Courses Taught at Reed

SPAN 110: First Year Spanish

A balanced study of written and oral aspects of Spanish. Includes an introduction to reading.

SPAN 210: Second Year Spanish

An intermediate-level study of grammar, composition, and conversation. Emphasis on reading: essays, theatre, short stories, and poetry. 

SPAN 322: Theory and Practice of Hispanic Literatures: Search for Identity in Latin America

The Independence and the later Mexican and Cuban revolutions provide a framework from which to study the most significant instances in the definition of a political and cultural identity.  Of central concern will be the relationship between ruling elites and subaltern groups, as it appears in political documents, manifestos, novels, short stories, poems, and films.  Particular attention will be paid to the voices and representations of gauchos, indios, and negros.

SPAN 357: Essay, 'Race', and Nation in Latin America 

Taking José Martí's chronicles about the United States as a starting point, this course studies a corpus of essays that seeks to redefine a political and cultural identity. The authors studied—Martí, Rodó, Vasconcelos, Blanco, Pedreira, Ortiz, Mariátegui, J. M. Arguedas and Lugones—formulate an alternative model of nation to the one proposed by the liberal elites of the 19th century. Three major themes will organize the class discussion: (1) the genre of the essay and the idea of ​​modernity, (2) the use of the category of race in the construction of identities, and (3) the appeal to aesthetics as a means to resolve conflicts that emerge with the modernization processes in Latin America. [syllabus]

SPAN 360: Literature, State, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

This course examines the relationship between literature and politics understood in the framework of an intellectual history of nineteenth-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, and 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, and de Hostos. [syllabus]

SPAN 368: Borges: Fiction and Criticism 

This course studies the writings of one of the most important authors of the twentieth century through various critical approaches that have been applied to his work: structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and sociocriticism. Emerging from this corpus are two opposing views: one that associates Borges with the Argentinean literary system, foregrounding his participation in national aesthetic and cultural debates, and one that emphasizes the cosmopolitanism, skepticism, and sense of unreality marking his literature. Also considered will be emerging critical studies that accentuate the historical and political relevance of Borges’s oeuvre. Along with these lines of inquiry, a series of theoretical categories and themes that are key for the comprehension of Borges’s writing will be discussed: avant-garde ultraism; criollismo; metaphor and metonymy; Argentinean tradition; reading, misreading, and translation; authorship and figures of the author; canon and literary genealogy; history, memory, and forgetting. [syllabus]

SPAN 375: Memory and Image in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Art

This course focuses on memory and image, two categories that have acquired great relevance since the 1980s, in ethical, political, juridical, epistemological, and aesthetic domains. The terms “subjective turn” and “iconic turn” used by cultural critics reflect this phenomenon that is analyzed through recent literary and visual artworks. Together with testimonies and other nonfiction works, a series of documents embodying different memorialization policies (museums and memorial sites) are examined and contrasted with practices (literature, performance, visual arts) that use aesthetics to engage with the past. Particular attention is paid to the presence of the imaginary, the anachronistic, obsolescence, and the emptying of objects. Parallel to the ethics-political character of memory, the function of forgetting and the intellective in relation to the past is discussed. Included are works by Rodolfo Walsh, Doris Salcedo, León Ferrari, Mario Bellatin, Cynthia Rimsky, Alejandro Zambra, Ricardo Piglia, Alan Pauls, José Emilio Pacheco, Margo Glantz, and Diamela Eltit. [syllabus]

SPAN 379: The Latin American Short Fiction 

This course focuses on in-depth analyses of short stories and other forms of short fiction by some of the most outstanding Latin American writers.  The concept of a literary genre will be examined along with basic narratological categories (narrator, implicit reader, point of view, narrative sequence, etc.).  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).  Finally, attention is directed at micronarrative and the poetics of the fragment (Denevi, Monterroso, Piglia).  Primary readings will be complemented by theoretical readings (Poe, Chejov, Freud, Sartre, Moravia, Benjamin, Friedman, and Reid, among others). [syllabus]

SPAN 381: Fiction and Politics: Introductory Course to Argentinean Literature 

Considering literature as a specific social practice, this course studies the changing relationship between fiction and politics in the context of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Argentina. Special attention will be devoted to the different literary genres and poetics used to represent political power which can, itself, be understood as a complex fictional machine. The readings follow a chronological order that will enable discussion about the contradictory process which leads to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and a professional writer. Key concepts such as, national identity, tradition, modernization, democracy, mass culture, nationalism, populism, among others, will be considered. [syllabus]

SPAN 383: Cuba: Literature and Society 

This course studies nineteenth and twentieth-century Cuban literature in terms of its formulation of a political and cultural identity.  Taking as a point of departure narratives on slavery, we shall discuss how the concept of race operates in different authorial projects and genres: political manifestoes of the independence (Martí), essays on nationhood (Guerra y Sánchez, Araquistain, Ortiz, Mañach), black poetry (Guillén), marvellous realism (Carpentier).  The focus will then move to the cultural influence of the revolution of 1959 and the creation of two divergent poetics.  Along with politically engaged literature (Desnoes, Fernández Retamar), we will examine works which, emphasizing their autonomy, present a metaphysical, universal and ludic vision of Cubanidad (Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy.)  The course will conclude with some reflections on the thematic recurrence of exile and diaspora (Arenas, Pérez Firmat). [syllabus]