Spanish
Jorge Abril Sánchez
Peninsular literature.
Diego Alonso
19th- and 20th-century Latin American literature. On sabbatical 2009-10.
Elizabeth Drumm
Peninsular literature, modern European and Hispanic drama, literary theory.
Craig Eppelin
Latin American literature.
Ariadna García-Bryce
Early modern Spanish literature and culture. On sabbatical 2009-10.
Sharon Larisch
Spanish American literature, colonial literature, literary theory.
The Spanish department offers a balanced program leading to a major in Spanish language and literature. First- , second-, and third-year Spanish language classes emphasize all aspects of Spanish, speaking as well as reading, writing, grammar, and the cultural context of the language. All courses are conducted in Spanish. In the second year, emphasis on composition increases, and readings are drawn from a variety of genres. The third-year classes focus on certain problem areas of Spanish language in concert with an investigation of selected topics in Spanish and Spanish American culture. Primary readings in the literature courses are in the original language. The first priority in the upper-division courses is always an informed and accurate reading of each literary text, but this also implies a consideration of the artistic, historical, and cultural context of works, as well as questions of literary history and theory.
Students who major in Spanish are encouraged to select courses from a variety of periods in both Peninsular and Latin American literature and to enhance their studies with appropriate coursework in other areas, such as other literatures, humanities, history, art, and linguistics. They should also consult with the department to explore options for studying in a Spanish-speaking country.
For majors and nonmajors alike, the Spanish House provides an additional opportunity to practice and learn Spanish in an everyday setting.
Placement
Students who have studied Spanish before coming to Reed and who wish to enroll in Spanish courses should take the Spanish placement examination given every year during orientation week.
Non-majors
Students majoring in other departments in the Division of Literature and Languages may fulfill the divisional requirement with any of the third- or fourth-year courses.
Requirements for the Major
- A minimum of six units of literature at the 300 and 400 level. These must include at least two courses in Peninsular Spanish literature and at least two courses in Spanish American literature. At least one course in Peninsular literature and one course in Spanish American literature must cover pre-20th-century texts.
- Competence in Spanish equivalent to Spanish 321.
- Spanish 400.
- Spanish 470.
Recommended but not required:
- Spanish 321.
- French, and/or Latin, and/or another foreign language.
- Humanities 210 and/or 220.
- Latin American history.
Study Abroad
Majors in Spanish are encouraged to spend time in a Spanish-speaking country. Reed has study-abroad options in Ecuador at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito and the Pontífica Universidad Católica del Ecuador; in Argentina at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales and the Universidad de San Andrés; in Spain at the Universidad de Barcelona, at the Universidad de La Rioja in Logroño, and through the Hamilton College Academic Year in Spain Program in Madrid; and, in Costa Rica at the Universidad de Costa Rica, in concert with Lewis & Clark College. These programs are not limited to Spanish majors. The department also helps students select study-abroad programs in other parts of Latin America and in Spain on an individual basis. See the “Off-Campus Study” section of this catalog for more information.
Spanish Language and Introduction to Literature
Spanish 110 - First-Year Spanish
Full course for one year. A balanced study of written and oral aspects
of Spanish. Includes an introduction to reading. Conference.
Spanish 200 - Spanish for Advanced Beginners
Full course for one year. Students in this yearlong course will cover
the same material taught in Spanish 110 and 210, but at a highly
accelerated rate. A balanced study of and practice with written and
oral aspects of Spanish, this course is designed to prepare students
for introductory courses in literature and culture at the 300 level.
Prerequisites: placement exam or interview and consent of the
instructor. Students with no prior background in Spanish should take
Spanish 110. Conference.
Spanish 210 - Second-Year Spanish
Full course for one year. An intermediate-level study of grammar,
composition, conversation. Emphasis on reading: essays, theatre, short
stories, and poetry. Prerequisite: equivalent of one year of college
Spanish. Conference.
Spanish 311 - Advanced Language and Culture: Latin American Theater and Spectacle
Full course for one semester. This course is designed to refine and enhance language skills in concert with an investigation of selected topics in Spanish and Latin-American cultures. They include a focused consideration of problem areas of Spanish language and an introduction to various rhetorical forms. In addition to oral practice in class, students will write numerous short essays. The topic for fall 2009 is Latin-American theater and spectacle. Conference. Prerequisites: Spanish 200 or 210 or equivalent with the consent of instructor. Applicable to Group D.
Spanish 312 - Advanced Language and Culture: Spanish Civil War
Full course for one semester. This course is designed as a continuation of Spanish 311, to refine and
enhance language skills in concert with an investigation of selected
topics in Spanish and Latin-American cultures. It includes a focused
consideration of problem areas of Spanish language and an introduction
to various rhetorical forms. In addition to oral practice in class,
students will write numerous short essays. The topic for spring 2010 is the Spanish Civil War. Conference. Prerequisites: Spanish 200 or 210 or equivalent
with the consent of instructor. Applicable to Group D.
Spanish 321 - Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literature
Full course for one semester. This course is designed to give students
a theoretical, historical, and cultural framework for the more advanced
study of Spanish and Spanish American literature. It will include
considerations of genre, reception, and critical theory. Students will
be responsible for undertaking close readings of the texts as well as
research projects. Prerequisite: Spanish 210 or equivalent. Conference.
Early Modern Literature and Culture
Spanish 343 - Don Quixote and Narrative Theory
Full course for one semester. This course will consist of a close reading of Cervantes’s masterpiece in conjunction with the works of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Gyorgy Lukács, Ruth El Safar, Leo Spitzer, and Robert Alter, who have written about Don Quixote in the development and exploration of their various “theories of the novel.” To better understand the context of Don Quixote, we will begin with a careful consideration of political, cultural, and historical aspects of the Spanish Golden Age. We will end the semester with student presentations that focus on adaptations and appropriations of Don Quixote in modern narrative. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for Spanish credit will meet in extra sessions. Prerequisite for students taking the course for Spanish credit: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 344.
Spanish 353 - Chronicling America
Full course for one semester. The early chronicles of the exploration
and conquest of the “New World” initiate Spanish American literature
and have left an enduring mark as well on the development and
transformations of this literary tradition. This course focuses on the
chronicle form at two critical junctures. In the first part of the
course, we trace the constitution of a particularly Spanish American
colonial discourse through a reading of early chronicles, including
Columbus’s letters, mestizo and ladino histories, and
chronicle-novels. The second part of the course examines how problems
raised by these early works are taken up in recent texts that lay claim
to, parody, or shatter the chronicle form. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
19th- and 20th-Century Literature and Culture
Spanish 360 - Literature, State, and Nation in 19th-Century Latin America
Full course for one semester. This course examines the relationship
between literature and politics understood in the framework of an
intellectual history of 19th-century Latin America. The selected texts
reflect the range of different meanings that the concept of nation
takes on, according to the distinct context and junctures in which it
is evoked. The first part of the course focuses on discourses about the
nation that are primarily concerned with questions of culture and
identity, as well as with mythical-symbolic import. Discussed in this
light are neoclassical, romantic, and naturalist poetics.
Representative genres read include poetry, short stories, novels, and
essays by Olmedo, Heredia, Bello, Echeverría, Mármol, Gómez de
Avellaneda, Issacs, Matto de Turner. The rest of the term is devoted to
a tradition of republican thought that addresses institutional and
juridical problems. Readings include letters, essays, and speeches by
Bolívar, Artigas, Lastarria, Sarmiento, Alberdi, Bilbao, de Hostos.
Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 364 - Regionalism, Nationalism, Decadence: 19th-Century Peninsular Literature
Full course for one semester. Developing out of the “costumbrismo”
movement of the midcentury, Spanish realist narrative played an
important role in articulating regional differences and giving these
differences narrative play. At the same time, however, these
representations taxed the claims of realism to represent a coherent
national whole. This course examines experimentation within narrative
realism: What paradigm of the “real” drives the representation? What is
excluded? What forces cannot be assimilated and threaten its
disintegration? How does a growing sense of national decadence generate
new literary forms? Beginning with examples of “costumbrista” texts, we
will study works by central Spanish novelists like Clarín, Galdós,
Castro, Pardo Bazán, and Valle-Inclán within a broad range of
theoretical approaches to realism. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
Spanish 370 - Peninsular Modernism
Full course for one semester. After Spain lost its last colonies (Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) in 1898, it entered into a period of
social and political reform that affected literature and the plastic
arts. Although this period of political transformation and artistic
freedom was shut down by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, for many
artists creating during the long years of Franco's dictatorship, it
became a point of reference, a "silver age" to rival Spain's "golden
age" of the 16th and 17th centuries. Focusing on the period 1900–1930,
this course will examine how modernism reacts to late-19th-century
realism, proposing a new vision of reality through the use of existing
genres and the development of new ones. In addition to the study of
texts by Galdós, Valle-Inclán, Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Antonio Machado and
Azorín, we will examine works by the architect Gaudí, and artists such
as Santiago Rusiñol and Pablo Picasso. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
Spanish 372 - Echoes of Spanish Romantic Poetry
Full course for one semester. This course will have two objectives: to
familiarize students with Spain’s Romantic movement (particularly, its
poetry); and to trace, in a partial fashion, how Spain’s Romanticism
has influenced posterior generations of Spanish poetry. While we will
pay close attention to the sociohistorical contexts of the works to be
studied (and to Spanish Romanticism, as it has been defined up to the
present), our main focus will be the transmission of a literary
tradition. Authors whose works we may discuss include Quintana, Lista,
Mora, Espronceda, Zorrilla, Carolina Coronado, Gertrudis Gómez de
Avellaneda, Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, Machado, Unamuno, Cernuda,
García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, José Hierro, Jaime Gil de Biedma,
Francisco Brines, Gloria Fuertes, Julia Uceda, and Luis García Montero.
Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 373 - The Avant-Gardes
Full course for one semester. This course will explore the aesthetic
revolution waged by the Spanish and Latin American avant-gardes at the
beginning of the 20th century. Focusing on manifestos, poems,
paintings, films, and theatrical works, we shall consider diverse ways
in which Futurism, Ultraism, Creationism, and Surrealism declare war on
“bourgeois” art forms. Presenting a utopian view of modernity, these
movements react against both the weight of tradition and the alienation
of the individual in the industrialized world. Particular attention
will be paid to the link between avant-gardist poetics and the
different political ideologies, such as communism and fascism.
Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 377 - Contemporary Spanish Fiction
Full course for one semester. Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 marked
the end of dictatorship in Spain, though the transition to democracy
was hardly smooth. In this course, we will examine Spanish fiction
after Franco’s death, paying particular attention to the fictional as a
space through which Franco’s legacy may be confronted, and through
which a Spanish society may be constructed. The reading of novels and
short stories by Martín Gaite, Tusquets, Vázquez Montalbán, Marsé,
Javier Marías, Muñoz Molina, Etxebarría, Rivas, and others will be
complemented by texts that chronicle and confront the transition
(Vilarós, Vázquez Montalbán). Studies on narratology, trauma, memory,
and national identity will inform our work on Spanish fiction.
Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 379 - Short Latin American Fiction
Full course for one semester. This course focuses on in-depth analyses
of short stories and other forms of short fiction by outstanding Latin
American writers. The concept of literary genre will be examined along
with basic narratological categories. Starting with the canonical texts
through which the modernist short story took shape (Darío), the course
goes on to study the fantastic genre (Quiroga, Borges, Cortázar,
Ocampo), feminine literature (Bombal, Ferré), magical realism
(Carpentier, García Márquez), and other manifestations of critical
realism (Arlt, Onetti, Rulfo). Attention is directed at micronarrative
and the poetics of the fragment–Denevi, Monterroso, Piglia. Primary
readings will be complemented by theoretical readings to include Poe,
Chejov, Freud, Sartre, Moravia, Benjamin, Todorov, Friedman, Reid, and
others. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 381 - Literature and Culture of Argentina from Independence to the Present
Full course for one semester. In the framework of an Argentinean
cultural history, this course analyzes the relationship between
aesthetics, ethics, and politics. A series of 19th- and 20th-century
texts, both fictional and nonfictional, will serve to trace the
trajectory from a political use of literature to the emergence of an
autonomous intellectual sphere. The course is organized around the
topics of “civilization and barbarism”; gauchos, frontiers, and
“the desert”; the Generation of 1880 and immigration; Peronism and
anti-Peronism; and militarism and democracy. Prerequisite: Spanish 321
or equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 385 - Realism and Magic
Full course for one semester. For better or worse, “realism” and
“magic” have come to be linked with Spanish American literature. This
course examines in broad cultural terms the interplay of these two
poles in Spanish America and investigates how we might critically
appraise their conjunction as realismo mágico. Under the rubric of the “real” and realism are included chronicles, journalism, social realist and naturalist fiction, and testimonios.
Magic will be understood in similarly broad terms: witchcraft, the
fantastic, the grotesque, the gothic, and the uncanny. Readings in
Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 387 - Essay, Race, and Nation in Latin America
Full course for one semester. This course focuses on an essay tradition
that reflects on questions related to modernity. The chronicles of the
Cuban José Martí on the United States serve as an introduction to a
series of themes and categories: democracy, popular culture, aesthetic
autonomy and heteronomy, spiritualism, anomie, consensus, and race,
that are relevant to the study of the other authors. The reading of the
primary texts—Rodó, Ortiz, Vasconcelos, Blanco, Lugones, Mariátegui,
and Arguedas—is accompanied by the study of theoretical essays
originating in other traditions: Baudelaire, Tocqueville, Renan,
Eagleton, Hobsbawm, and H.L. Gates Jr. The principal axis of this
course is the relationship between the aesthetic and the political,
tracing an itinerary that goes from the appeal to beauty in consensual
practices to their most elitist and authoritarian manifestations.
Emphasis is on how the authors formulated a model nation, which stood
as an alternative to that proposed by the liberal elite of the 19th
century. Readings in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent
with consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 389 - Toward a New Mexican Narrative
Full course for one semester. This course analyzes contemporary Mexican
narratives in the form of written and visual texts that have been
produced from the mid-1980s to the present. Fictional novels, short
stories, films, documentaries, performance art pieces, and blogs will
help shed light on the most current and innovative aesthetic tendencies
in the Mexican nation. The chosen works will aid us in gaining an
understanding of the political, economic, and social factors that have
contributed to their artistic creation. Topics and issues such as
globalization, borders, and environmentalist movements will be
addressed. This class will be interdisciplinary, since we will also
draw on historical, social scientific, and cultural studies. Readings
and video recordings are in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 390 - Crime and Literature in Spanish America
Full course for one semester. The notion of crime constitutes a point
of articulation joining religious, philosophical, juridical,
journalistic, historiographical, scientific, psychoanalytical, and
other discourses. For this reason, it provides a particularly rich
point of departure for the study of cultural production. This course
focuses on the various ways in which crime has figured in Spanish
American writing. Texts may include accounts of transvestite nuns and
“deluded” mystics, detective novels, and literary or journalistic
treatments of the drug trade and the criminal state apparatus. We will
also consider filmic representations of crime. Theoretical readings
address the development and function of penal, judicial, governmental,
and medical institutions. Readings in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish
321 or equivalent with consent of instructor. Conference.
Spanish 393 - Special Topics in Peninsular Literature and Culture
The Spanish Picaresque Novel of the 16th and 17th Centuries: Origins, Evolution, and Consolidation of a Critical Literary Tool
Full course for one semester. This course focuses on the
autobiographical narrations of the pícaro, who ironically unveils the
lies and hypocrisies of a corrupt society in sixteenth and seventeenth
century Spain. We will trace the literary precedents of the picaresque
novel in the Spanish Middle Ages and Renaissance in order to identify
the defining characteristics of this popular sub-genre of prose. Then
we will examine how this satirical discourse is constructed to offer
the reader a rich mine of observations concerning every social milieu.
Readings include the anonymous Vida del Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus
Fortunas y Adversidades, Francisco de Quevedo’s Vida del Buscón llamado
don Pablos, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s La hija de la
Celestina, Miguel de Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo and La
Gitanilla, Juan de Luna’s Segunda parte del Lazarillo de Tormes, and
Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses’s La Niña de los Embustes, Teresa de
Manzanares. Primary readings in Spanish will be complemented by
theoretical readings, mostly in English, by authors—Marcel Mauss,
Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, among
others. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent or consent of the
instructor. Conference.
Spanish Cinema
Full course for one semester. In this course, we will consider a
variety of critical and theoretical approaches to the growing canon of
Spanish cinema. From Buñuel’s first experiments to the most recent
releases, the films studied will be examined as both aesthetic texts
and historical documents–documents that not only have a particular
history, but serve to enact national histories as well. Directors whose
films we will be discussing include Álex de la Iglesia, Almodóvar,
Amenábar, Bardém, Berlanga, Bigas Luna, Bollaín, Borau, Buñuel, Érice,
León de Aranoa, Mañas, Martín Patino, Ménem, Miró, Nieves-Conde, Sáenz
de Heredia, Saura, David Trueba, and Fernando Trueba, among others.
Screenings held outside of class hours. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
Spanish 395 - Special Topics in Spanish American Literature and Culture
New Media Culture in Latin America
Full course for one semester. What do we mean when we talk about new media? In this class, we will take this question as a point of departure for examining a series of cross-media aesthetic practices in contemporary Latin America. One assumption of the course is that “new media” refers to an entire “media ecology” underlying all cultural production in the present. This assumption is subject to revision, and the cultural objects we examine will allow us to test it. We will read and view texts of many kinds: printed books, films, digital archives, e-poems, blogs, online games, and installations. We will read texts by theorists of media, literature and the visual arts. This aims at understanding how contemporary Latin American writers and artists contend with the possibilities opened up by new media technologies, how they articulate forms of subjectivity and collective life, and what aesthetic formulas emerge from their efforts. Most readings are in Spanish, with some in English. Others include a combination of the two, which is an increasingly common trait of new media objects in Latin America. Class discussions will be in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
The Avant-Garde Imaginary in Latin America
Full course for one semester. This course traces a lineage of avant-garde aesthetics in twentieth-century Latin America. We will examine how the avant-garde imaginary is formative for Latin American literary culture, up to the present. We will begin with readings of the most canonical representatives of the Latin American historical avant-garde and move through a series of works growing out of this tradition. A central question in our discussions will be how writers reframe the political impulses of the avant-garde while articulating their own authorial positions. We will study collections of poetry, which is arguably the central literary genre of the avant-garde and its successors. A number of our texts are pictorial in nature, which also evinces a central characteristic of the avant-gardes: a focus on the visual and an orientation toward multimedia works. Readings are in Spanish, with some theoretical texts in English. Class discussions will be in Spanish. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
The Evolution of Mexican Drama: From Traditional Theatre to Transnational Performance
Full
course for one semester. The genre of theatre has allowed for
ideological expression as well as reflected social reality. In the case
of Mexico, theatre has also served as a tool in the process of
nation-building, and as a critique of that same nationalistic
discourse. In this course, theatre is analyzed primarily as a
sociocultural phenomenon within specific sociohistorical contexts as we
study different moments of the Mexican theatre from the 20th and 21st
centuries. We will begin with marginal revue and “tent” theatre,
continue with vanguard and feminist theatre, and finish with
performance art that takes place on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican
border. Our readings of the plays are supplemented by genre theory,
performance, and cultural studies. Prerequisite: Spanish 321 or
equivalent with consent of the instructor. Conference.
Spanish 400 - Junior Seminar: Church and State in Early Modern Spanish Culture
Full course for one semester. This course examines the relationship
between politics and culture in 16th- and 17th-century Spain. More
specifically, the organizing theme is the convergence of absolutist
monarchical power and religious authority, as formulated or contested
in various cultural productions: poems, comedias, autos sacramentales,
novellas, conduct manuals, court correspondence, pictorial emblems, and
paintings. The construction of and resistance to a theocratic imperial
order are analyzed from different theoretical perspectives. This course
includes a substantial research project. Readings in Spanish.
Prerequisites: Spanish 321 and one other literature course taught in
Spanish or equivalent with consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.
Spanish 470 - Thesis
One-half or full course for one semester or one year.
Spanish 481 - Independent Reading
One-half or full course for one semester. Prerequisite: approval of instructor and division.
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