Courses

We tell stories for many reasons: to entertain; to seduce; to complain; to think. This course draws upon the literatures and cultures of the romance languages to explore the role of narrative in our construction and understanding of the world.

Full details for ROMS 1102 - FWS: The Craft of Storytelling

What is a culture, and how do we know one when we see it?  This course draws upon the histories and texts of French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Portuguese speaking worlds to discuss issues of identity, difference, politics, place, and community.

Full details for ROMS 1108 - FWS:Cultural Identities/Cultural Differences

What kind of information do images - in photography, painting, and/or film - convey?  What kind of impact do they have on the minds and the bodies of their audiences?  This course foregrounds the role of visual culture in the societies where Spanish, French, Portuguese, and/or Italian is spoken, and it asks students to dwell upon how visual material interacts with spoken and written language.

Full details for ROMS 1109 - FWS: Image and Imagination

Some of the most important and intriguing thinkers, from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, have done their thinking in the romance languages.  This course explores a body of work that would be called philosophical by some, theoretical by others, and that, beyond these names, struggles to articulate fundamental concepts, problems, discourses, and situations.

Full details for ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought

This studio class will introduce students to a range of contemporary performance techniques in a Spanish context.  Through exercises, improvisation, textual analysis, and scene study, students will develop core acting skills, learn relevant Spanish theatre terminology, and enhance their self-expression in Spanish.  Students will also explore the dramatic and theatrical potential of short Spanish literary texts adapted for the stage.  The course will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

Full details for ROMS 2901 - Spanish Performance Studio: RVVR Caberet Literario

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Full details for ROMS 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

The search for the active, good, or just life has increasingly come under pressure by the socio-political and economic conditions in late Capitalism or, in Deleuze's term, the "society of control." The individual and society seem to not flourish but disintegrate. In this class, we will examine interdisciplinary scholarly work and literary texts dealing with various concepts used to critically engage with the current state, among them: speed, rest and restlessness, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, weariness, intensity, and burnout. Authors include: Ottessa Moshfegh, Kathrin Röggla, Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jonathan Crary, Kathi Weeks.

Full details for ROMS 3512 - No Rest: The Exhausted Self

The most intense public encounter between Existentialism and Marxism occurred in immediate post-WWII Europe, its structure remaining alive internationally. Existentialist questions have been traced from pre-Socratic thinkers through Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes onward; just as roots of modern materialism extend to Epicurus and Lucretius, or Leopardi. This course will focus on differing theories and concomitant practices concerned with "alienation," "anxiety," "crisis," "death of God," "nihilism," "rebellion or revolution." Crucial are possible relations between fiction and non-fiction; also among philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Other authors may include: Althusser, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Büchner, Camus, Che, Dostoevsky, Fanon, Genet, Gide, Gramsci, O. Gross, Hamsun, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, C.L.R. James, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lagerkvist, Lacan, Lenin, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Mishima, G. Novack, Nietzsche, Ortega, Pirandello, W. Reich, Sartre, Shestov, Tillich, Unamuno. There is also cinema.

Full details for ROMS 4210 - Existentialism or Marxism

Focuses on language teaching as facilitation of learning, thus on the learner's processing of language acquisition and the promotion of reflective teaching. Pedagogical approaches will be addressed from a learner-centered perspective involving effective language learning strategies and analysis.

Full details for ROMS 5070 - Methodology of Romance Language Learning and Teaching

This course takes as its starting point the thinking of address that emerges from the study of trauma, and explores how the notion of address (its failures, and its new possibilities) help us reconceptualize not only traumatic temporality and affect but the philosophical and theoretical frameworks bound up with them. We will open with a brief introduction on Sigmund Freud and move to three sections: on Jean-Francois Lyotard (selections from The Differend, "Emma," and "The Phrase Affect"), Emmanuel Levinas (selections from Otherwise than Being and "Philosophy and Awakening") and Paul de Man ("Autobiography as De-Facement," "Hypogram and Inscription," and "The Resistance to Theory"). Prominent Levinas, Lyotard, and trauma scholars will join the course for one class in each section.

Full details for ROMS 6559 - Theories of Address

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.  Daily preparations and active participation are required.

Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability; to establish a groundwork for correct writing; and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

This intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world.  The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business.  Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

Full details for FREN 2080 - French for Business

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment.  A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest.  Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world.  It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis.  Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema.  Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works.  Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre.  The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism tets, and will be conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film

Some celebrate the Enlightenment for its foundational precepts of liberty, reason, and progress, whereas others criticize it for entrenching exclusionary principles and promoting a totalizing worldview. As an intellectual movement prioritizing knowledge, freedom, and happiness, the Enlightenment ushers in revolutionary developments in art, science, literature, philosophy, and politics, yet many also condemn it as grounded in the West, and as failing to offer a voice to all. This course examines such underlying Enlightenment paradoxes through the varied perspectives of those reflecting upon it from different contexts, and as portrayed in the legends they construct. Close and comparative analysis of texts and visual culture will allow us to examine Enlightenment innovations in ideas as well as in literary forms, and to raise questions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. We will explore a range of different works to evaluate both the ideals and the flaws of the Enlightenment, as well as its ongoing legacies.

Full details for FREN 2600 - Legends of Enlightenment

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for FREN 3020 - French Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC)

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English.  The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres.  Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice

This course is conceived as a critical introduction to a cultural and political debate that appeared in the years of Mitterrand's France and reached its climax in the last decade.  It will focus on a French society deeply shaped by immigration and globalization.  In which way do the youth of the "banlieue" - mostly formed by postcolonial Blacks and Muslims - create their own culture with the French culture?  How have literature, essays, movies, documentary films, "national identity" carried on by governments reacted to these transformations?  Selecting literary texts (by Maryse Condé, Zahia Rahmani, Adb El Malik) and other cultural productions, the course will explore the new expressions of France as an "imagined community".

Full details for FREN 3400 - French Identities: 21st Century Culture and Society in France

This course focuses on after life, survival, death, memory narratives, liminal spaces, memorial traces and indigenous memory, by writers and visual artists from the Francophone world presented through the history of colonization, the slave trade, the decolonization movements and Postcolonialism in several areas such as the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Quebec and Lebanon. The diversity of Francophone cultures and voices will be mostly explored around issues of trauma, remembrance and forgetting, anamnesis and creolization of memory.

Full details for FREN 3660 - Looking Back: The Poetics of Remembrance in the Francophone Imaginary

Assia Djebar famously described the Algeria of the 1990s – immersed in the décennie noire's civil war – as a "blank territory" where violence "immured" an entire Nation "in an untranslatability exacerbated by Western media coverage" (Apter). Space, literature and memory collided once again in Djebar's literary project in order to resist aesthetically political sheer violence hic et nunc – "here and now." Focusing on North African cross-cultural legacies with Arabic, French, Berber and Hebrew languages, this seminar will consider key notions such as deterritorialization, disjunctive temporality (Benjamin), hybridity, multidirectional memory (Rothberg), opacity (Glissant), plurality (Khatibi), Postcolonialism, postmemory (Hirsch), repair (Attia), spectrality (Derrida), trauma, and untranslatability to critically understand how Maghrebian authors have undertaken to reclaim their cultural memory beyond the remnants of colonialism by elaborating what we will call aesthetic résistances (Rancière).

Full details for FREN 4030 - Multidirectional Maghreb

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

From 1857 up to 1870, a series of bodily seizures erupted in Morzine, a village in the Alps. They affected first adolescent girls, and then many women and some men. The crisis was attributed successively to sorcery, demonic possession of hysteria, and spiritualism. Should we interpret these trances as a clash between tradition and modernity? Did they display a female revolt? Analyzing what some have called the question of "evil," this course will investigate the transformations and fears in nineteenth century French society. Today, hysteria and possession still remain a source of inspiration for both artists and scholars. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of cultural and historical anthropology, we will explore their posterity in cinema and novels, as well as in psychology, psychoanalysis and feminist writings.

Full details for FREN 4225 - Denomic Possession or Hysteria

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Full details for FREN 4350 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

Assia Djebar famously described the Algeria of the 1990s – immersed in the décennie noire's civil war – as a "blank territory" where violence "immured" an entire Nation "in an untranslatability exacerbated by Western media coverage" (Apter). Space, literature and memory collided once again in Djebar's literary project in order to resist aesthetically political sheer violence hic et nunc – "here and now." Focusing on North African cross-cultural legacies with Arabic, French, Berber and Hebrew languages, this seminar will consider key notions such as deterritorialization, disjunctive temporality (Benjamin), hybridity, multidirectional memory (Rothberg), opacity (Glissant), plurality (Khatibi), Postcolonialism, postmemory (Hirsch), repair (Attia), spectrality (Derrida), trauma, and untranslatability to critically understand how Maghrebian authors have undertaken to reclaim their cultural memory beyond the remnants of colonialism by elaborating what we will call aesthetic résistances (Rancière).

Full details for FREN 6030 - Multidirectional Maghreb

Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest.

Full details for FREN 6300 - French Reading for Graduates

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Full details for FREN 6350 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the literature of perversion (sadism, masochism, fetishism), with readings drawn from major texts of the libertine or S/M traditions (Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Lautréamont, Réage, Flanagan), as well as recent works of philosophy that share with these writers an investment in what I will term "writing the real."  We will consider works of perversion not merely as literary or clinical cases, therefore, but as illuminating how the discourse of perversion, broadly understood, posits or constructs the real-its cases or modes of postulation or figuration.  We will focus our attention on three modes of construction that purport to straddle the alleged gap between language and its real-figure, fetish, and formalization-considering in each case their relation to the problematic of the drive.  In addition to the authors mentioned above, readings will include selections from Badiou, Freud, Deleuze, Ferenczi, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Meillassoux, Perniola, and Zizek.

Full details for FREN 6580 - The Case of the Perversions

Full details for ITAL 1113 - FWS: Writing Italy, Writing the Self: Jewish-Italian Lit and the Long 20th Century

This is a fast-paced, introductory course designed for students with some basic knowledge of the language.  This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small and large groups.  Interactive lectures cover grammar and cultural information.

Full details for ITAL 1202 - Italian II

The aim of this course is to help students familiarize themselves with one of the most important, and world-renowned aspects of Italian culture, or rather "La Cucina Italiana". This course will combine different language learning approaches like grammar and audio/oral activities such as video clips, role play activities in class, interviews regarding food topics, etc., as well as some "hand-on" lessons. Class will alternate grammar and conversation lessons, while adding a few practical cooking activities that will focus on recipes and traditions that characterize different geographical regions of Italy.

Full details for ITAL 1212 - Italian Food Culture

An intensive elementary Italian language course. This 6-credit course covers material presented in ITAL 1201 and ITAL 1202 in just one semester. It's offered to students who cannot study Italian in the Fall, but can only do it in the Spring semester.

Full details for ITAL 1401 - Intensive Elementary Italian

An intermediate-level course that aims to further develop intercultural, reading, listening, speaking, and writing abilities in ITAL 2201. Students will be guided in perfecting their communication skills, improving their cultural proficiency, and developing a critical eye toward printed and visual material drawn from literature, history, politics, science, and arts in the Italophone world. Conversation skills will be practiced in daily discussions and in individual or group projects and presentations. A variety of written assignments will help students increase the range, accuracy, and stylistic appropriateness of their writing. Review of select grammar topics is part of this course, as is reading a short contemporary novel.

Full details for ITAL 2202 - Italian IV

This course, which is at the core of the major and minor in Italian, is designed to give students a basic grounding in some of the most important facets of Italian culture, including cinema, literature, art, and food.  Students will trace the development of Italian national identity in literary and cinematic texts as well as across Italian photography and cuisine.  Readings will include selections from the works of Primo Levi, Roberto Saviano, and Leonardo Sciascia.  Students will also view films by directors such as Rossellini, de Sica, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Sergio Leone, becoming familiar along the way with genres in Italian national cinema.  By the end of the semester, students will have a working knowledge of the effects of geographic and national fragmentation on political life in post-Risorgimento Italy, understand the so-called Southern Question and the fraught relationship between the Italian South and wealthier Northern regions, and gain different perspectives on political life today in Italy.

Full details for ITAL 2204 - The Cinematic Eye of Italy

This course serves as an introduction to the close reading of, and critical engagement with, a range of sources from various periods of Italian literary and cultural history.  In fact, since Italy doesn't really cohere as a political entity until late in the nineteenth century, this course could just as easily be called Perspectives in Pre-Italian Culture.  The questions of perspective-of who's looking, what's being looked at, and what we're  looking through-will haunt our readings from sources as varied as Dante's Commedia, the reception history of St. Francis of Assisi, medieval visionary women, Michelangelo's love lyrics, the novel (e.g. Moravia), the short story (e.g. Celati), film, and political philosophy.  We'll pay special attention to the way in which desire, pleasure, excess, and resistance structure the articulation of Italian-or more local, frequently urban-identities, and we'll attempt too grapple with how, even as we get a kind of perspective on Italy, Italy always looks back at us with questions, desires, and a gaze of its own.

Full details for ITAL 2900 - Perspectives in Italian Culture

Full details for ITAL 3020 - Italian Practicum

This course is dedicated to studying important works of literature that address what it means, in the Renaissance, to strive for excellence as a man or as a woman, especially in the public sphere.

Full details for ITAL 3580 - Creating Renaissance Man (and Woman)

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for ITAL 4200 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for ITAL 4300 - Honors in Italian Literature

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for ITAL 6400 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

In this course, students work on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also develop their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra! Po polsku 1" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 0-9. If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 1131 - Elementary Polish I

In this course, students work on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also develop their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra! Po polsku 1" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 10-20. If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 1132 - Elementary Polish II

Eastern Europe has contributed unique films to the global cinema. In this class, students will watch, discuss, and write about a variety of movies: Oscar winners and lesser-known films, thrillers and comedies. Our films come from Poland, Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan etc. In addition to learning film terminology, students will have the opportunity to become acquainted with the cultures, history, and geography of Eastern Europe. They will write film reviews, do research on the topic of their choice, and write a research assignment. All class films are available for streaming through Blackboard for students to watch them in their free time.

Full details for POLSH 1301 - FWS: East European Film

In this course, students continue working on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish.  Students will also enhance their intercultural competency.  The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input.  Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra!  Po polsku 2" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries.  This class covers chapters 1-10.  If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 2033 - Intermediate Polish I

In this course, students continue working on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish.  Students will also enhance their intercultural competency.  The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input.  Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra!  Po polsku 2" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries.  This class covers chapters 11-20.  If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 2034 - Intermediate Polish II

In this class, students master their language skills: oral communication, listening and reading comprehension as well as creative and formal writing.  Students also deepen their cultural competence.  Classroom discussions include issues of contemporary Poland and various aspects of Polish culture.  Students have writing assignments and one oral presentation in class.

Full details for POLSH 2103 - Advanced Polish I

PORT 2010-2020 is a full year course intended for students who have already taken the first level of Portuguese, or as an intensive introductory course for those who are native/near native speakers of Spanish.  An all-skills course with particular emphasis on Brazilian Portuguese spoken within the contexts of its culture, it presents a fast-paced review focused on improving grammatical accuracy, pronunciation and on enriching vocabulary.

Full details for PORT 2010 - Intermediate Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers I

Intended for students who have already taken the first level of Portuguese, or as an intensive introductory course for those who are native/near native speakers of Spanish.* An all-skills course with particular emphasis on Brazilian Portuguese spoken within the contexts of its culture, it presents a fast-paced review focused on improving grammatical accuracy, pronunciation and on enriching vocabulary.

Full details for PORT 2020 - Intermediate Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers II

This course provides an introduction and overview of Brazilian culture. It will study different periods of Brazilian history, through the analysis of films, literature, essays, visual arts, and music. Students will explore different definitions of Brazilian identity and "Brazilianness" focusing on key topics including the formation of the colonial Brazil  and the emergence of the nation of Brazil as a tropical paradise; slavery and abolition; the particularities century; and the contradictions of the modernization process throughout the 20th century. We will consider elements of Brazilian popular culture such as Carnival, Samba, and "telenovels," and some of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century, such as "Modernismo," "Cinema Novo," and "Tropicalia." The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the relevant background to understand Brazilian cultural history.

Full details for PORT 2800 - Perspectives on Brazil

This course provides intermediate level students with the opportunity to advance their oral and written fluency, proficiency, and understanding of the grammar of Portuguese. In addition, students will be introduced to several cultural aspects of the Lusophone world, including regionalisms of Portuguese language. This goal will be achieved with the aid of literary and journalistic texts. Students will be expected to give individual and group presentations, as well as to write short pieces in the target language. The course is tailored to bridge language learning and content-based courses and research in Portuguese.  

Full details for PORT 3100 - Advanced Portuguese I

We will focus on writers from Argentina and Brazil whose work is reshaping both the national and the continental canon.  Taking into account different kinds of narrative writing-from personal diaries to short stories and novels-we will explore topics such as the monstrous side of motherhood and childhood: issues of gender, class, and race; and the tension between rural and urban spaces.  We will also analyze how women writers have been powerful innovators in narrative modes and genres such as regionalism, testimonial literature, and the Latin American fantastic.  Some authors to be discussed are Carolina de Jesus, Clarice Lispector, Ana Paula Maia, Rachel de Queiroz, Aurora Venturini, Silvina Ocampo, Dolores Reyes, and Sara Gallardo.  Class will be conducted in Spanish; Spanish and Portuguese texts will be available.

Full details for PORT 3920 - Women's Writing in Brazil and Argentina

While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.

Full details for SPAN 1220 - Elementary Spanish II

The goal of this low-intermediate course is to achieve a higher level of comprehension as well as to advance oral and written expression in a cultural context. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in communicative and creative activities. Students engage in linguistic and literary analysis of texts to acquire new vocabulary, complete analytical exercises, and develop reading strategies. Students continue developing writing skills through composition, and review grammatical structures independently with some clarification by the instructor as needed. After this course, students may take SPAN 2000, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090.

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

Full details for SPAN 1305 - FWS:Narrating the Spanish Civil War

This innovative course focuses on oral communication in Spanish for students who will do special projects abroad or short term study abroad trips.  Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context.  It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.

Full details for SPAN 1501 - Strategies for Spanish Abroad

This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, SPAN 2170, or SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2090 - Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation)

This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country.  It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed. Check with the instructor if you intend to take this course concurrently with SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, or SPAN 2170.

Full details for SPAN 2095 - Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations.  Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence.  Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.

Full details for SPAN 2130 - Advanced Spoken Spanish

Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.

Full details for SPAN 2140 - Modern Spanish Survey

Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernández, Martí, Darío, Agustini, Cortázar, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.

Full details for SPAN 2150 - Contemporary Latin American Survey

This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.

Full details for SPAN 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey

This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course.  All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.

Full details for SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2200 - Perspectives on Latin America

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring.  Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area.  In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions.  Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2205 - Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish

This course examines the history of Chile from the 1700s to the present, always with an appreciation for its place in a broader world but always also with attention to its regional and national specificities and its links to the Pacific. Lectures will be paired with readings from various genres: fiction, poetry, journalism, manifestos, speeches, historical monographs, and short stories. The course includes an optional 1-credit 7 to 10 day trip to Chile during spring break.

Full details for SPAN 2715 - A Global South: Chile, the Pacific and the World

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for SPAN 3020 - Spanish Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC)

This course considers how the arts-through their many forms and platforms-give shape to the narratives of the past. It explores the various transformations of the rhetoric of social, political, and historical memory in Latin America, starting with works produced by writers of the Boom during the 60s and the 70s, and ending with more contemporary texts that bring the discussions of memory to the digital age. We will trace the development of these transformations by analyzing the tensions between memory and literary/cultural genres, and how these changes through engagement with different moments of political and social upheaval and with the development of new technologies. We will discuss how the discourses of class, race, and gender intervene in the production of memory, giving visibility to certain narratives of the past while rendering others-and the actors behind them-invisible. Lastly, we will also consider how the relationship between memory and the coming into being of a nation, particularly how the past intervenes in the production of collective imaginaries that shape territories and dictate who can and who cannot be a citizen.

Full details for SPAN 3270 - Shapes of the Past

In this course, we want to explore the links between politics and fiction in Latin America from different perspectives: narrative devices, philosophy, and cinema. We will focus on the role of sensibility, fantasy and fiction in building political narratives of Latin America; we will also explore how these narratives produce a visual dispositive that oscillates between colonial and emancipatory representations.  Some of the writers and directors to be studied are: Simón Rodriguez, José Carlos Mariátegui, Pablo Palacio, Ricardo Piglia, René Zavaleta Mercado, Jorge Sanjinés, Luis Ospina and Lucrecia Martel.

Full details for SPAN 3325 - Politics and Fiction in Latin America

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for SPAN 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

This course gives students an overview of some of the best-known movies of Latin American cinema, from the political films for the 1960's and 1970's such as Memories of Underdevelopment to more recent blockbusters in the 2000's such as Amores perros.  Film theory will accompany the discussion of screened movies.

Full details for SPAN 3900 - Latin American Film

We will focus on writers from Argentina and Brazil whose work is reshaping both the national and the continental canon.  Taking into account different kinds of narrative writing-from personal diaries to short stories and novels-we will explore topics such as the monstrous side of motherhood and childhood: issues of gender, class, and race; and the tension between rural and urban spaces.  We will also analyze how women writers have been powerful innovators in narrative modes and genres such as regionalism, testimonial literature, and the Latin American fantastic.  Some authors to be discussed are Carolina de Jesus, Clarice Lispector, Ana Paula Maia, Rachel de Queiroz, Aurora Venturini, Silvina Ocampo, Dolores Reyes, and Sara Gallardo.  Class will be conducted in Spanish; Spanish and Portuguese texts will be available.

Full details for SPAN 3920 - Women's Writing in Brazil and Argentina

This course examines how modern Spanish writers and doctors represented the human body as they grappled with disease and disability.  Reading fiction alongside medical and anthropological texts we will examine notions of the normal/abnormal, beautiful/ugly/ and healthy/infected as they change over time.  We also look at the ways in which these concepts are inflected by other identity categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and class.

Full details for SPAN 4020 - Reading the Body in Medicine and Fiction

Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 4200 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for SPAN 4300 - Honors Work in Spanish

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Full details for SPAN 4350 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

Experimental media surfacing from different corners of the Iberian Peninsula, since the emergence of the avant-garde to the Internet age, has a long-standing history of exploring new modes of sensory perception-the relationship between technology and emotion, vision and time, abstract forms and concrete effects.  In this course, we will study a range of audiovisual materials from photomontage and short animation, to surrealist cinema and video art.  As we move through different registers, the goal will be to study the language of media, its aesthetic relation to literary forms, and its connection to poetry and philosophy.  Prior knowledge of film and media studies is helpful but not required.  Some viewing scheduled for outside of regular class times.

Full details for SPAN 4520 - Experimental Screens:Mirrors, Memory, Media

Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.

Full details for SPAN 4540 - Moses Maimonides

In this course we will explore how Latin American science fiction and fantastic novels, graphic novels, short stories, and films from the modern and contemporary period have represented the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg. The aim is to reflect on what these representations tell us about the shifting notions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the region, and to analyze how these "weird" bodies are able to challenge binary constructions such as civilization/barbarism, nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, and body/mind, while creating spaces for emerging alternative communities. Some of the authors to be read are Mario Bellatin, Samanta Schweblin, Leonora Carrington, and Martin Felipe Castagnet.

Full details for SPAN 4895 - Cyborgs, Animals, and Monsters

The terms "Marx" and "Marxisms" have meant different things to different people, beginning with Marx himself and continuing in his legacy today.  As obviously, this legacy remains global (Europe, North and Latin America, India and Pakistan, Vietnam, Africa, Near East and Far East)—all still including imagined allies, neutrals, and foes.  This seminar is an approach to this otherwise bewildering complexity: we focus on two things: (1) a possible Marxist (or Communist or Anarchist) theory of all language and any semiotics; alongside (2) its equally possible inter-action with manuals of guerrilla warfare.

Full details for SPAN 6100 - Marx and Marxisms

What kinds of poetry might be usefully characterized as "postcolonial" and what are the stakes of such a designation? How common, variable, translatable are values deemed "postcolonial" for particular poetics across cultures? Is there such a thing as a transnational, transcultural, "Postcolonial Poetics?" What relation(s) do specific textual/poetic features or strategies have to geopolitical, cultural, historical, economic circumstances, and to the condition(s) of what has come to be called the "postcolonial" in particular? With special reference to Edouard Glissant's influential concept of a "poetics of relation," attending as well to our own situatedness as readers - perhaps also, though not necessarily, as writers - of poetry within U.S. (and) academic context(s), this seminar will focus on Caribbean poetry as an especially fruitful site for exploring a diversity of approaches to these and related questions concerning postcoloniality, poetry, community, language, culture, and identity.

Full details for SPAN 6350 - Postcolonial Poetry and the Poetics of Relation

Guided independent study for graduate students. For graduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 6400 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Latin American literature has produced some masterpieces of (post)apocalyptic narrative in the last decades, from Oesterheld's El Eternauta to Roberto Bolaño's 2666. In this seminar we will explore the literary, religious, and historical uderpinnings of this subgenre, going back to the Book of Revelations, and analyze the reasons behind its current popularity. We will discuss the political and social crises connected to apocalyptic narratives-from dictatorships to the current neoliberal order-; an important part of the seminar will be devoted to studying how the climate emergency in influencing these works.

Full details for SPAN 6850 - Apocalyptic Writing in Latin America

This seminar proposes two displacements regarding the study of Latin American essay.  We will not focus on the problem of nation but on the notion of republic, as an attempt to deconstruct the one-sided image of essays as "accomplices" of foundational domination national projects, in order to explore a struggle between an oligarchical republicanism and a plebeian republicanism.  Following the critical thought tradition, we will explore this struggle in terms of "dialectical images", working with texts from the 19th and 20th centuries-fiction and non-fiction-, in order to reveal a tragic dialectic between an oligarchic desire and a plebeian impulse, overcoming fossilized dichotomies (nationalism/cosmopolitism; avant-garde/traditionalism), from Sarmiento to Isaacs, Euclides da Cunha, Mariátegui, Gilberto Freyre, Silvina Ocampo, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui among others.

Full details for SPAN 6920 - Mottled Narratives: Latin American Essay