SPAN550

SPAN550

Literaturas hispánicas en tránsito, desde los viajes coloniales hasta las migraciones actuales

Source: Getty Images

Este curso se propone examinar el variado corpus de relatos de viaje escritos por autores hispanoamericanos y españoles desde la conquista de América hasta la actualidad. Dichos relatos nos guiarán a través de mundos a veces exotizados o amenazantes, misteriosos o distópicos. Dentro de este contexto, discutiremos problemáticas ligadas a la movilidad, tales como el desarrollo de los contactos interculturales, el cruce de fronteras, el impacto del exilio y la creciente globalización. Además, complementaremos el análisis de las obras primarias con una selección de textos crítico-teóricos y la cartografía propia de cada periodo estudiado, así como algunas representaciones fílmicas.

Language of instruction: Spanish

Instructor: Dr. Kim Beauchesne 

Grading Breakdown

Coming soon!

Readings

Obras primarias (fragmentos disponibles en Canvas):

  • Aguirre, Carmen. De cuerpo entero
  • Belli, Gioconda. Waslala
  • Carpentier, Alejo. Los pasos perdidos
  • Erauso, Catalina de. Historia de la Monja Alférez
  • Fukunaga, Cary Joji, dir. Sin nombre
  • Guevara, Ernesto “Che”. Diarios de motocicleta (y la adaptación cinematográfica de Walter Salles)
  • Herrera, Yuri. Señales que precederán al fin del mundo
  • Malaspina, Alejandro. En busca del paso del Pacífico
  • Mansilla, Eduarda. Recuerdos de viaje
  • Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar. Naufragios
  • Vargas Llosa, Mario. El hablador
  • Wiener, Gabriela. Huaco retrato

SPAN590

Narrativa Sonora: Sound and Literature in Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Instructor: Tamara Mitchell
Language of instruction: Spanish

Latin America has a rich and complex tradition of orality, both aural and textual. This course reads narrative fiction of the past three decades in relation to that tradition, considering how contemporary works build on, but more importantly diverge from, oral practices that have been the ground of storytelling, memory making, and political interventions in the region. Throughout the semester, we will attend closely to how contemporary aural novels grapple with and contextualize important sociohistorical, political and economic realities, such as gendered and cartel violence, ingrained corruption by political figures, disability, increased out migration through and to North America, and ecological disasters that are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. In particular, our conversations will inquire into how narrative texts invoke or represent sound, aurality, and silence formally—through literary devices and formal structure—as a means of indexing, critiquing, and deconstructing structures of power. We will read critical texts from literary sound studies and philosophy to account for how narrative aurality is deployed as a means of responding to precarity, inequality, and violence of the globalized present.

Readings:

  • Úrsula de Jesús, Las almas del purgatorio
  • Leonora Carrington, La trompetilla acústica
  • Horacio Castellanos Moya, Insensatez
  • Juan Villoro, Arrecife
  • Jorge Comensal, Las mutaciones
  • Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Los sordos
  • Guadalupe Nettel, El huésped
  • Rita Indiana, Papi
  • Emiliano Monge, Las tierras arrasadas
  • Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

FREN514

France in Ruins: Wounded Spaces From 1945 to the Present

Ruins have been at the center of the French imaginary since the sixteenth century. They represented in turn the decay of the pagan world, its architectural genius, the height of the sublime, and a refuge for earthly pleasures or the inquisitive mind. The twentieth century, with its landscapes of broken metropolises and scorched earth, changed the literary reading of this spatial motif in radical ways, making it more malleable and more ambiguous. It has been evolving from 1945 to the present, taking unique shapes in the literature we will be studying this semester, starting with the rotting landscapes of Julien Gracq and Pierre Michon, and moving towards the industrial territories of François Bon and Élisabeth Filhol.

This seminar will allow the students to become familiar with a poetic approach to literary texts, while also remaining open to the theoretical perspectives that they will be bringing forward through class discussions and oral presentations. Our seminar will also include a substantial component dedicated to the visual history of ruins in European architecture, painting, photography, and film.

Required readings:

Julien Gracq, Un balcon en forêt

Pierre Michon, La Grande Beune

Patrick Modiano,  Pedigree

François Bon, Paysage fer

Philippe Vasset, Un livre blanc

Élisabeth Filhol, La Centrale

Céline Minard, Le Dernier monde

Theory readings will include works by Bertrand Westphal, Michel Collot, Marielle Macé, and others.

Language of instruction: French

Professor: Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire

Course Registration

FREN502

Masculinités, féminités et questions d’identité à la Renaissance

Cross-listed with FREN495

Maître François de Rohan, Marguerite de Navarre donne son ouvrage à Anne de Pisseleu, duchesse d'Etampes. Miniature tirée d'un manuscrit de La Coche ou débat d'amour (vers 1542): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Coche_ou_d%C3%A9bat_d%27amour_-_Mus%C3%A9e_Cond%C3%A9_Ms522_f43v_%28Marguerite_de_Navarre_et_Anne_de_Pisseleu%29.jpg

Le masculin et le féminin sont souvent remis en question depuis l’émergence des études sur le genre (gender studies). Cependant, même si les voies d’approche récentes à la sexualité ou à l’altérité nous permettent d’analyser quelques-uns de ces concepts sous un nouveau jour, nous constaterons que certaines problématiques existaient déjà dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance. Dans ce séminaire, nous lirons donc divers textes – médicaux, philosophiques, iconographiques et littéraires – dits d’Ancien Régime, qui nous permettront d’examiner les débats (voire les angoisses) vis-à-vis des concepts de masculinité et de féminité, qui sont si souvent liés aux questions identitaires, y compris les constructions d’identités linguistiques, régionales ou nationales, entre autres.

Nous examinerons donc diverses représentations d’hommes et de femmes dans un choix de textes attribués à des auteurs masculins et féminins, ainsi que les images (parfois idéalisantes) d’hermaphrodites et d’androgynes qui prolifèrent dans l’iconographie renaissante. Nous aurons aussi lieu de nous demander s’il pouvait exister une écriture masculine ou féminine, non seulement à l’instar de certains critiques plus ou moins récents, mais de textes du seizième siècle où il s’agit (comme chez Montaigne) de mettre en valeur la vigueur d’une écriture virile, tout en dépréciant la « mollesse » de styles, de langues et de comportements décrits comme efféminés – liant ainsi éthique, rhétorique et esthétique.

Language of instruction: French

Instructor: Nancy Frelick

Grading Breakdown

Participation (discussions en classe et sur Canvas, 2 x 10%): 20%
Présentations en classe: 20%
Dissertations (2 x 30%): 60%
Total: 100%

Readings

Lectures obligatoires :

Une sélection de textes en prose (Marie de Gournay, Marguerite de Navarre, Michel de Montaigne et Etienne de la Boétie, François Rabelais…) et en poésie (Philippe Desportes, les Dames des Roches, Joachim Du Bellay, Pernette du Guillet, Nicole Estienne, Louise Labé, Clément Marot, Estienne Pasquier, Pierre de Ronsard, Maurice Scève…), ainsi que quelques emblèmes (de Gilles Corrozet et Guillaume La Perrière).

Un choix de textes primaires et d’ouvrages critiques sera disponible via Canvas.

Quelques pistes bibliographiques :

Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance. Genève: Droz, 1990.

---. Un corps, un destin. La Femme dans la médecine de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1993.

Clément, Michèle et Janine Incardona, eds. L’Émergence littéraire des femmes à Lyon à la Renaissance, 1520-1560. Saint-Étienne: PU Sainte-Étienne, 2008.

Closson, Mariane, ed. L’Hermaphrodite de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Garnier, 2013.

Cottrell, Robert D. Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne’s Essais: Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1981.

Ferguson, Gary, ed. L’Homme en tous genres: Masculinités, textes et contextes. Paris L’Harmattan, 2009.

---. Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance. Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Frelick, Nancy M., and Edith Benkov, eds. Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France. Toronto: Iter Press, 2024.

Gray, Floyd. Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Hampton, Timothy. Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.

Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Keller, Marcus. Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650). Newark: U of Delaware P, 2011.

Kritzman, Lawrence D. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

LaGuardia, David. Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Aldershot: Ashgate 2008.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Larsen, Anne R. et Colette H. Winn, eds. Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994.

Long, Kathleen P. Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

---, ed. High Anxiety : Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France. Kirksville: Truman State UP, 2002.

Poirier, Guy. L'Homosexualité dans l'imaginaire de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1996.

Reeser, Todd W. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2006.

---. Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.

Rothstein, Marian. The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Siefert, Lewis C. and Rebecca M. Wilkin, eds. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Warner, Lyndan. The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Winn, Colette, H. Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. New York: MLA, 2011.

Yandell, Cathy M. Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000

SPAN322

Latino/Chicano Literature

This course will survey the literatures and cultures of Latino/as and Chicano/as in the United States and Canada. We will read authors such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Carmen Rodríguez. The settings will range from nineteenth-century California to twentieth-century Spanish Harlem and South Side Chicago, as well as glitzy Miami and multicultural Vancouver today. The themes to be discussed include identity, racism, memory, shame, pride, crime, exile, and international geopolitics, plus the usual literary topics of sex, death, and tortured adolescence. Students will edit Wikipedia articles as one of their assignments.

Instructor: Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray

Prerequisite: One of SPAN 202, SPAN 207. Or successful completion of a language placement exam or an assessment interview.

Language of Instruction: Spanish

Course registration

SPAN404A

From World to Screen: Topics in Hispanic Cinema

El curso es un acercamiento al cine español de finales del siglo XX y el siglo XXI.  Se estudiarán algunas de las películas más representativas y que, además, por su evidente calidad, han despertado el interés del público y de la crítica.  Las películas seleccionadas son representativas de alguno de los géneros más frecuentes: drama histórico, la comedia, el thriller, el film de horror y el drama realista y social. Los films serán el punto de partida para abordar cuestiones esenciales de la vida de España en este período: por ejemplo, cuestiones sobre la memoria, la identidad nacional o regional; o asuntos relativos al individuo y la sociedad española en el contexto global.

En el curso se plantearán preguntas como: ¿Por qué resucitar el pasado visualmente? ¿Cómo se filma la historia? ¿Tiene el cine de los nuevos directores un alcance nacional o un alcance universal? Es decir, ¿es una manifestación de un cine nacional o un producto más, genérico e indiferenciado, dentro del mercado global sin alcance o proyección internacional? ¿Se puede hablar de esencia identitaria y cultural española, vasca, catalana o gallega en el contexto global? ¿Es posible vislumbrar en el nuevo cine la presencia y construcción de nuevos modelos de masculinidad y feminidad? ¿Cómo construyen las directoras de cine la imagen de la mujer en la pantalla? ¿Cómo se aborda la temática de la violencia machista? ¿Qué grupos de la sociedad urbana quedan al margen del progreso económico neoliberal en el marco de una España internacional y global? ¿Qué implica la presencia de la cultura popular en el cine actual?

Language of instruction: Spanish

Prerequisite: SPAN 221; and SPAN 301 or equivalent expertise in written and spoken Spanish

Grading Breakdown

Coming soon

Readings

Coming soon

FREN420A

Le roman de l’extrême contemporain

Une des caractéristiques du roman français aujourd’hui réside dans l’absence de frontières génériques (romanesque, autobiographie, essai, polar, science-fiction) accompagnée d’une surenchère de mouvements ou courants (académique, nouveau roman, avant-gardiste, historique, féministe, minimaliste, etc.). Force est de se demander : qu’est-ce qui se joue dans le roman de la fin du XXème et du XXIème siècle ? Existe-t-il une nouvelle pensée du contemporain qui émerge de l’effervescence ou de la radicalisation littéraire et critique ? En quoi le nouveau et l’esthétique sont-ils transformés dans la production littéraire ? Comment l’auteur se situe-t-il entre l’engagement et une voix individualiste ? Ce sont ici quelques pistes que nous aurons à emprunter dans nos lectures. Il s’agira aussi dans ce cours d’analyser les textes au plus près.

Required readings:

Olivier Rolin. Port-Soudan (1994)

Jean Echenoz. Les grandes blondes (1995)

Delphine de Vigan. No et moi (2007)

Camille Laurens. Fille (2020)

Prerequisite: French 328, 329, or 330

Language of instruction: French

Course Registration

SPAN490C

La escritura sonora: El sonido y la escucha en la literatura latinoamericana

Marco Verch | CCNull, CC-BY 2.0

Latin America has a rich and complex tradition of orality, both aural and textual. This course reads 20th- and 21st-century literature in relation to that tradition, considering how recent works build on and (perhaps more importantly) diverge from, oral practices that have been the ground of storytelling, memory making, and political interventions in the region. Throughout the semester, we will attend closely to how contemporary aural (related to the faculty of hearing) literature grapple with and contextualize important sociohistorical, political, and economic realities, such as gendered and cartel violence, ingrained corruption by political figures, ablism and differently-abled bodies, increased forced migration to North America, and ecological disasters that are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. In particular, our conversations will inquire into how written texts invoke or represent sound, aurality, and silence both thematically and formally—through literary devices and formal structure—as a means of indexing, critiquing, and deconstructing structures of power. Together, we will consider how literary aurality is deployed as a means of perceiving alternative epistemologies and responding to precarity, inequality, and violence of the globalized present.

Discussion of primary works will occur in Spanish and will be informed by critical readings from philosophy, literary theory, media studies, and other related disciplines. As the semester progresses, we will acquire a critical vocabulary (e.g., orality, aurality, orality-literacy binary, intermediality, audile technique, audiovisual litany, etc.) for analyzing and discussing sound and sonorities in literary texts.

CONTENT NOTE: This course will occasionally cover sensitive, mature, and charged material, including scenes of sexual violence. You may find some readings and other content difficult.

Language of instruction: Spanish

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Recommended pre-requisites: SPAN 221; and SPAN 301 or equivalent expertise in written and spoken Spanish.

Grading Breakdown

TBD, but will likely include an oral presentation (individual or in pairs); a short essay or creative piece; a long essay or aural critical reflection (e.g., podcast episode, sonic essay, etc.); and thoughtful preparation of materials and engaged participation in class, as demonstrated by class discussion.

Readings

TBD, but many (if not all) of the texts will be provided on Canvas.

FREN416B

Shades of Truth and Fiction in Contemporary French Literature

Contemporary literature is not easily grasped. It is constantly unfolding, leaving us, its readers, little time to map the field and little distance to judge what will become the emblematic works of our era. While this uncertainty may seem daunting, contemporary literature offers us unique opportunities to gain a complex understanding of present-day events, perspectives, taboos, and obsessions.

One notion that has come to define our times is that of truth. We are tasked, urgently, to seize what it may be and how it can be ascertained. Paradoxically, literature may contribute some of the most crucial reflections on the boundaries of truth. Indeed, writers of fiction have an intimate grasp on all shades of the real and of its representation. This appears remarkably salient in contemporary French literature, as it plays endlessly with nuances of the self, of testimony, of objectivity. In this class, we will discover how a variety of authors interprets historical reconstitution, gaslighting, confession, verisimilitude, autofiction, and more.

Required texts:

Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
Emmanuel Carrère, La moustache
Hervé Guibert, Cytomégalovirus
Annie Ernaux, L’événement
Edouard Levé, Autoportrait
Christine Angot, Les Petits
Gaël Faye, Petit pays
Maylis De Kerangal, À ce stade de la nuit                     

Instructor: Dr. Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire

Prerequisite: One of FREN 320, FREN 321, FREN 328, FREN 329, FREN 330

Language of Instruction: French

Course Registration

SPAN520A

Women Breaking/Bridging Borders: Intercultural Performance in Transatlantic Literature

Instructor: Elizabeth Lagresa-González
Language of instruction: Spanish

The course will include drama, poetry, prose fiction, biographical essays, historical and theoretical texts, as well as visual materials, to help us think through the following questions: How are transatlantic and cross-cultural encounters represented artistically, linguistically, culturally and visually? How do they contest fixed identity categories of self and ‘other’? How do these representations participate in the production and re-envisioning of world views and build connections across the shores of the Atlantic?

Our course will highlight the transhistorical and transnational aspects of staging subaltern subjectivities, focusing primarily on the role women performed in both bridging and breaking borders. We will pay particular attention to representations of Indigenous women, Mestizas, Criollas, Blacks, Africans, and Ibero-Africans, as well as their instrumental contribution to the formation of national identities. Primary readings will include: autobiographical text by women that traveled to the new world as Catalina Bustamante (México) and Mari de Ledesma (Perú); plays, autos sacramentales and poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; dramas by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Lope de Vega; epic poetry by Pedro de Oña and Alonso de Ercilla, among other literary, theoretical and historical texts.

Required texts:

  • Provided as PDFs on Canvas.

Selected readings:

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2016.
  • Gómez-Lucena, Eloísa. Españolas del nuevo mundo: ensayos biográficos, siglos XVI-XVII. Madrid: Cátedra, 2013. ISBN 978-84-376-3202-5
  • Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. Pennsylvania: Penn State Univ Press, 2020.
  • Lux Martelo, Martha Elisa. Las mujeres de Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII: lo que hacían, les hacían y no hacían, y las curas que les… Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, Centro de Estudios Socioculturales e Internacionales Ediciones Uniandes, 2006. ISBN 958-695-237-1
  • Martín, Luis. Las hijas de los conquistadores: mujeres del virreinato de Perú. Barcelona: Casiopea, 2000. ISBN 84-95446-02-2
  • Maura, Juan Francisco. Españolas de Ultramar en la historia y en la literatura: aventureras, madres, soldados, virreinas, gobernadoras, adelantadas, prostitutas, empresarias, monjas, escritoras, criadas y esclavas en la expansión ibérica ultramarina (siglos XV a XVII). Valencia: Univ. De Valencia, 2005. ISBN 84-370-6245-4
  • Morant, Isabel y María Ángeles Querol, et al. Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005-2008. ISBN 84-376-2262-X
  • Piossek Prebisch, Teresa. Las conquistadoras: presencia de la mujer española en América durante el siglo XVI. Buenos Aires, 1990. ISBN 950-43-3228-6
  • Pita Moreda, María Teresa. Mujer, conflicto y vida cotidiana en la ciudad de México, a finales del periodo español. Alcala de Henares: Centro Asesor de la Mujer, 1999. ISBN 84-87914-35-7
  • Poska, Allyson M. Gendered crossings: women and migration in the Spanish empire. Albuquerque, Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8263-5643-7
  • Pumar Martínez, Carmen. Españolas en Indias: mujeres-soldado, adelantadas y gobernadoras. Madrid: Anaya, 1988. ISBN 84-207-3121-8