Courses and Descriptions
SPA 500 The Poetry of Resistance in the Time of the Generals in Latin America 3 Credits
This course offers a broad overview of important historical literature about dictatorships in Latin America. The weekly readings and writing assignments have been selected in order to: 1) introduce major concepts, arguments, and figures in the field of Latin American literature and culture; 2) appreciate the evolution of the role of artists and intellectuals during the years of the “dirty war” in Latin America; 3) sharpen analytical writing; and, 4) demonstrate the connection (and the limits of the connection) between literature, culture, and society. This course is predominantly a study of Latin American governments in the twentieth century and of the role of artists, primarily writers of fiction and poetry, as a corps of truth-tellers and resisters in the face of government propaganda, censorship, and cultural/political repression.
SPA 510 Marks of Identity: The Journey of the Self in Spanish Theater 3 Credits
What markers of class, race, ethnicity, gender and even species shape individual and group identity? How does identity change over time? How do I know who I am, and how does my identity further my interests and those of society? Offered in translation, this course explores the staging of identity in Spanish theater from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Topics may include the 17th-century honor code and gender, the myth of Don Juan, imperialist imaginings of New World subjects, the romantic hero and the angel of love, identity and the grotesque, identity and erotic desire, identity and media technologies, and non-human animal subjects. Film, art, music and live-theater attendance.