hesburgh Library Special Collections and participate in a series of curated events in collaboration with the library. The final project will involve original research, encouraging students to connect historical women’s culture with contemporary gender debates.

We have recently witnessed a wave of debates about monuments (statues of military figures, explorers, conquerors, rulers, etc.). Moreover, many of those monuments have been intervened, "vandalized" moved, covered, and even topped down, fueling a series of controversies that invite us to reflect about the constantly shifting politics of memory and about the political effectiveness of pursuing symbolic justice in the public space. This is a Cultural Studies undergraduate research seminar devoted to a selection of important public monuments in Latin America; this is, statues, monoliths, and architectural visual signs that attempt to memorialize historical events and people as well as cultural and political values. We will examine their history as well as their paradoxical semiotic fate: no monument is able to install the memory it pretends to make eternal. Monuments are floating signifiers destine to be appropriated, re-signified, toppled down, and, eventually, forgotten.

Throughout a series of heterogeneous Latin American texts (short stories, movies, performances, paintings, songs) we will explore some of the key concepts proposed by Guilles Deleuze, one of the most intriguing and important philosophers of the 20th Century ("territorialisation" / "deterritorialisation", "assemblage", "Body without Organs", "lines of flight" "affect", "becoming", "rhizome" , "desire," "nomadism," and so on). Taught in Spanish.

"Gonzalo Guerrero's Offspring. Colonial Renegades in Yucatán." This is a seminar that focuses on a selection of historical and literary narratives about the figure of Guerrero (the Spanish conquistador that went native and fought on the side of the Maya) as well as on what I call Guerrero's progeny: a series of renegades who - like Guerrero in the 16th century - went native and ended up fighting against different forms of colonialism since the 16th century until today.

What can literature teach us about the local Latino community? How does immersion in the community enhance your understanding of concepts such as migration and biculturalism? How can literature combined with experience in the "real world" allow you to connect the dots between politics, economics, history, culture, and the arts? Migrant Voices is a course designed to bridge together the study of U.S. Latino/a literature and the pedagogy of community-based learning. Students will read foundational and contemporary works by U.S. Latinos/a authors from various backgrounds and nationalities (Mexican/Chicano, Salvadoran, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Peruvian, etc.) that are representative of the local Michiana U.S. Latino population. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and transnationalism will be central to our discussions and will be examined through both a literary lens and an experiential perspective. For the CBL aspect of the course, students are required to engage in a minimum of 2 consecutive hours of tutoring/mentoring, once a week, at La Casa de Amistad. Programs are available M-T-W-R from 3-5 pm and Mon. and Thurs. from 4-6 pm. The final grade will be calculated based on: class participation, class journal, essays, quizzes, exam, and a final paper. This class will be conducted in Spanish. Offered to Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors. Cross-listed with: ILS, LAST, AFST.

If something has become clear following the recent termination of Mexican-American studies courses by the Tucson Unified School District (AZ) is that race and ethnicity matter when considering the condition of Latinos/as in the US. In this course students will begin by examining the events related to the AZ law and will explore how these issues are played out in Latino literature and our local Latino community. Literature by Afro-Latina/o, Andean-Latina/o (and other Latinos of indigenous descent), and Asian-Latina/o authors will provide a lens through which to explore the racial and ethnic complexities that are erased by the umbrella term "Latino." Tutoring/mentoring at La Casa de Amistad will provide an opportunity for students to see the issues studied at work in the "real world," while also fostering stronger ties between Notre Dame and the South Bend community. For the Community-Based Learning segment of the course, students will spend two hours per week volunteering and will participate in a local immersion weekend. This course will be conducted in Spanish. Spanish heritage speakers are welcome. This course can fulfill the Modern Latin-American area requirement.

What is a border? Who inhabits the borderlands? What function does the border play in the construction of a national or cultural identity? How do we bridge communities? How are borders represented, established, and challenged in the works of US Latino/a writers? These are some of the questions that this course will address within the context of US Latino/a literature and culture. Most of the course will focus on two geographical areas that we tend to associate with these concepts: the traditional US-Mexico border and the lesser studied Caribbean. Students will watch films and read literary works by Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Dominican-American and Cuban-American authors in order to gain a deeper understanding of how borders and borderlands inform contemporary discourse and culture. This course has a Community-Engagement Learning (CEL) requirement. Students are expected to sign up for tutoring at La Casa de Amistad once a week for 2 hours. The course will be taught in Spanish and is open to advanced non-majors . This course is for undergraduate students only.

This course centers Blackness within latinidad. In it, students will learn about the history of Blackness in Latin America, and how that history continues to shape the experiences of AfroLatina/os in the US today. We will approach Blackness from a transhemispheric perspective, paying attention to how it is erased through the discourses of mestizaje and latinidad. We will analyze literary and cultural works by AfroLatina/os with roots in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Perú. This is a CBL course and students will volunteer at La Casa de Amistad once a week. Open to non-Spanish majors who are fluent in Spanish or are Spanish heritage speakers. Taught in Spanish and can count as Modern Latin-American Area requirement.

This course takes up the relations between aesthetics and politics as they pertain to traffic, migrancy and the international movement of people. Politico-philosophical categories such as freedom, containment, refugee, civilian, (in)equality, nation, hate and hospitality will be at the center of our conversations. Our approach will be interdisciplinary and our objects of study will include recent literature, film, television and historical research that deal with these themes in a sustained way. Language of instruction: English. Spanish majors taking this course for major credit will complete written assignments in Spanish.

In this course we will focus on the themes of Human Rights and Social Justice in modern Latin American literature and film. The class will be structured around geographical areas, with approximately equal time divided among the Hispanic Caribbean, the Andean Region and the Amazon, the Southern Cone, and Central America. For each class students will read literary texts and related secondary readings that deal specifically with human rights issues such as torture, poverty, economic exploitation, women's and children's rights, racism, religious and cultural oppression, etc. Students will also be required to watch several films, all of which will be related to the readings.

If the saying "We are what we eat" is true, then food reflects and determines our identity, our subjectivity, and our very being. Through the study of Latin American canonical and less-known literary texts from Colonial to contemporary times, this course focuses on food as a cultural artifact shaped by the dynamics of colonialism, modernization, immigration, and globalization. From a multidisciplinary perspective that includes Literary, Cultural and Gender Studies, as well as History and Anthropology, we will explore topics such as food exchange value, regional and indigenous traditions, social behavior and consumption, cooking imaginaries and social structure, culinary technologies, and gender correlations, among others. Primary sources include texts by Cristóbal Colón, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ricardo Palma, Esteban Echeverría, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, Rubén Darío, Rosario Castellanos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende. We will read these works together with theoretical approaches by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Mignolo, Pierre Bordieu, and Walter Benjamin.

O futebol, fútbol, football: The beautiful game, the people’s game, the world’s game. Soccer is the most popular sport on the globe, a massive, international corporate enterprise whose outlays—from player salaries to stadiums—make it by far the biggest business in sport. Soccer is also popular in the other sense, del pueblo, a game played around the world on the smallest pitches imaginable, with improvised nets, bare feet, and any reasonably kickable object standing in as a ball. If sport tells us something about who we are and offers a window into our historical reality, then the massive scope of soccer, perhaps, can tell us something about the world. On the eve of FIFA World Cup 26ä, when the world’s game will be centered in a country that has turned its back on globalization and where the United States, Mexico and Canada will be asked to work together in the name of internationalism, we will take up the modern history of soccer (fútbol, futebol) by focusing on its aesthetics, politics, economics, and interactions with society. Soccer is big enough to comprise the world’s dreams and its nightmares and we will consider its controversies head on: race, gender, class, labor, inequality and social violence will be in play. We’ll also take plenty of time to contemplate the sport as an aesthetic object, and its relations to art, poetry and music. Objects of study include literary and journalistic texts, academic research, and video (films, shows, clips, and so on). This course satisfies electives in both the Spanish major and the Sports, Media and Culture (SMAC) minor. The language of instruction is English. Spanish majors, or students of French or Portuguese, may conduct their assignments in the respective language. Interdisciplinary and comparative work is encouraged.

The so-called Black Death was an outbreak of highly virulent Bubonic plague that tore through Africa, Asia and Europe during the fourteenth century. It killed a third, perhaps as much as half, of the European population, and is remembered in the popular and historical imagination as the mother of all plagues. But while the Old World suffered a highly storied and ritualized plague that transformed its politics, culture and identity, it would be the other half of the globe, America, whose very existence as a geopolitical formation would be founded on an even more vicious plague: the toxic cocktail of fever, nausea and boils that, like a slow-moving apocalypse creeping along over centuries, decimated America's indigenous inhabitants, wiping out entire civilizations, reducing some regional communities by over 90 per cent. America's long history of violence is founded on a great plague, an emissary of the conquest itself, and American writers, artists and intellectuals have rethought, reimagined, and given aesthetic and cultural shape to plagues, large and small, ever since. This class is dedicated to the contemplation and analysis of the relations between outbreaks of widespread illness (broadly conceived) and aesthetic representation. Our objects of study will be literary texts (mostly) from the American and Iberian worlds (e.g. Borges, Camus, Garcia Marquez, Saramago, Whitehead, Wright), films (e.g. Anderson, Cazals, Cuaron, Eggers, Gilliam, Guerra, Kaufman, Kazan), cultural history (Barry, Diamond, Fen, Tuchman), and a range of visual-cultural artifacts. Language of instruction: Spanish. Narrative objects of study will be in Spanish or English. Student production will be in Spanish. Comparative work is encouraged.

This course will be an interdisciplinary exploration of the social function of art in Spain and the Americas, focusing on poetry and the visual arts in particular (painting and film, specifically) and their relations to moments of extreme social conflict such as wars and revolutions. We will also cast a critical eye on representations of illness and medical conditions which attend some of these moments of conflict. Our discussions will center on a series of key dates: 1898, 1922, 1936, 1959, 1973 - which indelibly mark the history of Spain and of the Americas and which have given rise to a wide range of artistic responses. Conflicts: the Spanish-American War, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, the Chilean coup. Authors: Jose Marte, Cesar Vallejo, Miguel Hernendez, Pablo Neruda, Nicoles Guillen, Rael Zurita. Illnesses and medical conditions: Yellow Fever, hunger and malnutrition; forgetting and amnesia.

Caribbean societies are diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. They also share a common history of colonization and slavery, neo-colonization, and plantation and tourist economies that are in stark contrast to the stereotypes of sun, sand, etc. This course examines high points in 20th and 21st Century Caribbean discourse (meta-theoretical texts about the Caribbean) and Caribbean poetry from the three major linguistic traditions (Spanish, English and French). We will focus on the poetry itself, the place of land and seascapes in Caribbean discourse, as well as issues of identity, difference and disidentification. We will read theoretical texts by Fernando Ortiz, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Édouard Glissant, Silvio Torres Saillant, and José Esteban Muñoz, and poetry by José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Derek Walcott, Rosario Ferré, Julia Álvarez, Juan Carlos Flores, Víctor Fowler, and Damaris Calderón. Class to be conducted in Spanish.

This graduate seminar will analyze the processes of modernization in the Rio de la Plata countries: Argentina and Uruguay. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach (literary criticism, cultural theory, ethics, philosophy), we will focus on how popular culture, especially tango, gave voice and images to European immigration, rural migration to the urban areas, space transformations due to technological and scientific advances, among other social and economical phenomena of the turn of the twentieth century. We will also investigate the complex dynamics between popular and high cultural responses to modernization and the creation of a modern culture in the region. To this aim, we will pay particular attention to the transformation of tango from a manifestation of the harbor slums to popular and mass culture as well as the development of the modernista literary aesthetic to the avant-garde. Concepts of nationalism/exoticism; authenticity/copy; belonging/banishment will occupy our discussions on the creation of modern subjectivities.

What is the status of "work" today? This course takes up the history and current crisis of the idea of work by focusing on its philosophy and its aesthetic representation. We are at the cusp of a civilizational shift that has work at its center: the implacable rise of automation and artificial intelligence suggests that by the next decade there will be many, many more people than there will be jobs. And yet why should we think of this as a crisis at all? Since work's emergence as a modern idea, dreams of human emancipation have revolved around the liberation from the toil that it implies. John Maynard Keynes, the foundational bard of post-Depression capitalism, saw in the free market the opportunity to reduce "work" to a few hours per week; a century later the World Health Organization has identified "overwork" as a public health crisis, with its most consequential symptom—"death by overwork"—common enough to be reducible to a concept, what in Japan is called karoshi. And a major world language reminds us that negócio, the modern frame for all work, is precisely a negation: of ócio, idleness, leisure, pleasure. Nation-states themselves take on as a major function of their administrative existence the regulation of who can work within their borders, and entire regions of the world—such as Latin America, which will be of special interest in this course—are thought about in the popular imagination as warehouses of work, the mano de obra of the global economy. In posing the question "what is work?", this course will move to some basic concepualizations of its form (Marx, Freyre, Keynes, Lévi-Strauss, Arendt, Sennet, Ehrenreich, Graeber, etc) to a set of topics where work is at stake, for example: work and inequality; forced work (e.g. slavery); work and (im)migration; work and race; unremunerated work (‘house work'); sex work; violence work; work as commodity; work and identity; global divisions of labor; the end of work. As a way of getting into these topics, we will draw on their problematization in contemporary film, including works by, for example, Mendonça, Herzog, Reygadas, Rivero, González Iñárritu, Martel, Cuarón, Joon-ho, Loach, Reichardt, Zhao. Language of instruction is English. Comparative work is encouraged.

Since the financial collapse of 2008, it has been common to declare that capitalism is in “crisis”. But capitalism was born in crisis: from its earliest moments, it has been associated with boom-and-bust cycles, breathtaking stock bubbles, financial ruin, forced labor, and conquest. Moreover, as a historical social relation that in ways large and small organizes our lives, it is notoriously difficult to explain. Scholars of capitalism—historians, economists, sociologists—do not at all agree on what capitalism is; less agreement stands on its origins, its development, its future possibilities, even its current existence (more than one prominent thinker has declared capitalism “as we know it” to have ended). And yet at the same time, so overwhelming is the elusive presence of capitalism in our lives that one philosoher’s pithy remark has been repeated to the point of cliché: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Which begs the question: is human civilization, simply, capitalism? With particular focus on the comparative experience of historical capitalism in the Americas, this course revolves around three broad problems: the contested origins of capitalism; the bifurcation of experiences of capitalism through uneven development; and the possible futures of capitalism. Each problem will be dealt with through a set of texts. On the one hand, we will engage some basic scholarly (historical and philosophical) texts in order to build conceptual language and identify points of controversy. On the other hand, we will draw on creative (narrative fiction and film) texts in order to contemplate the lived experience of capitalism and its contradictions in a range of settings. Language of instruction is English. Comparative work is encouraged.

Mexican cinema has been one of the most vibrant, influential national film cultures of the past century. This seminar will introduce the student to the rich history of this art through the viewing and analysis of six essential films: Maria Candelaria (1943), Los olvidados (1950), El lugar sin limites (1977), Amores perros (2000), Luz silenciosa (2007) and Roma (2018). Alongside their aesthetic innovations, these films will also provide a window into transformations in Mexican culture, society and politics. Class time (4 hours per week) will be introduced with a very brief lecture and then dedicated to a discussion of the assigned film. The language of instruction is English. All students, all majors, all levels are welcome.

Specialized reading related to the student's area of study.

This course is designed with the purpose of allowing students to engage in an individual or small group study under the direction of a departmental faculty member.

This course may cover an in-depth study of a particular author, theme, genre, or century. In addition to primary texts, some critical material will be required reading. This course culminates in a substantial research paper.