Fall 2015 Seminar Descriptions

SPAN 5200/7200, SEM: La controversia en torno a Góngora: Góngora y el gongorismo
Professor Julio Baena                                                            Wednesdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

Góngora is possibly the most controversial author in the entire history of Spanish literature. The controversy over his work, especially over his Soledades, began even before the long poem was finished, and is still open today. Important things are at stage, belonging to all areas of literary criticism and critical thinking: the bounds of language, the meaning of “meaning,” the autonomy of poetry, representation, the construction of subjectivity/objectivity, the context of art, the Baroque, modernity as a point of no return, and many other issues. Góngora’s contemporaries perceive all this—especially his enemies: his friends often read him less well—and therefore react to his poetry as if to a rash, or an infection that threatens the very foundations of their world. On the one hand, Góngora personifies the Baroque—nobody is more Baroque than Góngora—but on the other hand the Baroque abhors Góngora. In Spain, little by little, and culminating in, for instance, Menéndez Pelayo, the Canon judges Góngora as a monster, while, at the same time, in Spanish America, Góngora is received as a source of true inspiration, and, as it were, feels right at home. The Vanguardia (at both sides of the Atlantic) re-evaluates Góngora, claiming him as “one of them”, but Spanish academia continues to this day to belittle his work, and that of his followers. In a country in which regional celebrities are usually overestimated by the local institutions, we find that Villamediana, possibly the best poet ever born in Valladolid, doesn’t even have a street named after him in this city, and his poetry is not even taught in the Universidad de Valladolid. In this seminar, we will try to understand why.

We will read Góngora’s poetry, together with that of select “Gongoristas” such as Villamediana or Soto de Rojas, together with work from the Colonies (Domínguez Camargo) or from a “Marrano” poet (Henríquez Gómez). We will also look at the Spanish mystics—at first glance the very opposite to Góngora—to look for clues as to the crisis of language. We will read important theoretical work by authors such as Michel de Certeau, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Agustín García Calvo, as well as specific criticism on Góngora by Menéndez Pelayo, Dámaso Alonso, Jorge Guillén, John Beverley, Crystal Chemris, Humberto Huergo, and many others. 

SPAN 5220/7220, SEM: Politics and Emotions in Modern Spanish Culture
Professor Javier Krauel                                                        Tuesdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

This course explores the intersection between political life and theories of emotion in modern Spanish culture, paying special attention to four traumatic moments in Spanish history (the nineteenth-century Carlist Wars, the loss of the last colonies in 1898, the Second Republic, and the Spanish Civil War). Drawing on current theories of emotion, which view feelings as a form of knowledge and as a crucial dimension of social life, we will examine the following topics: emotions in literature and visual culture, emotions as bridging the public/private divide, the political and legal regulation of emotions, and emotions in political myths and war. The syllabus will be structured around these themes and will include essays (Ganivet’s Idearium español and María Zambrano’s Horizonte del liberalismo), novels (Unamuno’s Paz en la guerra or Valle-Inclán’s Los cruzados de la causa), nouvelles (Ayala’s La cabeza del cordero), political journalism (select articles by Chaves Nogales and Sagarra), and photography. Theoretical and historical readings about the political dimension of emotions and affects will include works by Pierre Bourdieu, Wendy Brown, Ann Cvetkovich, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Carl Schmitt, Enzo Traverso, Michael Warner, and Max Weber.

SPAN 5300/7300, SEM: The Historical Imagination: Representing Past and Present in Colonial Latin American Literature
Professor Andrés Prieto                                                        Fridays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

En este curso, exploraremos las distintas maneras en que la historia fue entendida y practicada en el siglo XVI en Latino América. El curso comenzará con una revisión de las reflexiones renacentistas acerca de la naturaleza de la historia para después estudiar un grupo de obras sobre la historia de la conquista y el pasado americanos. Al enfatizar los aspectos retóricos de la práctica historiográfica colonial, intentaremos responder algunas cuestiones teóricas, ideológicas y prácticas que influyeron en la producción de estos textos. Algunas de las preguntas que enfrentaremos durante el semestre tienen que ver con el problema de la autoridad del historiador, el papel de los personajes en la historia colonial, la relación de la verdad histórica con la verosimilitud de los eventos narrados y los usos políticos de la práctica historiográfica durante el período.

SPAN 5320/7320 SEM: The 1920s in Latin American Literature and Culture
Professor Peter Elmore                                                         Mondays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

The time-honored practice of coupling decades with particular literary movements or styles (e.g., the Avant-Garde and the Regionalist Novel as the only phenomena worth-mentioning in the 1920s) has a serious drawback, since it blurs the often contentious dynamics of cultural life by focusing so closely on what was new or emergent that only one or two threads are visible while the whole tapestry remains hidden.  What was widely read and discussed in the 1920s? Who (and among whom) were regarded as major figures and who contested their place? How was the cultural agenda shaped in different countries and across the continent? In short, how did residual, emergent, and dominant trends interact in the cultural field?  In this seminar, we´ll entertain such questions as we analyze and discuss poetry books, novels, essays, and short story collections by authors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Readings

  • --Vallejo, César. Trilce (1922)
  • --Lugones, Leopoldo. Romancero (1922)
  • “La hora de la espada” (1924)
  • --Mistral, Gabriela. Desolación (1922)
  • --Neruda, Pablo. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924)
  • --Reyes, Alfonso. Ifigenia cruel (1924)
  • --Rivera, José Eustasio. La vorágine (1924)
  • --Vasconcelos, José. La raza cósmica (1925)
  • --Arlt, Roberto. El juguete rabioso. (1926)
  • --Güiraldes, Ricardo. Don Segundo Sombra (1926)
  • --Borges, Jorge Luis; Hidalgo, Alberto; Huidobro, V. Prólogo de Indice de la nueva poesía hispanoamericana (1926)
  • --Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma (1928)
  • --Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto antropófago (1928)
  • --Mariátegui, José Carlos. “Aniversario y balance” (1928)
  • “El problema del indio” y “El problema de la tierra”. En: Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana.
  • --Guzmán, Martín Luis. La sombra del caudillo. (1929)

SPAN 5440/7440 SEM: Grammaticalization
Professor Javier Rivas                                                          Thursdays 3:30-6:00 p.m.

The purpose of this graduate seminar is to approach the study of morphosyntactic change from a usage-based perspective. The main focus of the course will be grammaticalization, a process whereby a lexical item or construction becomes grammatical in a particular linguistic context. We will discuss the principles of grammaticalization, mechanisms and motivations for change in grammaticalization (e.g., reanalysis, analogy) 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 discuss grammaticalization processes concerning the expression of future time, progressive, perfect and perfective aspects, middle voice, objective agreement, and discourse markers. Although the aim of this seminar is not to account for the development of Spanish from Latin, there will be frequent references to earlier stages of the language.