SPAN101 Elementary Spanish I

This introductory course is designed for students without prior Spanish language study. Students will develop basic receptive and productive language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) along with an awareness of the various cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, including the United States. Note that Span 101 and Span 102 are designed as a year-long course, with each course covering half of the textbook, along with other materials. Completion of Span 102, or evidence of appropriate level, will be required to continue onto Intermediate Spanish (111-112).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN102 Elementary Spanish II

This course is the continuation of SPAN101, though students may place directly into 102 via the Wesleyan Language Placement Exam. The course further develops basic language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) and incorporates readings and media from a variety of sources, allowing students to explore the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: SPAN101

SPAN103 Elementary Spanish for High Beginners

SPAN103 is intended for students with prior experience in Spanish (and is considered the same level as SPAN 102). This language course places emphasis on the development of speaking, listening, reading and writing, within a cultural framework, so students can attain an intermediate level in the language (and subsequently enroll in SPAN 110 or 111).

To enroll in this course students must have placed into SPAN 102 or SPAN 103 on Wesleyan's Placement exam. Enrollment for Juniors and Seniors is contingent upon space availability during drop/add period. This course is not linked to another class.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN110 Spanish for High Beginners

Intermediate-level language course following SPAN103, with emphasis on the development of four basic language skills (reading, listening, writing, and speaking) within a cultural framework.

This course is comparable to SPAN111 and can be followed by SPAN112. Those seeking to follow with SPAN113 require permission of instructor. A weekly electronic journal is required for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: SPAN102 AND SPAN103

SPAN111 Intermediate Spanish I

This intermediate language course places continued emphasis on the development of reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills within a strong cultural framework. The sequence SPAN111 and SPAN112 seeks to expand students' active and passive control of vocabulary and grammar and for students to gain experience in using formal and informal registers of Spanish. Note that Span 101 and Span 102 are designed as a year-long course, with each course covering half of the textbook, along with other materials. Completion of Span 112, or evidence of appropriate level, will be required to continue onto Advanced Spanish - Introduction to Hispanic Literatures (Span 221).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN112 Intermediate Spanish II

This course leads students through a review and in-depth examination of advanced Spanish grammar issues and vocabulary expansion within a cultural framework that explores an array of topics connecting to other academic disciplines. Students will experience working with written texts and other media materials and produce a variety of written pieces. The course is a continuation of Span 111, though students may place directly into the course via the Wesleyan Placement exam or an appropriate AP score.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: SPAN111

SPAN113 Intermediate-Advanced Spanish

Within a cultural framework focused on the Spanish-speaking world--especially Latin America--this course leads students through a review and in-depth examination of advanced Spanish grammar issues and vocabulary expansion while providing the experience of working with written texts and other media materials. Students will explore an array of topics that connect to other academic disciplines.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: SPAN110 OR SPAN111

SPAN201 Spanish Play

Students will be in charge of directing and staging a play in Spanish with the assistance of a Spanish professor. The workshop will take place over 10 weeks. Minimum one hour per week, which will increase to 2 as the day of the opening approaches. Rehearsals will be split between activities including reading and commenting on the dramatic text and working on diction, which can be done collectively or in smaller groups, and workshopping and rehearsing the play. Although the play will be in Spanish, we will try to allow for a wider audience by providing a brief English translation of the plot.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN203 Spanish for Heritage Speakers

This course is designed to meet the specific needs of students who are heritage speakers of Spanish to increase their language skills and confidence. Students who take this course must have placed into SPAN112 or above. Emphasis is placed on the following: development of linguistic strategies that advance students' written and oral expression beyond the colloquial level, grammatical and orthographic norms of Spanish, critical reading (reading for understanding and analyzing what is read), and expansion of vocabulary. The linguistic work will be conducted through course materials that explore, through a variety of literary and nonliterary texts, the use of Spanish in the U.S. Materials include a textbook or manual and topics related to the experience of Spanish speakers in the U.S.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN204 Teaching Spanish K-12: Second Language Pedagogy (CLAC 0.5)

This is a community engagement course in which students learn basic principles of language pedagogy and language acquisition to inform their teaching of Spanish to children at one of the Middletown public schools. Readings in English and Spanish; class discussion and assignments in Spanish. Students will familiarize themselves with characteristics of second language (L2) learning and teaching, a basic know-how on analyzing and preparing materials for language learning/teaching, and L2 teaching as a profession.

Language and course requirement: Students must have recently taken a SPAN course numbered 221 or above. Preference will be given to EDST and HISP majors, as well as juniors and seniors.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: CGST218, EDST204
Prereq: None

SPAN221 Introduction to Hispanic Literatures and Advanced Practice in Spanish

Poems, plays, essays, short stories, and films representative of various Spanish-speaking countries and different periods of literary history are used to improve speaking and writing skills and to introduce students to the fundamentals of literary analysis. It includes a formal review of recurring grammatical and rhetorical problems students have at this level in Spanish. The course is conducted exclusively in Spanish. Besides the three hours of class sessions with the professor, all students are required to attend a weekly one-hour conversation section with a Colombian or Spanish TA.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN225 Creative Writing in Spanish

Taught by renowned Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, Distinguished Writer in Residence for 2024-25, this seminar will offer students the tools to articulate their ideas and experiences in Spanish in narrative forms. The course is designed to achieve this in two ways: learning specific techniques through readings of prose in Spanish and by working throughout the semester on crafting at least one short piece. The professor will make in-class observations and written suggestions on student texts as drafts of their work are presented. During the semester students will practice extensive writing, critical reading, and peer editing. The course introduces students to literary terminology and places significant emphasis on vocabulary building.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: WRCT225
Prereq: None

SPAN227 Writing Short Fiction in Spanish

This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of writing short fiction in Spanish. It will enhance their command of Spanish and their skills as effective writers through the examination and discussion of many aspects of the craft of fiction writing, which will inform students' own writing and development of their personal style. We will examine essential features of fiction (methods of constructing narrative tension, climax, ambiguity, character, dialogues, and structure), as well as various fictional styles through our discussion of the writing of our peers and a study of the texts of a number of contemporary Latin American and Latinx writers working in a genre that has been crucial to the region's intellectual production.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: CGST227
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN230 Heroes, Lovers, and Swindlers: Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature and History

This course is designed to develop students' ability to make informed and creative sense of four fascinating, complex, and influential medieval and Renaissance Spanish texts in their multiple (literary, historical) contexts: the "national" epic EL CID (12th-13th century); the bawdy and highly theatrical prose dialogue known as LA CELESTINA (1499); the anonymous LAZARILLO (1554), the first picaresque novel; and María de Zayas's proto-feminist novella THE WAGES OF VICE (1647). Through these and selected historical readings, the course is also intended to provide students with a basic knowledge of Spanish culture (in its plurality) from the 11th through the 17th centuries, the texture of everyday life, and the larger movements of long-term historical change. We will draw on literature and history to imagine the world of chivalry and crusade in the medieval Spain of "the three religions of the book" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam); of mercantile values, courtly love, and prostitution in the Renaissance city; of social injustice and religious hypocrisy in imperial Spain; and of the exacerbated gender and caste tensions that followed from the political crises of the 1640s. We will reflect on the interplay of literature and history in our efforts to come to grips with a past both familiar and strange; address the crossing of linguistic, artistic, ethnic, religious, caste, and gender boundaries that has long been a conspicuous feature of Spanish society; and consider what texts and lives of the past might still have to say to us today. No prior historical or literary preparation is required, only a willingness to engage the readings closely (textually and historically).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL229, MDST228
Prereq: None

SPAN231 Classic Spanish Plays: Love, Violence, and (Poetic) Justice on the Early Modern Stage

From 1580 to 1690, Spanish and Latin American playwrights created one of the great dramatic repertoires of world literature, as inventive, varied, and influential as the classical Greek and Elizabethan-Jacobean English traditions. A distinguishing feature of this theatrical tradition is the unusual prominence it lent to actresses (and roles written for them), as well as to women in the paying audiences. This profit-driven popular entertainment of its day appealed to the learned and illiterate, to women and men, and to rich and poor alike. And the plays correspondingly mixed high and low characters, language, genres, and sources, with results regularly attacked by moralists. Vital, surprising, and ingenious, they exposed the creative tension between art and profit on a new scale, a tension that remains alive for us. We will examine five of the greatest of these plays by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (in Mexico or "New Spain") in a variety of genres and modes (history, epic, romantic comedy, tragedy, Islamic borderland, metatheater, parody, siege play, philosophical and theological drama), with their deft character portraits (the original Don Juan by Tirso; Calderón's "Spanish Hamlet" Segismundo; Lope's spitfire diva Diana, the Countess of Belflor; and Sor Juana's cross-dressing comic virtuosi) and their spirited dialogue, inventive plots, and dazzling metrical variety. We will look at the social conditions that enabled the Spanish stage to serve as a kind of civic forum, where conflicts between freedom and authority or desire and conformism could be acted out and the fears, hopes, dangers, and pleasures generated by conquest, urbanization, trade, shifting gender roles, social mobility, religious reform, regulation of matrimony and violence, and clashing intellectual and political ideals could be aired. We pay particular attention to the shaping influence of women on the professional stage (in contrast to England) and to performance spaces and traditions. Organized around the careful reading of five key play-texts in Spanish, together with historical, critical, and theoretical readings, this course assumes no familiarity with the texts, with Spanish history, or with literary analysis. However, an interest in engaging these wonderful plays closely, imaginatively, and historically is essential. There will be opportunities to pursue performance, adaptation, and translation.



This counts as a Theater Method course for the Theater Major.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL313, THEA231
Prereq: None

SPAN232 Dialogue of Poets: Classical and 20th-Century Poetry in Spain and Latin America

This course samples the rich tradition of Spanish-language verse from its beginnings to the present. It is organized around four primary dialogues: (1) the creative reception by leading 20th-century poets from Spain and Latin America (e.g., Neruda, Lorca, Machado, Borges, Paz, Rossetti) of classical poets (Saint John of the Cross, Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz); (2) the interplay of poetry and essays by those same poets; (3) the round-trip fertilization of popular and elite, oral and written forms of poetry; and (4) the crossing of linguistic, ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries that has shaped Spanish-language verse from its beginnings as love lyrics embedded in Hebrew and Arabic poems (jarchas) to the creative stimulus of other Romance languages (especially Galician and Catalan) in Spain, through Latin American poets open to Amerindian and African influences, and Hispanic-American poets exploring bilingualism in the U.S. We will read lyric, epic, and burlesque verse on a wide variety of themes (mysticism, sex, history, reason, travel, love, politics, sensory perception, death, and poetry itself); reflect on how poetry can best be enjoyed and understood; and consider how poetry has been produced, heard, read, and used (ritual and spontaneous song; minstrel performance of epic and ballads; courtly patronage, literary academies, and manuscript circulation; private reading of printed texts and commodification; and 20th-century singer-songwriter musical settings and politics). Although no prior expertise in poetry is expected, a willingness to engage it closely (textually and historically) is essential.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST232, COL226
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN236 Cervantes

Cervantes is known chiefly for DON QUIXOTE, often described as the first modern novel and fountainhead of one of the great modern myths of individualism. DON QUIXOTE also reimagines virtually every fashionable, popular, and disreputable literary genre of its time: chivalric, pastoral, picaresque, sentimental, adventure, and Moorish novels; the novella; verse forms; drama; and even the ways these kinds of literary entertainment were circulated and consumed, debated, celebrated, and reviled. It is a book about the life-enhancing (and endangering) power of books and reading and the interplay of fiction and history and truths and lies. Cervantes' art remains fresh and unsettling, sparing no one and nothing, including the author and his work. Distinguished by its commitment to the serious business of humor, make-believe, and play, the novel is at once a literary tour de force and a fascinating lens through which to examine the political, social, religious, and intellectual debates of its moment. Characteristic themes include social reality as artifact or fiction, the paradoxical character of truths, the irreducible diversity of taste and perception, the call for consent in politics and love, and personal identity (including gender) as a heroic quest. In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about DON QUIXOTE, along with a sampling of critical, philosophical, literary, and artistic responses it has inspired.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL327, MDST254
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN239 Rebels and Rebellions in Early Modern Spain

What does it mean to be a rebel? This course examines literary, visual, and historiographical representations of rebels and rebellions in early modern Spain. Students will examine the uprisings of aggrieved comuneros (proto-bourgeois revolutionaries) in Castile and of outraged moriscos (Muslims converts to Christianity) in Granada and Aragon, the covert spiritual rebellions of crypto-Jewish conversas (Jewish converts to Christianity) and crypto-Muslim moriscas, as well as texts composed by women writers who rebelled against gender norms and Spain's most famous playwright's classic rebellion play. We will analyze the scathing testimonies of expelled moriscos and paintings that reimagine the pre-expulsion revolts of Valencian moriscos alongside gripping examples of local resistance to the moriscos' banishment, an astonishing and unprecedented tragedy in Spanish history. The seminar will introduce students to a critical framework for analyzing visual and multilingual texts. Close readings of "rebellious" texts will acquaint students with both known and nameless rebels of Spain, as well as with the unresolved legacies they left behind.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL239
Prereq: None

SPAN250 Modern Spain: Literature, Painting, and the Arts in Their Historical Context

In this course, we study the so-called "masterpieces" of modern and contemporary Spanish literature, painting, and film (18th century to the present). The works chosen represent the major literary and cultural movements of the past three centuries: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, realism, and naturalism, the generations of 98 and 27, the avant-garde, neorealism, and postmodernism. As masterpieces, they have achieved canonical status through either the influence they have come to exercise over successive generations or their popular reception at the time of their production. In our close analysis of these works, we will interrogate the processes and conditions of canonicity. We will emphasize the relationship between cultural production and historical context, seeking to draw analogies at all times between the short stories, novels, poems, plays, paintings, and movies under consideration and the social, political, and economic milieu from which they emerged.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL219
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN251 Urban Fantasies: The City, Sexuality, and National Identity in the Modern Spanish Novel

The novel as we know it today reached maturity in Europe in the 19th century against the backdrop of a rapidly changing social and economic context, with the city emerging as a "capital" coordinate (literally and figuratively) on the map of national cultures. The rapid growth of a powerful bourgeoisie is a defining aspect of this cultural dynamic, manifesting itself as it does through demographic changes, urban expansion, and the rise of a bourgeois aesthetic that will come to influence art, literature, and all other forms of cultural expression for decades to come. In Spain, these phenomena are reflected acutely by one of the nation's greatest novelists, Leopoldo Alas ("Clarín"; 1852-1901). Through a close reading of Clarín's "La Regenta" (1884-85), a uniquely insightful and polished work of epic scope that is widely regarded as one of Europe's greatest modern novels, we will seek to evaluate how narrative and the cityscape form interlocking textualities within each of which family, the female, and the nation are protagonist, sexuality a central theme.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN254 The World of Federico García Lorca: Tradition and Modernity in the Spanish Avant-Garde

This course focuses on one of the most charismatic authors of the 20th century. Known primarily as a poet, playwright, and public intellectual, Federico García Lorca cultivated a literary language whose allure has proven to be timeless. By exploring the reasons for this, we will heighten our sensitivity not only to the magical power of Lorca's writing but to the potentially transformative power of language and literature in general.



Lorca's writing (1919-1936) spans a pivotal historical crossroads, when avant-garde artists sought to forge a new, revolutionary style representative of the profound social and political changes sweeping the world. Lorca, like so many others of his day, did so fully cognizant of the national traditions within which he worked, and with a keen desire to modernize those traditions. We aim to develop a deep understanding of how Lorca's verse, plays, and high-profile initiatives intersect with his context in these terms.



Please visit the course web site at http://span254.site.wesleyan.edu/ to review in detail the materials, objectives, and modes of assessment for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: THEA254
Prereq: None

SPAN255 Constructing Barcelona Through Its Margins: Contemporary Spanish Culture Through Catalonia

This course seeks to examine the physical and cultural construction of Barcelona through the ways it has been understood across artistic mediums, social and historical periods, and political spectrums, especially along its margins. This marginality will allow us to look into contemporary Spanish culture from a new perspective, understanding the complexities that lie under the idea of a nation. The course also explores some of the tensions between modernization projects and cultural production during the 20th and 21st centuries, examining representations of the city in literature (poetry and prose), maps, films, performance, and photography.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN256 City, Mobility, and Technology: Towards the Modern City in Spain

Movements, itineraries, encounters--these are some of the elements that have characterized modern literature. From the Baudelairean figure of the flâneur to the car chases of popular movies like Bullit, the city is described from a series of journeys that create a representation of urban space. However, these narratives reveal more than a personal account of the city: they show the urban architectures that allow the movement in those spaces (ie, paths, roads, lighting) and in doing so they portray the development of the modern city.



With this framework in mind, in this course we will analyze the construction of the modern city in Spain through literary and filmic texts. We will pay special attention to Barcelona and Madrid, but we will also look at how other international cities are perceived and represented in Spanish literature. In doing so, we will explore how these authors understand the modern city and the international connections and influences that shaped it at specific historical moments.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN257 Performing Ethnicity: Gypsies and the Culture of Flamenco in Spain

In this course, we will analyze how Gypsies and flamenco are associated, in fact and in fiction, and how and why they have emerged into the limelight of Spanish national cultural discourses. Although they represent discrete realities--not all Gypsies identify with flamenco and not all flamenco artists are Gypsies--correlations between the two have nonetheless been exploited by the media and by artists as an often unwanted emblem of Spanishness. The tensions surrounding this practice seem related to an undisputed fact of Spanish cultural history: Flamenco is unique within European culture; with a population of nearly one million, Gypsies are Spain's dominant minority; yet recognition of the artistic value of the former and acceptance and assimilation of the latter have been slow to congeal within Spanish society. Our practical aim will be to analyze these important aspects of Spanish culture in their historical context. We will study how the connection between Gypsies and flamenco has emerged; we will evaluate the extent to which it is valid; and we will attempt to assess what seems to be at stake in the struggles between those who promote and those who resist this connection as distinctive of Spanish national culture. In doing so, we seek to foster a deeper understanding of the importance of the Roma community within the framework of European and Spanish culture and a deeper appreciation for flamenco as a unique form of cultural expression. On the theoretical plane, we seek to understand how music, dance, literature, cinema, performance, and art can give expression to ethnicity; how cultural hegemonies emerge; and what role artists play in supporting or contesting those hegemonies. In general, this course is designed to help students develop critical skills of cultural analysis while increasing their proficiency in Spanish.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL271
Prereq: None

SPAN258 The Intercultural Stage: Migration and the Performing Arts in the Hispanic World

Hybridity, heterogeneity, transnationalism, and interculturalism are just a few of the terms that have proliferated within the marketplace of ideas over the past several years as reflections, from within the field of critical theory, of one of the contemporary world's dominant social realities: the massive displacement of peoples across borders and the creation of constricted multicultural zones of interaction and conflict within the confines of single nations. The Spanish-speaking world has been affected by this phenomenon in particular ways, in both Spain and North America. In this course, we will study how Spanish, Mexican, and Chicano playwrights and stage artists working in various genres have responded to this reality, how and why they have chosen to craft the collective experience of the border as performance, and how they have addressed the cultural and political tensions that are associated with this experience. The framework for our study will be comparative in both content and format. We will focus on two borders--the Strait of Gibraltar and the Río Grande (Río Bravo)--and on the two corresponding migratory experiences: from North and sub-Saharan Africa into Spain, and from Latin America into the U.S. This course will be taught simultaneously at Wesleyan and at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain. When possible, classes will be linked through videoconferencing. Wesleyan students will collaborate with their counterparts in Spain on various projects and presentations. In general, this course is designed to help students develop skills of critical analysis while increasing their Spanish language proficiency and intercultural awareness.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: THEA238, LAST259
Prereq: None

SPAN259 Detective Fiction: Procedure and Paranoia in Spanish Narrative

The detective genre is the point of departure for an investigation that will lead us to solve a mystery: How do fictions about the detective--a person who is generally outside the law and sometimes crazy or paranoid--help us to understand the social construction of Spain? We will follow this figure through time (from the 19th century to the present) and space (visiting many Spanish cities) to build a theory of the genre in Spain and a panorama of Spanish society and culture. Following the trail left by novellas, novels, and short stories, together with critical texts, our investigation will allow us to unravel the mysteries of a multidimensional society.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL260
Prereq: None

SPAN260 Between Word and World: Major Spanish Poets of the 20th Century

Our goal in this course is to study how the leading poets in 20th-century Spain use the lyric mode to negotiate the relationship between themselves and their community at key junctures in the nation's history. In doing so, we will also identify and assess the various notions of community that arise in modern Spanish poetry, attempting to evaluate how those notions evolve or are affected by such events or movements as (1) the avant-garde and the second Republic (1920-1936), (2) the Civil War and the Franco regime (1939-1975), and (3) sweeping political and social transformations of the past 30 years as signaled by the country's democratization, integration into the European Union, economic development, and by the massive influx of immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (1977-present). Key essays (critical and theoretical), some by the poets themselves, are included in the syllabus to provide critical tools for discussing how the public experience is lyricized through the intimate filter of the poet's own sensitivity. We will seek to understand the role played by context in conditioning the decisions poets make in adopting the epic, elegiac, didactic, or testimonial mode of expression, to name just a few. The image of the poet standing at the crossroads of lyrical creativity--word--and historical circumstance--world--will be central to our critical inquiry.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN261 Sites of Resistance & Memory: Theater, Performance & Political Consciousness in Contemporary Spain

Compared to other literary genres, and given its essentially social (public) format, theater is an especially vulnerable mode of cultural expression and, therefore, can easily fall victim to both overt (institutionalized) and covert (social) systems of censorship. The tendency for authoritarian regimes to scrutinize stage practices is exemplified by the state censorship that prevailed under Franco (1939-1975) and that prompted Spanish playwrights to develop subtle strategies for resisting authority and for addressing the crucial social and political concerns of the day. The parliamentary regime born in the aftermath of the dictator's death in 1975 ushered in an era of experimentation unprecedented in recent Spanish cultural history. During these years, playwrights have increasingly embraced the struggle against more covert (social, market-driven) forms of censorship in attempting to craft a new social order for a new political context: a democratic mindset that will serve to solidify the foundations of the young democratic state. Our goal in this course is to trace these trends through a close reading of key works by the major Spanish playwrights active since 1950. We will focus on context, on how theater, society, and politics are intertwined, by evaluating both works of dramatic literature themselves and the place and meaning of the public, commercial, and alternative theater circuits where many of these plays were premiered. Our aim, broadly, is to understand the extent to which collective memory and national identity, as staged over the past three-quarters of a century, have become a battleground where Spaniards either seek or resist reconciliation with legacies of repression.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: THEA261
Prereq: None

SPAN262 Through Foreign Eyes: The U.S. in Spain in the 20th Century

Although the relationship between Spain and the U.S. has a long history that can be traced back to colonial times, during the 20th century, an extensive corpus of literature in which Spanish authors portray the U.S. prominently becomes visible. The appearance of this body of work gives rise to a series of questions: How do Spaniards see the U.S.? What are the consequences of this understanding? Why is there such interest in portraying the U.S. from a Spanish point of view? Of course, cultural and social definitions are constructions always limited to historic, social, and cultural events, be they of a military, political, or purely commercial nature. One could think that these portraits dwell on stereotypes; nonetheless, we are before a literary production that uses the U.S. to create a narrative about how Spain enters a global economic market through a cultural exchange. These are texts about traveling, the construction of the individual, and the shaping of a nation; texts that cross the boundaries of literary genres to define Spanish identity. We are before the construction of a narrative that questions the building of alterity and shapes the identity of modern Spain. In our approach to the main historic events that define the relationship between Spain and the U.S. during the 20th century, we will examine novels, poems, and movies that result from such events to analyze questions related to identity, globalization, localism, modernity, and nation. What we will engage in is, in fact, a debate about how we define ourselves, whether we are Spanish or American, through foreign eyes.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN263 Mythic & Modern: Reappropriating Classical Themes in Contemporary Drama and Performance

What does it mean to defy the authority of the patriarch, of family, or of government? How do these structures of authority intersect in contemporary society? How do we, today, understand "destiny"? How do we challenge it, and what are the consequences for doing so? How do we break the patterns of shame and disenfranchisement inherited from the shared past? These are just some of the social, political, and ethical concerns transmitted over time by playwrights, stage and performance artists, and film directors who treat classical myths as valuable constructs for interrogating our contemporary world and society.



In this collaborative, project-based course we explore how classical myths have been appropriated within the modern Hispanophone cultural context. Just as important as our study and discussion of modern adaptations of classical models are the staged readings of key scenes incorporated strategically throughout the semester that help us develop an organic understanding of the material from the inside. Our overarching aims include: 1) exposing what persists in modern adaptations of classical myths, 2) tracking the kernels of change that the adaptations present, and 3) understanding why performers over time, working in disparate cultural milieus, continue to seek and derive inspiration from classical myths. The mythic figures we examine may include any of the following: Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Oedipus and Medea, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, as well as figures from the Oresteia and from such epics as Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. This course is taught in conjunction with Italian 263 and French 263. The final collaborative performance, scheduled during the Final Exams period, will involve students from across the Romance Languages and offers the unique opportunity for cohort building among students of French, Italian, and Spanish.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN264 Orientalism: Spain and Africa

Over the past several decades, North African and Middle Eastern cultures have become conspicuously important within the Spanish cultural arena. Translations of writers from Lebanon to Morocco abound in Spanish bookstores. Spanish writers have begun addressing North African and Middle Eastern issues with greater frequency, especially in their novels. The dramatic rise in the African immigrant population in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s, meanwhile, has been matched by a rise in press coverage of issues pertaining to Africa and the Middle East. These factors constitute the point of departure for our historical overview of the treatment of Islamic cultures in modern Spain, from early 19th century to the present. Guided by Edward Said's seminal essay, ORIENTALISM, we will assess the extent to which (and the process by which) Spain passes from the Orientalized subject of European Romanticism (painting, literature, music) to an Orientalizing European power in the late 20th century. In doing so, we will seek to relate the representation of Islamic cultures in Spanish literature and painting to social, political, and economic factors, most important of which was Spain's military invasion into Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will also survey changing attitudes among Spanish intellectuals with regard to the Islamic world and toward Spain's Islamic heritage, the result, perhaps, of 20th-century modernization and, most recently, of Spain's full integration, after Franco's death, into Europe's military and political structures. The tools for this study include works of literature primarily, but we will also focus on painting, historical essays, newspaper articles, and film.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL231
Prereq: None

SPAN265 History of Spanish Cinema for Spanish Speakers (CLAC.50)

Spanish 265 is designed as a discussion section for students who are enrolled simultaneously in SPAN 301 and who have advanced proficiency in Spanish. This half-credit course offers students the opportunity to master the critical vocabulary and tools of film analysis in Spanish.



Weekly student-led discussions will provide students with the unique opportunity to exercise these tools regularly and gain greater fluency in the language. Students will be responsible for the same material included on the SPAN 301 website at: https://span301.site.wesleyan.edu/. Students will submit their assignments in Spanish and contribute weekly posts to a blog set up for SPAN 265.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: CGST265
Prereq: None

SPAN267 Image/Word: Narrative and Photography in Contemporary Spain

The objective of this course is to analyze the relationship between literature and photography, questioning the idea of representation that usually unites them. This relationship goes further than the simple representation of the environment that surrounds us: literature and photography modify not only the perception of, for example, urban space, but also its organization; that is, they have a direct effect on the built environment. This effect creates a productive linkage that challenges the limits of these disciplines and the worlds in which they are created, proving how their work aims not exclusively to describe or represent but also to build. This idea of creating is the base for this seminar, where students will develop a photographic and a narrative/analytic project in which they will test firsthand the relationships and skills seen in the class. Thus, they will be able to see the connections between disciplines and cultures that guide our everyday life. In this seminar we will work with Cuban artist and writer Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks, who will work with students in their creative project.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL280
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN269 Appearing Acts: Visual Histories and Identity Construction Through Photography in Spain

In her reading of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," Susan Sontag finds a close bond between photography and the world, our cave. Photography, she says, shows us a new visual code that constructs narratives that "alter and enlarge our notion of what is worth looking at," and in doing so can influence, guide, and condition our knowledge of the world. Keeping this in mind, when it comes to Spain, what kind of world does photography construct? How does the visual field influence and guide our knowledge of modern Spain? In this seminar, we will reflect on how photography has conceptualized social and national identities in Spain from the 19th century to the present, asking how images create, shape, and question the cultural and social archive. Through the examination of photographs, theories, and methods, we will draw a contextualized history of photography that will help us to consider its role in the interdisciplinary construction of Spanish identity.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL209
Prereq: None

SPAN270 Survey of Latin American Literatures, Cultures, and Ideas

A close study of texts from the colonial period to the present will serve as the basis for a discussion of some of the major ideas and cultural and political debates that have emerged in modern Latin America to this day. Thinkers include Las Casas, Sor Juana, Bolívar, Sarmiento, Martí, Neruda, Borges, García Márquez, Menchú, and Bolaño, among others. For purposes of understanding context, students will also read selected chapters from works by historians and cultural critics and will watch several films. (Please note that this course was previously called "Spanish American Literature and Civilization.")
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST226
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN271 Against Epistemicide: Latin American Critical Thought

This class explores seminal social and political texts that reconceptualize America Latina against the legacies of colonialism and Eurocentrism. We will focus on Liberation and Decolonial Latin American Thought in order to move from the idea of Latin America to that of Abya Yala. We will begin with the triad: La ciudad letrada by Ángel Rama, Culturas híbridas by Néstor García Canclini, and Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina by Aníbal Quijano. We will then decolonize their own theories through the work of women thinkers such as María Lugones, Yuderkis Espinosa, Ofelia Schutte, Mary Louise Pratt, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Catherine Walsh.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN272 Cubanidad: Diaspora, Exiles, and Cultural Identity in Cuban Literature and Film

This course will examine shifting notions of Cubanness, or "cubanidad," from the 19th century to the present times from a diasporic framework. We will discuss writings by/about African slaves, Chinese indentured laborers and migrants, and Spanish immigrants in Cuba, as well as Cuban exiles in the U.S. and Spain from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. Through a variety of literary texts and films, we will then study select cases of European exiles who visited Cuba in the 1930s and '40s, the later massive waves of Cuban migration to the U.S. after the Revolution, and the more recent immigrants who have settled in Cuba.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST272
Prereq: None

SPAN273 Beyond Machu Picchu & Macondo: Real and Imaginary Worlds in Latin American Letters

Latin American writers and intellectuals have long conceived of their particular literary and cultural practices in connection to individual spaces and sites, both real and imagined. In this course we will examine why and how they have done so, looking not only at well-known if not legendary ones such as Machu Picchu and Macondo, invented, respectively, by Neruda and García Márquez in certain moments of their careers, but also the América and Gran Colombia of Simón Bolívar, the New York City of the Cuban intellectual José Martí (1880s) and Nuyorican writer Tato Laviera (1970s), as well as Violeta Parra's other Chile, César Aira's Colón (Panamá), Fernando Vallejo's Medellín (Colombia), and Mayra Montero's eroticized Caribbean. In each case we will be concerned with understanding the relationship between local, national, and hemispheric history and the new imaginarios created by the author/intellectual in question in the context of north-south relations. Topics to be considered within this critical framework will include the Wars of Independence, industrialization in the late 19th-century, the construction of the Panama Canal (1904--1914), the Cold War (1947--1991), Latino identity in the context of Puerto Rico and New York City, the drug wars, and sexual identity. When possible, films and short videos will be used to help build knowledge of historical context.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST273
Prereq: None

SPAN274 Insular Borders of Latin(x) America

Before and at the same time the United States established itself throughout the 19th century as a major power in the Americas and the world, various Latin American republics inherited and acted upon a similar imperialist agenda to expand their borders not only to neighboring territories but also across oceans. In this class, we will study and compare these imperialist gestures, among them the Spanish Empire's control of its remaining insular colonies in the 19th century (e.g., Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam) and the United States' successive claim to these very same islands. We will analyze literary works and films that interrogate these imperialist claims as well as the trajectories of islanders: for instance, the forced migration of the Rapanui (Easter Island people) in the second half of the 19th century (first as slaves to Peru and then to the town of Hanga Roa in Easter Island) and the island-to-island "intra-colonial" (Joanna Poblete) recruitment of Filipino and Puerto Rican laborers in sugar plantations in Hawai'i at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the questions we will explore are: Why are islands so coveted by old and new empires? How have Rapanui, Filipino, and Puerto Rican migrants and their descendants resisted authorities on the insular borders of empire? How do writers and artists tell these silenced histories? Can we speak of Latinidad and Edouard Glissant's concept of Poetics of Relation in a Pacific Ocean context? Readings will be in Spanish and English. All discussions and assignments will be in Spanish.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: LAST274, AMST289
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN275 Multilingual Aesthetics in Latin America

This course examines writings by Latin American authors who are multilingual or have an intercultural awareness as a result of colonization, cosmopolitanism, migration, or bicultural upbringing. First, students will learn about a variety of Spanish American movements, such as "modernismo," "creacionismo," "negrismo," "indigenismo," "neoindigenismo," and "indianismo," all of which dialogued with diverse cultures and languages other than Spanish. Then, we will examine a series of collaborative projects, such as a quadrilingual poem co-written by Octavio Paz (Mexico), Jacques Roubaud (France), Edoardo Sanguineti (Italy), and Charles Tomlinson (UK); a selection of English-Spanish poems by Marjorie Evasco (Philippines) and Alex Fleites (Cuba); and the "Festival de poesía: lenguas de América," a bi-annual event that gathers poets from diverse multilingual regions in the Americas. Lastly, we will examine literary and scholarly work by/about Latin American writers of indigenous descent, as well as works in Spanish, English, and "Spanglish" by Chicano, U.S. Latino, and Filipino American writers. Throughout the semester students will reflect on how multilingualism can serve as a medium for aesthetic experimentation, intercultural dialogue, and/or political resistance. All discussions will be held in Spanish, and all readings will be in their original Spanish or in Spanish/English translation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST265
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN276 Body, Voice, Text: Theater and the Transmission of Experience

Theater can and does exist as a written text, but we all know that its existence on the page is meant as a precursor to its live performance out in the world. In this course, our approach to a series of Latin American plays will be informed by competing notions of the theater as both a field of academic inquiry (built on reading, study, research, and interpretation) and also as an art form (built on reading, rehearsal, repetition, direction, and interpretation). We will combine traditional academic study of the written dramatic text with theater workshop exercises meant to train actors for the delivery of the staged performance text. Students will thus gain an understanding of how academic study and and workshop rehearsal take different approaches to what is essentially the same goal/problem: how to interpret the text written by the dramatist, whether for meaning or performance. This course will be taught in Spanish.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: THEA276, LAST276
Prereq: None

SPAN277 The Secret Life of Waste: Trash in Latin American Art & Literature

From space junk to microplastic particles found in human blood, man-made waste and pollution are ubiquitous. What are the effects of waste on the environment? What can the decomposition of waste create and/or undo? What is the afterlife of waste? Is waste apocalyptic? Through figures such as rottenness, radioactivity, mutation, and zombies, we will explore the ways in which Latin American art and literature try to answer some of these questions by imagining living amidst the remnants of hyperconsumption and by exploring the unforeseen effects that coexisting with waste could have upon the land and the body. We will study a wide range of visual and literary engagements with trash from novels, poetry, comics, and films to environmental art projects. Artists and writers may include Cecilia Vicuña, Daniel Lie, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Trías, Vik Muniz, H. G. Oesterheld, Javier Campos, and Alejandro Durán, among others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST277
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN278 Dangerous Plots: Fictions of the Latin American Jungle

This course is an exploration of the ways in which nature has been plotted in fiction, films, and popular culture, focusing on the tropical jungle, a space that has been central to the way Latin America has been imagined for centuries. We will investigate the construction of jungle as a cultural space where diverse anxieties about sovereignty, nationhood, race, development, gender, and subversion collide. We will evaluate this topography in relation to diverse projects of modernization and development, to the global angst over the environment and its destruction, to peasant and indigenous agency, and to a number of cultural and economic struggles that have shaped the region over the past century. Attention will be placed on literary, filmic, and visual texts.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST278
Prereq: None

SPAN279 Latin American Theater and Performance

This course will focus on the history, theory, and practice of theater and performance in Latin America in the 20th century. We will be particularly interested in the intercultural aspects of Latin American theater and performance that have reinvented and reinvigorated European dramatic forms through their constant interaction with non-Western cultural expressions in the Americas. We will examine a wide variety of performance practices, including avant-garde theater, community theater, street performance and agitprop, solo, and collective theater. The syllabus is loosely organized in a chronological fashion, structured more importantly around critical themes in Latin American history, culture, and society in the 20th century. We will take as our primary source material both readings and video recordings, when available, that will be supplemented by a wide variety of historical, critical, and theoretical background readings, including texts written by theater practitioners, theorists, and critics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST266, THEA297
Prereq: None

SPAN280 Screening Youth in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

This course will examine some of the most important Latin American films to emerge in the past three decades that have cast children and teenagers as protagonists. We will analyze a large body of films that address issues of historical memory, economic inequality, social conflict, political activism, education, sexuality, cultural identity, and citizenship through the lens of the child or adolescent. These films question the roles of minors in relation to the political arena and reflect upon the constructions of childhood that operate at a social level with important political implications. Students will explore the aesthetic and social dynamics at play in the representation of young protagonists and develop interpretative filmic skills through an exploration of the connections between the technical composition of the works and the social, political, and cultural contexts that they address. Besides the varied cultural, theoretical, formal, and historical elements that this course will examine, one of the central components is a creative module in which students will develop an idea for a short film based on their own personal coming-of-age narrative.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST280
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN281 "Islas sonantes": Music and Sound Technologies in Hispanic Caribbean Literature

Cuban author Alejo Carpentier once stated that the Antilles (the Caribbean islands) could easily be referred to as "islas sonantes" (sounding islands) because of their strong musical tradition. Music, according to him, is their common denominator. Inspired by this statement and extending it, in this course we will examine the role of music, as well as other sound and vocal productions in Hispanic Caribbean literature from the end of the 19th century to the present. Through close readings, we will reflect on how music and other sound media or communication devices (such as radio, audio recordings, sound magnification, and telephone) have helped reconceptualize social identities, notions of time and space, and human interaction. We will also look at their, at times, ideological, political, or purely aesthetic functions. No knowledge of music or sound technologies is required for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST281
Prereq: None

SPAN282 Narratives of Crisis: Violence and Representation in Contemporary Latin American Culture

How have Latin American literature, film, and performance of the past three decades articulated the many forms of violence in a region facing complex armed conflicts, wars deployed around the drug trade, and diverse forms of political unrest? Focusing on Colombia, Peru, Central America, and Mexico, we will investigate how contemporary cultural artifacts reflect on the linguistic, ethical, and social dimensions of subjectivity in times of crisis and provide productive analytical frameworks to examine violence, history, and memory in the region.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST285
Prereq: None

SPAN283 The Other 9/11: Dictatorial and Post-Dictatorial Films and Literature in Chile

This course explores how poetry, novels, and films, produced during and after Chile's military regime (junta de gobierno), try to make sense of state violence and cruelty. This class suggests that by actively performing the work of memory, of remembering the violent past and the forcefully disappeared ones (detenidos desaparecidos), films and literature oppose the politics of oblivion instantiated by the post-dictatorial state while claiming for and imagining social justice. We will understand films and literature as active, ethical memory technologies which we will read against the grain of Chilean politics and history (políticas de los acuerdos).



Some of the poets we will read include Eugenia Brito, Carmen Berenguer, Teresa Calderón, Malú Urriola, Rosa Betty Muñoz, and Raúl Zurita. In addition, we will watch films by Patricio Guzmán, Cecilia Vicuña, and Pablo Larraín. Finally, we will read novels by Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño, and Nona Fernández.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST283
Prereq: None

SPAN284 Tales of Resistance: Modernity and the Latin American Short Story

Latin American writers from the early 20th century forward have regarded the short story as a vehicle through which to make their mark and engage the great cultural issues of the day. Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, two of Latin America's most well-known literary figures, dedicated their careers almost exclusively to the genre. In this course, as we consider the privileged status of the short story in Latin American letters, we will examine the ways in which writers have used the genre to comment on important aspects of modernization, both within and outside their respective countries. Some of those aspects will concern the Mexican Revolution, bourgeois and mass culture, nationalism, globalization, and immigration to Europe and the U.S.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST254
Prereq: None

SPAN285 Asian Latino Encounters

In this course, students will analyze and discuss a variety of cultural productions (literary texts, films, songs, blogs, etc.) that reveal the overlooked connections between Asia and Latin/x America. We will begin examining views of Asian culture and Asian women of late 19th-century and early 20th-century Spanish American and Filipino writers (such as Darío, Tablada, Gómez Carrillo, Balmori, etc.). Then we will read various texts by Latin American writers who lived for some years in different parts of Asia throughout the twentieth century (e.g. Pablo Neruda in Southeast Asia, Octavio Paz in India, Araceli Tinajero in Japan, etc.). Finally, we will examine diverse works by writers/artists of Asian descent in Latin America as well as "Asian Latina/os" in the US. Some of the questions we will address are: How have the views towards Asia and Asians changed throughout the past century in Latin America? How does Philippine literature in Spanish produced during the US colonial period modify our conception of what is "Hispanic," "Asian," and "American"? How do Asian Latin American and Asian Latinx writers and artists represent themselves through culture?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST241
Prereq: None

SPAN286 Bolívar's Interpreters: Nation Construction in the Americas

No figure has been seized upon more as a symbol of cultural and political unity in Latin America than the liberator Simón Bolívar. In this course, we will examine not only the case of contemporary Venezuela with its cult-like tradition but also several of the countless appropriations of Bolívar that have occurred across the Americas and in Europe in the 180 years since his death. From the Cuban José Martí to the Colombian García Márquez, from the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno to the U.S. socialist Waldo Frank, from, to be sure, the powerful tradition of the Latin America essay with its identity politics to the U.S.-led Pan Americanism of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Bolívar has been made to serve complex and important functions in discourse about national and continental identity. To consider all this, we will study a number of rewritings of Bolívar's life and works, focusing on the dynamic process in which literary, cultural, and political traditions have been formed around him, while giving special attention to issues bearing on race, gender, and modernization. A wide range of texts will be examined, including letters, essays, poems, novels, screenplays, and films.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST258
Prereq: None

SPAN287 Constructions of the Self

How does one define oneself? What forces are active in the creation of our personal identities? How much control do we exercise over these processes? What role do writing and literature play in the construction of notions of the self? While these questions are timeless and know no geographical boundaries, we will examine how several different Latin American and U.S. Latino authors have addressed these concerns in their art, with an eye toward understanding the cultural specificity of each of their propositions, as well as how writing itself becomes the subject of writing in the search for subjectivity.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN288 Territories of Dwelling, Desire and Resistance in Latin America

This course seeks to examine the ways in which diverse geographical spaces in Latin America have been produced, negotiated, and contested from the past century to our times through cultural practices that construct them as territories of dwelling, desire, possession, dispossession, and resistance. We will focus on texts and practices--literature, film, performance, and the visual arts--that seek to destabilize the hegemonic (colonial) gaze that has been projected onto rural spaces for centuries, which in our times manifests itself through extractivist and other capitalist practices, and pay close attention to local modes of dwelling and the relationships among community, embodiment, gender, and desire. We will trace how these texts intervene in urgent debates about the destiny of rural lands, the uses and abuses of nature, and the place of rural peoples, the struggles for peasant and indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the construction of alternative modernities. We will focus particularly on the Andean and Amazon regions (mountains, rainforests) of South America, as well as other rural tropical areas.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST288
Prereq: None

SPAN289 Contact Zone: Introduction to Amazonian Narratives

Often, the Amazonian region has been considered a marginal space within the territorial limits of Perú, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. However, this territory is and has been key for these nations' past, present, and future. Beyond its outstanding biodiversity, the Amazon rainforest has housed for various centuries multiple and diverse native and non-native linguistic and ethnic groups. From the original Yanomami inhabitants to the contemporary European descendant citizens of Iquitos, the Amazonian territory has been a zone of contact where multiple cultural and cosmological views interact. In this class students will engage with a variety of materials, including literary works, travel diaries, films, and photographs that explore the Amazon rainforest: modern odysseys (La Vorágine), shape-shifting ghost stories (Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo), accounts of guerrilla warfare in the jungle (Naturaleza común), and apocalyptic prophecies (A queda do céu). By analyzing the literary and audiovisual archive resulting from multiethnic and multilingual interactions in the region, students will examine the role of the Amazon and its inhabitants in shaping the modern Latin American nations surrounding it. They will acquire a comprehensive understanding of the Amazonian region, its cultural diversity, and the complex issues it faces, such as racial and ethnic clashes, resource extraction, and the existential threat this poses to both human and non-human beings inhabiting it.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN290 From the Muralists to the Narconovela: The Public Intellectual in Mexico

Mexican writers, intellectuals, and artists, both male and female, have long been recognized for the brilliance with which they have used their work to comment on and shape the direction of the Mexican state and to engage with the multiple traditions (indigenous, European, and mestizo) that define them. In this course, we will examine the writings and artistic and filmic work of several major figures with the goal of understanding how they see and imagine Mexico in particular historical moments. The course will cover the entirety of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st, extending from the Mexican Revolution (1910--1917) and the Muralists (1920s--40s), through the post-1945 period including 1968, and to the drug wars and the Zapatista movement (since 1994). Students will analyze novels, essays, art, poetry, and film.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST291
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN291 Spanish American 'Modernismo' in a Global Context

The publication of Nicaraguan Rubén Darío's AZUL... in 1888 is often considered to be the inaugural event of "modernismo," the first Spanish-language literary movement that originated in Spanish America and spread thereafter throughout the Hispanophone world. In March 1916, about a month after Darío's death, a magazine in the Philippines claimed that Darío also belonged--at least "spiritually"--to the Philippines. Inspired by this statement, in this course students will read poems, short stories, and crónicas (short journalistic articles) by canonical Spanish American modernista writers, such as Darío, Julián del Casal, José Martí, Amado Nervo, José Enrique Rodó, Leopoldo Lugones, and Delmira Agustini, in conjunction with Filipino modernistas, including Fernando María Guerrero, Jesús Balmori, Manuel Bernabé, and Evangelina Guerrero. We will also read a selection of works of Spanish writers, such as Salvador Rueda, who visited Cuba and the Philippines in the 1910s. Some of the salient characteristics of modernismo that we will cover are the rejection of immediate reality and materialism, the search for linguistic renovation and cosmic harmony, and the celebration of Hispanism. When focusing on this last aspect, we will assess how modernismo helped to keep Spanish America connected not only to Spain but also to the Philippines, which became a U.S. territory in 1898, alongside Cuba and Puerto Rico. Thus, we will explore to what extent modernista writers responded to the spread of U.S. imperialism.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST292
Prereq: None

SPAN292 The Abya Yala Connection: Latin American Ecological Literature and Art

This course will examine the role that literature and the visual arts have played in imagining and suggesting ecological relations between humans and more-than-humans during our ecological crisis. Through the analysis of literary and visual aesthetic strategies, we will identify forms of resistance, endurance, and solidarity between feminist, queer, and indigenous bodies and the planet.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST289
Prereq: None

SPAN293 Writing Women's Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Latin America

We will explore the work of the novelists Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), and Samantha Schweblin (Argentina), among the most intriguing and innovative contemporary Latin American writers. We will discuss a variety of themes such as love, sexual desire, friendship, the body, violence, and ecology. In particular, we examine the relationship between language and gender formation and explore what it means to perform feminist readings.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST293
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN294 Queering Latin America: Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Literature and Film

This course studies important and groundbreaking films, novels, and poetry by contemporary gay, lesbian, and transgender artists. It focuses on their strategies to survive, respond to, and defy the changing socio-political Latin American landscape of the last 80 years. We will introduce some key critical concepts and debates from queer theory to guide our discussions. Some of the artists we will study include: Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucía Puenzo, Manuel Puig, Pedro Lemembel, Karim Aïnouz, Lorenzo Vigas, Rosamaría Roffiel, and Norma Mosgrovejo, among others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: FGSS294, LAST294
Prereq: None

SPAN295 Voices, Noises, and Son: Modern Sounds in Hispanic Caribbean Cultures

What happens to our understanding of Hispanic Caribbean cultures if we think about it through the category of sound? From the recorded voices of indigenous Caribbean peoples denouncing the atrocities of neo-colonialism to the contemporary Afro-Caribbean reggaeton rhythms in San Juan, sound has been a key component for this region's expressions and literatures. In this course, students will explore how multiple kinds of sound-voices, noises, music, and rhythms-shape and define the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean basin. We will read literary works and pay attention to the "sounds" described in them in order to examine how diverse ethnic groups have contributed to the production, perception, and transformation of various Caribbean "sonorous" landscapes.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: LAST295
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN296 Cuban Literature and Film: Imagination, Revolt, and Melancholia

This course surveys the major aesthetic and socio-historical movements in modern and contemporary Cuba. Since the late 19th century, the island of Cuba has been at the center of a number of key epochal disputes: between colonialism and independence, racism and racial justice, neocolonialism and revolution, liberalism and socialism, isolationism and globalization. In the arts, the turn of the century launched a period of great imaginative invention. Considering the singular place of Cuba in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the globe, this course addresses some of the most representative works of Cuban literature and film since independence until the present time. Imagination, revolt, and melancholia are the three concepts that will orient our discussion. Imagination refers both to artistic creation and to the collective capacity of projecting new worlds, utopias, or impossible realities. Revolt, as opposed to revolution, is not restrained to politics as usual but relates rather to a deep experience of discontent and a return (from the Latin revolvere) to ancient psycho-social strata. Finally, melancholia serves as a point of view to understand what happens when history does not live up to emancipatory expectations. Special attention will be given to Afrocubanismo, ethnographic literature, the avant-garde aesthetics of the group Orígenes, Marvelous Realism, testimony, revolution, socialist experimental film, diaspora, the Special Period, and post-Soviet life.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: CGST324, COL314, LAST315
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN297 Caribbean Rebels and Revolutionaries: Modern and Contemporary Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Lit

This course offers an introduction to Hispanic Caribbean literature and cultural productions from the nineteenth century to the present with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and politics. We will study works by representative writers, artists, and filmmakers from the Spanish-speaking insular Caribbean. They may include Julia de Burgos, Luis Palés Matos, Mayra Santos-Febres, Eduardo Lalo, and Noelia Quintero Herencia from Puerto Rico; Juan Francisco Manzano, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Martí, Nicolás Guillén, Lydia Cabrera, Severo Sarduy, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sarah Gómez, Reinaldo Arenas, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, and Tania Bruguera from Cuba; and Salomé Ureña, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, José Zacarías Tallet, Rita Indiana, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Lorgia García-Peña from the Dominican Republic.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN298 "Un pedacito de la historia negra": Afro-Latin American Literature and Culture

The significant contributions of Afro-descendent individuals to the development of Latin American culture have been frequently overlooked or torn to pieces. Yet, the experiences and bodies of racialized people have been key in shaping and transforming the region's culture. Beyond their representation in early colonial and republican works, Afro-descendent writers and characters have been crucial in the modern aesthetics of Latin American literatures. Along with musicians and other artists, they have provided a continuous challenge to the idea of Latin America and its cultural production as a product of a homogeneous cultural and racial miscegenation. Inspired by Colombian artist Joe Arroyo's opening to a famous salsa song, wherein he sets out to tell "un pedacito de la historia negra," in this seminar we will study short stories, novels, poetry, music, and film, including works that explore the experience of being racialized in Latin America, poetic experimentalism through orality, and the retelling of the history of Black resistance in the Caribbean through modern media. Engaging with historical and contemporary issues such as racial discrimination, social inequality, and cultural pride and preservation, this course invites students to critically analyze the fundamental role of Afro-Latin Americans in shaping Latin American cultures and histories.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-LAST
Prereq: SPAN221

SPAN299 Decolonizing Speculative Fiction in Latin America

This course interrogates what it means to imagine alternative futures in colonial and postcolonial settings. As the writings of conquistadors, explorers and missionaries show, Europe envisioned the New Continent as the land of the future or utopia, to the point that contemporary decolonial theorists have observed that nothing was "discovered" by the first European travelers to America but the idea of discovery itself. Modern temporalities of progress became thus inseparable from the image of the Americas as a frontier of imperial expansion, religious conversion, and economic exploitation. If European SF (science fiction/speculative fiction) emerged hand-in-hand with positivist notions of progress and civilization, Latin American SF contested Eurocentric epistemologies by claiming the ability to imagining the future and fictionalizing worlds otherwise. The course will center on three key moments of Latin American literary history: 1) the early to mid-twentieth century experiments in fantastic literature from the Southern Cone, which broke with realist mimesis from the margins of modernity; 2) post-1989 SF novels from Bolivia, Guatemala and Chile, that address the making of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of the Global South; and 3) contemporary Dominican and Cuban works in which Afro-Caribbean religions and gender formations engage in productive conversations with digital technologies, biomedical engineering, game cultures, and climate change.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Prereq: None

SPAN401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SPAN404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SPAN407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SPAN408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SPAN409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SPAN466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

SPAN491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SPAN492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT