Fall 2020 Graduate Seminar Course Descriptions

PORT 5110, Brazilian and Portuguese Modernist Poetry
Professor Tania Martuscelli,  Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays 1:00-1:50 pm

This course will focus on Brazilian and Portuguese Modernist poetry. Both avant-garde movements, although independent, have correlations while attempting to become internationally known. Students will be familiarized with both modernismos from early 1910s to mid-20th century, the transatlantic relationship that marks their intention of internationalization, and, of course, the proper mechanisms to analyze modernist/avant-garde poetry. Course taught in Portuguese.

SPAN 5220/7220, SEM: Postwar Peninsular Novel
Professor Nina Molinaro, Thursdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

The goal of the course is three-fold. First, it will serve as an introduction to some of the most important novels published in Spain between 1936 and 1975; I intend to place these novels within their relevant historical, literary, and socioeconomic contexts, with an eye towards preparing M.A. and Ph.D. students for the relevant exam period (XX/XXI Peninsular). Hence, we will read and analyze all novels listed on the current M.A. reading list and published in Spain between 1936 and 1975. Second, I intend to foreground theoretical and critical concepts that will include (but likely not be limited to) the following: gender, sexuality, violence, storytelling, relationality, ideology, performance, and power. And third, I intend to present and dialogue with the significant secondary criticism and commentary that has emerged regarding this group of narrative texts. The course will be organized around the following primary texts:

Camilo José Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte
Carmen Laforet, Nada
Francisco de Ayala, La cabeza del cordero
Ramón Sender, Réquiem por un campesino español
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, El Jarama
Luis Martín-Santos, Tiempo de silencio
Merce Rodoreda, La Plaça del Diamant (catalán o castellano)
Miguel Delibes, Cinco horas con Mario
Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás

Please see the following website for the editions that we will be using.

SPAN 5300/7300, SEM: Span-Amer Lit Colonial/19th C
Professor Andrés Prieto, Wednesdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

In 1584, Michele Ruggieri, the first Jesuit missionary in China, told the story of a Beijing-educated literato who, out of curiosity, helped him with his translation of a catechism into Mandarin Chinese. According to the Jesuit, as the young Chinese scholar immersed himself in the translation, the truth of the text resonated in such a way with him, that the young Mandarin began expounding on the mysteries of the Trinity and other obscure aspects of Christian dogma, to the astonishment of the priests. This brief anecdote showcases some of the initial expectations carried on by European missionaries when confronting other cultures, particularly their faith in the powers of the word. However, as it became clear during the sixteenth century, local cultures usually had their own rhetorical traditions and conventions. This complicated the evangelizing efforts, and brought to the fore a major problem: How to convey the culturally specific message of Christianity to culturally alien audiences? In this class, we will explore how European priests adapted both their own and local rhetorical traditions in an attempt to bridge this gap. These rhetorical experiments would have a long-lasting impact in what is today’s Latin America, being largely responsible for the postcolonial character of most native languages spoken today in the hemisphere. In this class, we will explore the native rhetorical traditions of Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay, and the changes and pressures they underwent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Simultaneously, we will study how European priests and colonial officers understood native rhetorical traditions and how they set about to turn them into useful tools of colonization, and the effects these changes had on the communities that utilized them.

SPAN 5320/7320, SEM: Digital Literary Arts and the Capitalist World Ecology
Professor Élika Ortega-Gúzman, Mondays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

This graduate seminar focuses on the digital literary-artistic production of Latin America and other Spanish speaking contexts and its material contexts in the twenty-first century. Students will acquire the foundations to critique digital literary arts, their genres and genealogies, as well as the intersections with print culture and the book as material practices. Upon this basis, the seminar will turn to an exploration of how works of digital art and literature force a reconsideration of materiality, locality, and humanity within the capitalist “world ecology” of wealth, nature, and power: for example, the way that the destruction of natural resources and human life is directly related to the evolution of digital technologies which project a sense of immateriality (the cloud, shrinking storage devices) and dislocated existence (globalization, ubiquity). Rethinking digital materiality calls for a double framework of interpretation; one that looks both at the place of digital works within the web of life (Jason W. Moore), as well as a new methodological approach that is based on a multi-directional relational logic. This requires not only the examination of formulations of our historical context (Anthropocence vs. Capitalocene) or new politics to frame digital objects (Donna Haraway’s ontological politics) but also a different type of methodology and language such as Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theory and politics, where new relationships of knowledge emerge from epistemic accountability and transversal ethics. We will think with posthuman, environmental, and material feminist critiques by drawing on the works of artists of the extended Spanish speaking world like Ricardo Dominguez (USA), Eugenio Tisselli (Mexico), Joanna Moll (Catalonia) among others. As we experience and discuss literary-artistic works we will interrogate the affordances and limitations of the internet and digital communications.

Drawing from (and critiquing) the interconnections of the digital web and seeking to implement lessons from feminist theory, this class will be taught simultaneously, yet asynchronously at times, from different locations: the Spanish and Portuguese departments at UC Berkeley and at CU Boulder. The instructors will also open the seminar to the public, sharing materials in a dedicated site where all participants may connect.

SPAN 5440/7440 SEM: Usage-based approaches to morphosyntactic change in Spanish
Professor Javier Rivas, Tuesdays 3:30-6:00 pm

The purpose of this graduate seminar is to approach the study of morphosyntactic change from a usage-based perspective. The focus of the course will be grammaticalization, a process whereby a lexical item or construction acquires a grammatical meaning a specific context of use. We will discuss the principles, mechanisms and motivations for change in grammaticalization, the role of frequency and productivity, the unidirectionality hypothesis, and the relationships between grammaticalization, subjectification and lexicalization. In order to illustrate this theoretical framework, we will focus on changes in Spanish morphosyntax. Among others, we will deal with grammaticalization processes concerning the expression of tense, aspect and mood, objective agreement, and discourse markers. We will also discuss the hypothesis of acceleration of change through language contact by focusing on US Spanish.