Graduate Course Descriptions
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Spring 2010
Spring 2010 Graduate Course Schedule
Prof. Judith Némethy (judith.nemethy@nyu.edu)
G95.1120 METHODOLOGY OF SPANISH LANGUAGE TEACHING.
This course provides a theoretical
foundation and practical experience for teaching Spanish to English speakers at beginning, intermediate, and
advanced levels. The course is divided
into three segments: Approaches to the
teaching of Spanish grammar and comparative study of the basic structures in
both Spanish and English; some
elements of contrastive phonology, and classroom management and techniques of
language learning.
Course requirements:
a. Development of materials portfolio, including
the preparation of lesson plan for elementary and intermediate courses
(including class activities and the explanation of a complex grammar topic),
ideas for classroom activities; and the preparation of a quiz.
b. Two take-home exams, reviewing grammatical
concepts and developing an assigned topic in language instruction.
c.
Observation of classes taught by experienced instructors, and report on
classroom dynamics and students'
learning patterns.
d.
Microteaching assignments
d. Teaching one lesson of a Spanish for
Beginners I class.
e. Class discussion. Students should bring to class the readings
and handouts on which the discussions are based.
f. Practicum: Teaching one semester of Spanish
for Beginners I.
Prof. Gigi Dopico-Black (gdb3@nyu.edu)
G87.2965 TPCS: BODIES, VISIONS AND DESIRES (in English).
Bodies, Visions, Desires reads
texts of the 16th and 17th century
through the lens of the body and the discourses of vision (or visions) and
desire that are scripted upon it. Throughout the semester, we will read bodies
of different sorts: the criminal body and the discourses of discipline and
exemplarity that it joins together, the saintly body as a double of the
diabolically possessed body and the scripts of ecstasy that differ in their
readings but not in the symptoms they manifest, the witch’s body as a site of
seductive excess, the body of a married woman as the meeting place of
surveillance and subjectivity, the tortured body and its strange alliance with
truth, the monarch’s body as a site of power and impotence, the cross-dressed
body and the way it exposes the constructedness of gender categories, the
Other’s body (Jew, morisco, Amerindian) and the challenges to legibility that
it presents, the medicalized or inquired body that at once requires examination
(a compulsory cure) and resists diagnosis.
We will ground our readings of literary texts by turning also to bodily
discourses of a slightly different order: early modern anatomical treatises
that place the body at the center of a theater of dissection, political arbitrios that propose cures of various
sorts for a national body deemed diseased, maps that chart the globe in terms
of a body, Inquisitorial torture manuals, tracts on the disciplining and
containment of errant women and the particular threat of sexual contagion
(syphillis) that they represent, spiritual exercises, witch-hunting treatises,
documents on blood purity, etc. Finally,
we will read various critical and theoretical works that take up bodily
concerns from different vantage points. In English
Prof. Marta Peixoto (marta.peixoto@nyu.edu)
G87.2967 MACHADO
DE ASSIS: FICTIONAL MEMOIRS, SOCIAL
REALITY, AND THE NOVEL (in English).
This course will examine the
novels of Machado de Assis (1839-1908), perhaps Brazil's most celebrated and
influential writer, considering especially the strategy that characterized much
of his later work: the use of fictional first-person narrators situated
simultaneously inside and outside the social world that the novelist
observes. The most extreme example of
this equivocal position is Brás Cubas, his famous posthumous narrator. We will a read a selection of Machado’s novels
and short stories, and of the criticism that, in the hundred years since the
author’s death, has presented powerful and competing views of Machado’s complex
engagement with history and politics (including the abolition of slavery), with
the writing of his Brazilian and European predecessors and with fundamental
aspects of the novel as a genre.
CLASSES WILL BE CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH. All the reading will be available in translation,
although students may prefer to read in the original Portuguese. Portuguese, Spanish or English
may be used in written work.
Prof. Diana Taylor (diana.taylor@nyu.edu)
G95.2976 STAGES OF
CONFLIT: LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE 16TH – 21ST CENTURIES.
(bi-lingual)
Latin American theatre and performance, this
course suggests, have always been caught up with the region’s turbulent
political history. Although the plays and performance practices we will
explore make strong claims for aesthetic distinction, this is not their only
(or at times even primary) reason for being. These works are in constant
dialogue with the events shaping them--conquest, colonialism, dictatorships,
torture, globalization and neo-liberal politics. We will trace the ‘stages of
conflict’ reflected in this theatre starting with the conquest in the 16th
century, the colonial period (Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz), through the period of
budding nationalisms and independence movements and through the twentieth
century to examine how Latin American playwrights (Enrique Buenaventura, José
Triana, Augusto Boal, Diana Raznovich, Griselda Gambaro) and collective theatre
groups (Las Divas --Jesusa Rodriquez/Liliana Felipe, Mapa teatro, Yuyachkani,
T.E.C.) struggled to transform theatre from an instrument of colonial
oppression into an oppositional, at times revolutionary, "theatre of the
oppressed." Readings, available in English and Spanish, will include plays by many of Latin America’s major playwrights.
Prof. Mary Louise Pratt (marylouise.pratt@nyedu)
G95.2968 PENSAMIENTO LATINOAMERICANO
This course will examine major projects in Latin
American social and cultural theory and analysis since 1980. Latin America
shares the modern state form with rest of the global geopolitical system; it
shares with the global south a history of imperial intervention, colonial
occupation, and neocolonial extraction; it shares with the rest of the Americas
a history as the object of the first wave of European expansion in the 15th
century; its history includes autochthonous large-scale imperial and state
formations that developed in complete independence from the rest of the
planet. What kind of intellectual field arises from the interaction
of these social forms and historical forces? What objects of study
and analytical imperatives does it produce? What challenges does
it pose to the intellectual norms of metropolitan thought, even as it is
governed by them? This is the broader frame in which we will consider
works of contemporary Latin American thought, clustered around a set of topics
including:
Crítica del estado
liberal (e.g. I. Rodriguez, Nugent)
Paradojas de la modernidad
(eg. Ludmer, Hopenhayn)
Diagnóstica del occidentalismo
(eg. Bonfil Batalla, Flores Galindo, Dussel)
Anatomía del autoritarismo (eg.
Garretón, Eltit)
La memoria como objeto de estudio
(eg. Jelin)
Ciudadanía en el siglo
XXI (Reguillo, Monsiváis, García Canclini)
Pensamiento indígena actual
(eg. Patzi, Paredes, Mamani)
Prof. Jodana Mendelson (jordana.mendelson@nyu.edu)
G95.2975 IBERIAN VISUAL CULTURE: THE
1930’s.
The 1930s was a turbulent decade across Europe and the Americas.
Several major exhibitions have been devoted to the topic, however few authors
have sought to understand the broader implications of the decade itself as a
generator for ideas and objects that challenged the boundaries between
disciplines, media, and nations. This seminar is concerned specifically with
trying to sort out the major force lines of the decade by studying the problem
of modernism itself: How were the avant-garde practices of the teens and
twenties transformed under the weight of the Depression and political upheaval
following World War I? Where was innovation located (geographically and
artistically) and how were new approaches to the critical task of art making
transmitted across national lines? (Does it even make sense to still use the
concept of innovation as a marker for “new art” in the 1930s?) Of particular
interest in this seminar will be a discussion about technology and choice of
media as creative decisions on the part of artists and writers. Of concern to
us will be the question of how Spain
and Latin America fit within a larger
narrative about art and politics that dominated the 1930s? How can we rethink
the dominant narratives about the 1930s from the perspective of Spain and Latin America?
Students will be expected to take an active role in this
seminar by proposing works to study. We will also try, when possible, to study
works in museums and galleries as well as devoting significant time to close readings
of texts. The idea is to look anew at the 1930s to see if previous models for
understanding the artistic and political geographies of the decade can be
productive rethought.
As a starting point, we will be studying current treatments
of modernism and modernity as concepts in the fields of literature, critical
theory, and art history (esp. readings related to what has been called
“modernist studies”). From there we will move to specific texts/objects, some
selected by me, and others suggested by students enrolled in the seminar. if
you are interested in taking this class, please email me with your suggestions
before December, otherwise we will develop the reading lists together at the
start of the spring semester.
This seminar coincides with my work as co-curator for an
exhibition on “The 1930s” scheduled for 2011 at the Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía.
CLASSES WILL BE
CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH. Although students
may prefer to read in the original Spanish. Spanish or English
may be used in written work
Prof. James Fernández (james.fernandez@nyu.edu)
G95.2966 MODERNITY & NATIONAL
IDENTITY: 18 & 19 CENTURY SPANISH LITERATURE
In this course we will
explore a set of key texts and issues in Spanish literature from the
mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
The texts will include:
Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal; Torres Villarroel, Vida; Cadalso,
Cartas marruecas; Jovellanos, “Sobre los espectáculos”; Moratín, El sí de las
niñas; Blanco White, Life; Larra, Artículos de costumbres; Zorrilla, Don Juan
Tenorio, and others
Issues will include: the question of “atraso” in modern Spain; notions of gender in the transition
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the legacy of empire in enlightenment
and romanticism; the emergence of first-person writing in Spain; the fashioning and refashioning of Spain’s
literary tradition in neoclassical and romantic terms.
