Spanish

This course offers an introduction to the Spanish-speaking world through its popular cultures. Throughout the year, students without previous knowledge of Spanish will be continuously exposed to an array of authentic materials to help them comprehend and communicate at a novice proficiency level. Students will learn and reflect on the history of the Spanish-speaking world through a combination of authentic materials, such as songs, poems, short stories, and short films. Students will also develop the necessary skills to navigate basic, everyday situations while also developing the corresponding cultural competency. In each unit, the communicative and vocabulary-building exercises encapsulated in goal-oriented tasks will encourage students to engage with the language at various register levels. Group conferences will provide an opportunity to expand what we have learned in the classroom and address any additional questions or concerns that students may have on the materials presented thus far. Moreover, the weekly conversation sessions with the language assistant are an integral part of the course and will help students hone the work that we do in the classroom.

This class is meant for students who have already taken some Spanish in the past but feel that they need to review the essentials of the grammatical system in order to secure a solid foundation. The seminar will operate on several levels: Rigorous, systematic work with morphology and syntax will be complemented by the acquisition of a solid body of vocabulary. A great range of practical exercises and integrated activities will serve the function of developing effective communicative skills centered on reading, listening, speaking, and writing. All of these linguistic practices will be smoothly integrated into a balanced program. The activities jointly conducted in class will be based on the use of authentic Spanish-language materials, including films, documentaries, video clips, episodes of TV series, podcasts, lyrics of songs, comic strips, adapted/graded short stories and novellas, excerpts of graphic novels, poems, newspaper articles, and brief essays on all aspects of culture. Two important features of this class are the class journal and the open syllabus. Students will keep a record of the different class activities in a detailed journal, also known as cuaderno de clase, or “el book.” Another important characteristic of this course is the nature of its syllabus, which is open—which means that it will be jointly created by all class members in coordination with me. Thus, students will suggest films, poems, songs, short stories, and other materials to be jointly explored by the class. Besides the collective activities shared with the rest of the class, students will work in small groups to develop small projects. Groups will consists of three or four students, and students will participate in three groups in order to create a more varied linguistic exchange. A third, optional section of the cuaderno will reflect the different activities done by students individually (additional films they choose to view, newspaper articles of their interest, songs…). In sum, Spanish will be present in your lives throughout the entire academic year. A strongly recommended practice will be the incorporation of habits such as reading newspapers in Spanish on a regular basis. At the end of the semester, each student will have produced their own libro de español, in which the entire trajectory of the class will be carefully recorded. In addition to all this, you will complete a conference project, which can be individual or collaborative (with one or more class members). The topics are infinite in their scope and possibilities. One of the things that has surprised me most when I taught this class in the past was the creativity and originality of the projects developed by my students. As a result, at the end of the year you will be surprised at how intense your progress will have been. And at that time, you will be reading your first full-length book in Spanish. You will begin as an advanced beginner, but you will end at a much more solid level—ready to conduct sophisticated work in this language on your own. The contents of the class activities that follow are indicative, apart from some structural guidelines related to grammar work. You will be expected to incorporate Spanish into your daily life and start thinking in this language. All students will also attend weekly, hour-long meetings, aimed at further developing communicative skills, in conversation sessions with the language assistant.

This course is intended for students who have at least one year of Spanish at the college level or more in high school. We will thoroughly review essential grammar concepts and broaden your vocabulary, improving your verbal and written communication as we hone your listening and reading skills. We will read and analyze the work of contemporary Latin American writers—such as Fernanda Melchor, Selva Amada, Lina Meruane, Mónica Ojeda, Camila Sosa, Samanta Schweblin, and Daniella Sánchez Russo—with a focus on literary strategies they use to explore issues such as sexuality, bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, definitions and redefinitions of gender, indigineity, violence, and resistance. In addition to class time, you will complete an individual conference project each semester and attend a conversation session each week with a language tutor.

Once students have reached the linguistic command required to work at an advanced intermediate level, they are in an ideal position to begin to explore the numerous resources that can be found on the Internet. Instrumentally, we will focus on the multiple uses of Spanish to be found in the virtual world and make use of its many possibilities, such as blogs, newspapers, magazines, and other formats. We will identify the most relevant web pages from the Spanish-speaking world, extract the adequate information, and exploit it in class jointly, making the necessary adjustments. Access to authentic sources from all over the Spanish-speaking world will give us an excellent idea of the varieties of the language used in more than 20 countries. We will explore all forms of culture, paying special attention to audiovisual resources such as podcasts, films, interviews, documentaries, TV programs, and other formats—all of which will be incorporated into the course of study, either complete or in fragments depending on the level of difficulty. Art, film, music, photography, theatre, science, politics, comics, video games, gastronomy—all forms and manifestations of culture, high or low, will be the object of our attention, as long as their vehicle of expression is Spanish. We will minimize the use of printed matter, which will be mainly devoted to a more classical exploration of grammar. The class as a whole, as well as students on an individual basis, will be encouraged to locate different kinds of materials on the Internet. Weekly meetings in small groups with the language assistants will help to strengthen conversational skills.

The distinction between human and animal is foundational in Latin American cultural and political history, as well as in its contemporary social and political discourse, informing issues from national identity and citizenship to disputes over land and resources. In this class, we will look at how the figure of the animal informs, complicates, and subverts the nature/culture dichotomy as seen in literature and film. We will analyze how different figurations of the relationship between human and animal register shifting hierarchies of race, class, and gender in stories by the likes of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, and Julio Cortázar, as well as in films such as La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel) and Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)—paying special attention to alignments/alliances between the animal and other subjects marginalized because of their race, gender, sexuality, and class. This course will introduce students to animal studies and ecocriticism through a survey of 20th century-21st century Latin American literature and film.

This course will explore the art and architecture of Spain and of Latin America as its lands emerged from colonialism to forge strong independent identities. We will focus on selected topics, including extraordinary artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Cabrera, and Aleijadinho, as well as on complex issues surrounding art and identity in contested and textured lands—in particular, Casta painting, colonialism, and arts of revolution and national identity. Students may, if they wish, extend their conference work to later artists (e.g., Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, José Bedia, Belkis Ayón, among others).

This community-partnership course will bring students closer to Latin American oral history writing in order to write their own community-based narratives. Since the advent of military and repressive regimes in late 20th-century Latin America, social scientists and historians have turned to oral histories. By interviewing eyewitnesses to reconstruct the past and act upon the present, oral histories originally served to document the stories of both oppressors and oppressed but, since then, have expanded in scope and purpose. Building on existing rich oral traditions in the region, this course will first explore the methodologies of Latin American colonial chroniclers, popular educators, activists, and professional historians to understand the historical origins and context of production of different oral histories, as well as their academic and political use. Then, focusing on the history of late 20th-century Chile and its transition from socialism to neoliberalism, students will read, view, or listen to different oral history-based narratives, including life histories, documentaries, biographies, and truth and reconciliation commissions, among others. By doing so, the course will help students both get a glimpse of Latin American history and assess and develop skills to craft their own narratives based on the observation of, and participation in, the Yonkers community. The third and final part of the course will be devoted to workshop the narratives produced by students. Throughout the semester, students will have the opportunity to work with a particular community organization in Yonkers. Students are expected to develop a conference project based on their work with the community, using the oral-history questions, tools, and problems learned and discussed in the seminar. The conference project may take any format, including essays, podcasts, short videos, timelines, and interactive maps.

Afro-Latin American subjects have had a long tradition of employing literature, newspapers, and films to participate in national and international debates, such as the push for a republic in Brazil and progress in the Dominican Republic at the end of the 19th century, the integration and celebration of Afrodescendent culture in Puerto Rico in the 1930s, and the implementation of Afrodescendent-conscious initiatives in contemporary Colombian society. While these outlets certainly served as a vehicle to disseminate their thoughts on a variety of topics, their materiality also attested to the undeniable existence and agency of these subjects in such nations. In this course, we will explore and evaluate cultural artifacts that have impacted intellectual and artistic discourses in Latin American societies from the 19th century to today. Through poems, short stories, novels, newspaper articles, and films by cultural thinkers including Maria Firmina dos Reis, Salomé Ureña, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet, we will delve into the visions that these thinkers had for themselves and their respective societies. We will critically discuss their artistic and political achievements at both local and international levels to better situate their epistemology in the tradition of the African diaspora. Students will learn the principles of literary analysis and theory and employ them in written assignments and class discussions. We will ground our analysis of these cultural artifacts in their respective sociopolitical contexts. Another important aspect of this course is to facilitate students’ transition to college life. As a result, we will meet every other week in group conference to discuss topics related to this transition. The other weeks, students will meet individually with the professor to work on their conference projects. This course will be taught entirely in English.

Against the backdrop of the bloodiest half-century in human history, Continental European culture produced an astonishingly rich and diverse body of lyric poetry. Robert Frost famously remarked that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But the unmistakable genius of modern European poetry survives its passage into English (inevitable losses notwithstanding), thanks in no small part to the inspired efforts of its translators. In this course, we will learn to hear the voices they have made available to English-language readers, often comparing multiple translations of a single poem or referring to the original in opposing-page editions. We will read selections from at least 12 poets translated from seven languages, including: Cavafy, Valéry, Rilke, Trakl, Pessoa, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Cernuda, Montale, and Celan.

The distinction between human and animal is foundational in Latin American cultural and political history, as well as in its contemporary social and political discourse, informing issues from national identity and citizenship to disputes over land and resources. In this class, we will look at how the figure of the animal informs, complicates, and subverts the nature/culture dichotomy as seen in literature and film. We will analyze how different figurations of the relationship between human and animal register shifting hierarchies of race, class, and gender in stories by the likes of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, and Julio Cortázar, as well as in films such as La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel) and Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)—paying special attention to alignments/alliances between the animal and other subjects marginalized because of their race, gender, sexuality, and class. This course will introduce students to animal studies and ecocriticism through a survey of 20th century-21st century Latin American literature and film.

The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included writing a postwar manual for the Army, called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. In much American poetry, the consequences of this project of domination are unseen. As is often not true elsewhere, the prison is seen (or unseen) from the point of view of the free. This course looks for the traces of this project of domination and asks what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the free from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it’s meant to be a poet elsewhere? Why hasn’t that been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? What might the poetry be that comes from it? Our text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nazim Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. You’ll be asked to do in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, and bring drafts to conference. Each term, you’ll be required to make an anthology and a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, we’ll look together for “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet”—aka “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.”