Graduate Information
For more detailed information including course description, sample reading list, and instructor, please visit the Registrar's Office.
Courses for Spanish
LAS 501/SPA 588Latin America: Literature and Power(LA)This course examines the life/work of twelve representatives of Latin American literature. It is partially based on my book Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America but presents additional material and reflections. The course examines the specific contributions of each writer to the political and economic development of his own country and of the region as a whole. The course emphasizes the biographical aspects of each thinker, an area that has been under-emphasized in Latin America itself. The principal sources will be biographies, autobiographies/personal letters (as well as exchanges of letters between important figures.)Staff
POR 561/SPA 589Modern Brazilian Literature: Images for a New World: Poetry and Fiction in Brazil and ArgentinaThis course aims to address a range of literary texts and artistic productions from Brazil and Argentina from the perspective of the concept of "novelty." We will work with the hypothesis that the idea of "novelty" has contained the promise of a "new world," besides being from a formal point of view a central concept for aesthetic modernisms and the avant-garde. However, although a disruptive procedure, "novelty" also imagines and announces the destruction of subjectivity and the social bond. Our goal is to explore some configurations around this duplicity in some key cultural productions of Brazil and Argentina.Mario C. Camara
SPA 538/COM 512Seminar in Golden-Age Literature: Five Ways of Reading "Don Quijote"This course explores Cervantes' seminal text from historical, philosophical, literary, medical, and visual perspectives.Marina S. Brownlee
SPA 543Seminar in Modern Spanish Literature: Thinking (on) the Spanish BubbleThis interdisciplinary course focuses on the Spanish crisis from a cultural perspective, analyzing how political and economic transformations, both global and local, have triggered complex cultural responses. By analyzing the circulation of popular cultural practices, it provides an interpretative framework for the emergence of new political subjects and identities and studies the ways they have and continue to contest contemporary symbolic interpretations. In so doing, it examines how alternative memories of past democratic experiences are brought up to date with the formation of new public spaces and cultural practices.Germán Labrador Méndez
SPA 548/ARC 544/COM 577Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Architecture and Literature: Perverse SpacesA study of the role of heterotopic architectural spaces in 20th-century literature, with special emphasis on "perverse spaces" (brothels, hotels, arcades, chambers, cells, voyeuristic and exhibitionistic configurations). We will read novels by Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Salvador Novo, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq, and theories of space and sexuality by Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Beatriz Colomina, Beatriz Preciado, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, and Rem Koolhaas.Rubén Gallo
SPA 551Body Cultures: Exhibitionism and Materiality in Latin AmericaCan the body disobey the limits imposed by the materiality of sex? Is it possible to disorganize the binary opposition without reinforcing its normativity? Can gender have a decisive bearing on bodily materiality? My seminar answers these questions, exploring the work of Latin American artists who aim to defy the norms imposed by the heterosexual imperative. Their own bodies generate a response, which arises from their compulsive need to call attention to their materiality. I propose that the possibility of a new body depends on its visuality and visibility to enable the deactivation of the culture's preferred categories.Javier E. Guerrero
LAS 402/SPA 407Latin American Studies Seminar: Architecture as a Mechanism of Social InclusionArchitecture as a mechanism of social inclusion investigates the processes that are transforming urban structures, in particular the public and common spaces. Latin America has become an urban laboratory of unique living experiences, becoming a scenario to look into new solutions for contemporary challenges. We will begin with a broader study that explores the characteristics behind the informality and urban plans, understanding the stories behind the new forms of city development, the related forms of democracy and governance in the Latin society; together with the power of architecture as a mean to transform social realities.Gian C. Mazzanti Sierra
Courses for Portuguese
POR 561/SPA 589Modern Brazilian Literature: Images for a New World: Poetry and Fiction in Brazil and ArgentinaThis course aims to address a range of literary texts and artistic productions from Brazil and Argentina from the perspective of the concept of "novelty." We will work with the hypothesis that the idea of "novelty" has contained the promise of a "new world," besides being from a formal point of view a central concept for aesthetic modernisms and the avant-garde. However, although a disruptive procedure, "novelty" also imagines and announces the destruction of subjectivity and the social bond. Our goal is to explore some configurations around this duplicity in some key cultural productions of Brazil and Argentina.Mario C. Camara