Below you will find the list of Winter 2013 graduate seminars in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Please share with your students.
Note that there are several seminars taught in English in the coming semester including one cross-listed with Women's Studies and Comparative Literature and one with History of Art. Also included is Italian 113, an accelerated reading course designed for graduate students' research needs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winter
2013
Italian
113 Accelerated Reading in Italian
Prof.
Romana Habekovic MW 9-11
Italian 113 is an accelerated
one-semester course that is primarily designed for graduate students that need
to acquire reading proficiency in Italian in order to be able to read articles
pertaining to their areas of research. This course will not only provide
students with a proficient reading knowledge of Italian, but will also
facilitate the translation of Italian texts dealing with a variety of
disciplines. The principal structures of Italian grammar and main lexical
features will be analyzed in a systematic and coherent way. In this manner, the
development of reading and translating abilities in Italian will be achieved.
Italian
533/333 Dante’s Divine Comedy
Prof.
Alison Cornish TTh 1-2:30
This course is dedicated to a guided reading
of the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The text will be
read in facing-page translation for the benefit of those who know some Italian
and those who do not. Lectures and discussion are in
English. Students will learn about the historical, philosophical, literary
context of the poem as well as how to make sense of it in modern
terms. Evaluation will be by means of bluebook midterm and final testing
knowledge of key terms, concepts, and passages, summaries of two scholarly
articles, and participation (consisting of active class presence, on-line
quizzes on readings, and on-line discussion).
Taught in English.
French
651/Women’s Studies 698.002 /Comparative Literature 751.001
Prof.
Peggy McCracken and Prof. Valerie Traub
Thurs. 1-4 pm
Animal, Human, Women: Medieval, Early Modern, Postmodern
This seminar explores the role and function of concepts of
embodiment (including race, gender, and sexuality) in definitions of the human.
The first part of the seminar is devoted to devising a theoretical repertoire
drawn from theorists not primarily known for their interest in gender, but who
have provided influential theories of the social, disciplinarity, sovereignty,
the biopolitical, and the posthuman. In the second part of the seminar, we will
use these theories to think through issues of agency, sovereignty, and power in
relation to species, gender, sexuality, and race. We will focus on two literary
case studies composed of a cluster of intertexts: the stories of Philomel and
Cressida across the medieval and early modern periods in English and in French
(all French texts available in English translation). Literary authors include
Chaucer, Chrétien de Troyes, Shakespeare, and translators of Ovid; theorists
include Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Latour, and Grosz. Throughout the
Term we will consider the tension, in both theory and literary representation,
between being and becoming.Students will complete a major research project grounded in their own primary research areas and that engages with the theoretical paradigms offered in the course. Requirements include an annotated bibliography, an oral presentation of research questions, and a final paper. The class will culminate in the presentation of student research with the goal of preparation for publication.
Although the case studies for the course will be located in the medieval and early modern periods, no prior training in those areas is assumed, and the seminar should be useful to any student interested in gaining a broader understanding of contemporary theory and developing a methodological tool kit for engaging with both literary texts and historical issues in any period.
French
655/French 450/History of Art 689.003/History of Art 489.004
Prof.
Michèle Hannoosh and Prof. Susan Siegfried
MW 2:30-4
Fictions of Fashion in 19th century France: Art, Literature,
Theory
With the emergence in
nineteenth-century France of a large middle-class and the increasing
availability of mass-produced merchandise from around the world, displayed in
new commercial emporia such as the department store, fashion became a
wide-spread statement of modern identities and behaviours for both men and
women. This course will examine the uses of fashion as a theme and a means of
signification in the literary and visual culture of Paris, the self-declared
capital of la mode. We will consider the theorization of fashion as the
quintessential emblem of modernity in this period and later, in the work of
twentieth century theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. The
subject of fashion will be studied in texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly,
Zola, and Mallarmé. The artists to be studied include Manet, Monet, Morisot,
Winterhalter, Tissot and fashion illustrators such as Constantin Guys. This
interdisciplinary course is team-taught between History of Art and Romance
Languages and Literatures. Texts will be read in English translation but
students are encouraged to read in the original French if possible. The course
will be taught in a large-group discussion format for advanced undergraduates;
graduate students enrolled in the course will have extra meetings and
coursework. A field trip to the major international loan exhibition
Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, is planned for a weekend during the Winter Term. History of Art
distribution grid: D. 4
Spanish
826/American Culture 601.002
Prof. Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes Mon 4-7 pm
US Latino/a Literature and Culture
Latina/o Studies is an
interdisciplinary approach to the study of Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban,
Caribbean, Central American, and Latin American communities in the United
States. Latina/o Studies offers a rubric for understanding not only the
interconnections between diverse Latina/o communities but also the differences
that sometimes divide them. This course will expose students to core knowledge
about Latina/o histories and communities as well as the various disciplinary
rubrics through which Latina/o Studies is elaborated including literary and
historical studies, studies of immigration and citizenship, and media studies.
As a true interdisciplinary “introduction” to the study of Latina/os in the
U.S., the pedagogical aim of this course is to help graduate students develop
the background knowledge, theoretical language and methodological skills needed
to analyze the histories, cultural production, and material realities of
Latina/os in the U.S.
Spanish 829 Literature and Politics
Prof. Juli Highfill
Mon 1-4 pm
Description will be available soon.
Spanish 855 Special Topics Seminar
Prof. Gareth
Williams Wed 1-4 pm
“Written in the Annals of Mankind in
Letters of Blood and Fire”: On
Literature and the So-Called Primitive Accumulation in Latin America.
In his famous essay “On the Concept of History” Walter
Benjamin wrote: “With whom does the
historian actually sympathize? The
answer is inevitable: with the
victors. And all rulers are the heirs of
prior conquests. Hence, empathizing with
the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this
means. Whoever has emerged victorious
participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the current
rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the
procession. They are called “cultural
treasures”, and a historical materialist views them with cautious
detachment. For in every case these
treasures have a lineage that he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the
efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil
of others who lived in the same period”.
A good part of the twentieth century in Latin America was labeled with
the ideological nomenclature of “magical realism”. In this course we will contemplate modern and
contemporary Latin American literature with the horror and cautious detachment
required to bear witness to history’s anonymous toil.
Readings:
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo.
Hijo de hombre, Augusto Roa Bastos
Oficio de tinieblas, Rosario Castellanos
El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, José María
Arguedas
Respiración artificial, Ricardo Piglia
El testigo, Juan Villoro
2666, Roberto Bolaño (selección)
Insensatez, Horacio Castellanos Moya
Spanish 865 Empire/Independence
Prof. Daniel Nemser
Tues 1-4 pm
This course is an introduction for graduate students to
colonial Latin American literature as well as more generally to colonial and
postcolonial studies. We will read texts produced in and about the Americas
from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, from the
Spanish conquest to the wars of independence, in order to develop a complex
understanding of colonialism and the relationship between colonialism and
modernity. In addition to canonical Spanish texts, readings will include
historically marginalized indigenous textualities (alphabetic and pictographic
texts, maps, cultural artifacts like khipu,
etc.). These primary sources will be paired with more recent criticism
including postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, the idea being not only to
deepen and complicate our readings of colonial texts but also to test the
historical, theoretical, and epistemological limits of this criticism for the
study of colonial Latin America. We will consider a number of overlapping
themes including foundational violence and colonial sovereignty; the invention
of the “New World” and its regimes of knowledge; spiritual conquest and
secularism; and discourses of resistance and counterinsurgency.
