SPAN405A

From Text to Palate: Literature, Food, and Society in Spain and Latin America

The ancient link between food and books is particularly significant in the Hispanic World where eating has always been essential in defining individuals, groups, cultures, societies, and nations. Through an interdisciplinary approach to Hispanic short texts from a wide range of authors (Abu Hamid, Don Juan Manuel, Cervantes, Josep Plá, Manuel Vicent, Ricardo Palma, Juan José Saer, Pablo Neruda, Rosario Castellanos, Laura Esquivel, Zoe Valdés, Martín Caparrós), this course studies food (everything ingested) as a cultural product concocted by forces such as ritualization, technology, colonization, travelling, (de)globalization, or climate change. We will pay particular attention to the intersections of food with economy (i.e., production and consumption, ethical eating), social class (i.e., abundance vs. hunger, etiquette), religion (i.e., fasting and feasting, gluttony), gender (i.e., kitchen as gendered space), migration (i.e., fusion food), language (i.e., alimentary metaphors), and health (i.e., dietary prescriptions, disorders). Course materials and content will be divided into four modules that represent a four-course menu: Appetizer, First Plate, Second Plate, and Desert.

Accessibility—in terms of topics addressed and types of works studied, affordability and easy access to course materials, and student interests and levels– is a major priority for the courseʼs instructor.

Required readings:

• Coursepack provided in digital format and made available to students with adapted excerpts

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

Language of Instruction: Spanish

Beginners’ Catalan

This course introduces students to Catalan language and culture. It seeks to foster students’ linguistic, communicative and cultural competence in Catalan while exposing them to the main sociocultural aspects of the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain.

Aligned with CEFR level A1 objectives.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of CTLN 101 or CTLN 301.

Language of instruction: English & Catalan

Intensive Elementary Spanish

SPAN 203 is a 3-credit Intensive Elementary Course that combines learning objectives of two existing courses, SPAN 201 and 202. This course is designed for highly motivated learners with previous experience in Spanish or other Romance languages, and offers the opportunity to review the linguistic, cultural and communicative topics at the elementary level of the language (CEFR A2) at a more appropriate pace.

Throughout the semester, students will demonstrate an ability to listen to, discuss, read and write about personal and society-related topics in the past, present, and future by using simple and complex verb tenses, as well as engage with complex modes of expression in real and hypothetical situations.

Topics covered (science and technology, work and the economy, popular culture and mass and new media, literature and art, and more!) will expose students to ways of thinking and understanding the world that promote intercultural knowledge, and build toward competencies required for upper-level courses in our program through exposure to literature, culture, and media related to the Spanish-speaking world.

The design and structure of the course is founded on adaptive and inclusive principles of teaching and learning that consider the interests and needs of all learners and strive toward greater personalization of learning, flexibility and accessibility for all students, including students with disabilities.

Required texts

The same textbook is used for Spanish 103 and Spanish 203.  Students that plan to take both courses, should purchase the 12 month access plan.

• Enfoques 6e SSPlus(v) + wSAM(5 month)
• Enfoques 6e SSPlus(v) + wSAM(12 month)

Prerequisite: One of SPAN 103, SPAN 102 or placement test for native or near-native speakers of other Romance Languages.

Language of Instruction: Spanish

Love and Revolution

Love is a central virtue of human kind that frames some of the most significant relationships and roles we will experience in our lifetime, particularly during times of change.  From guerrilla movements and political upheaval to intimate acts of resistance and desire, we will examine how love in its various enactments—patriotic, romantic, familial, erotic—serves as metaphor and material force in accounts of revolution in Latin American literary and cultural production of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Beginning with Pedro Páramo (1955), Juan Rulfo’s haunting representation of (post)revolutionary Mexico and ending with Cantoras, Caro de Robertis’s unapologetic imagining of five women’s fight for freedom in Uruguay’s military dictatorship, RMST 280 traverses countries (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay), rebel movements, and genres to evaluate how some of the most influential voices and works-in-translation from both fiction and non-fiction traditions frame the powerful interplay between love and revolution in a Latin American context: Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Cuban campaign diary, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Gioconda Belli’s autobiographical memoir on love and revolution in Nicaragua, The Country Under My Skin, as well as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Manuel Puig’s seductive exploration of intimacy and resistance from within the prison cell in The Kiss of the Spider Woman, among segments from other representative texts.  We will also consider the intersections of the works studied with music, film and documentary, and artistic production, as well as other themes that shape perceptions of love during times of revolution.

Accessibility—in terms of topics addressed and types of works studied, affordability and easy access to materials, and student interests and levels—is a major priority for the instructor.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Brianne Orr-Álvarez

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Don Quixote and Errant Subjects in a Global Context

Plate I of Gustave Doré's illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. From Chapter I.

Discover Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote (1605), through close readings covering topics that range from gender, race, translation, economic crises, to religious turmoil and social inequality. By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Cervantes’s works will be discussed in relation to the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain, drawing upon the visual arts, films, music, dance, opera, historical texts and education manuals, while deconstructing the different kinds of fiction — pastoral, picaresque, sentimental Moorish novella, Italian novella, and romances of chivalry — that inhabit this novel.

Special emphasis will be placed on examining the representation of “others,” within the context of the expulsion of Jewish and Moorish minorities. The course will consider “errant” subjects in its two dimensions: as those straying from the accepted course, unacceptable actions; and traveling in search of adventure, a wandering journey.

Attesting to his global reach, Cervantes has been influential to thinkers from Lukács to Foucault to Bakhtin to Girard to the Frankfurt School, and to writers from Nabokov to Borges to Flaubert to García Márquez and beyond. His works have served as inspiration for painters (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), musicians (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), cineastes (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), and critics (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert). As regards Don Quixote, no other book, with the exception of the Bible, has been translated to more languages, or undergone more editions and reprints. A herald of modernity, Miguel de Cervantes’s works casts a vast influence on Hispanic and World literature as a whole

Required texts:

• [Optional] Spanish Version: Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Tom Lathrop. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005. Legacy Edition. (ISBN- 978-158977-100-0)
• González Echevarría, Roberto, ed. Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Elliott, John Huxtable. Imperial Spain, 1469-1716. New York: Penguin, 2002.
• Lathrop, Tom. Don Quijote Dictionary. Cervantes & Co, Juan de la Cuesta, 2005.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Language of instruction: English