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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought

What allows us to make assumptions about people based on the way they speak or dress? How can we understand the deeper meaning of a fairy tale or an episode of The Simpsons? What does macaroni and cheese mean, and why is it not on the menu at most upscale Manhattan eateries? This seminar introduces semiotics, the study of signs and the meaning-bearing sign systems they form; sign systems that include not only human language but also literature, painting, sculpture, film, music, dance and also such aspects of popular culture as advertising, fashion, food, and television, to name just a few. The diversity of semiotic systems provides many possibilities for thinking and writing critically about the world we live in.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1114 - FWS: Semiotics

In this class, students will learn about animal welfare and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion, farm, and lab animals in conjunction with human cultures, politics, and geography. The course will cover various animal species in fiction films, documentaries, and animated movies. In some motion pictures, animals will be central, in other more peripheral. Students will learn how to compose a film review, assess sources, and write a critical essay. The class includes guest speakers and a field trip to Cornell Teaching & Research Barns. All films are digital for students to watch in their free time

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ROMS 1120 - FWS: Animals in Global Cinema

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

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

For more than two centuries, revolutions have marked the rhythm of modernity. In 1780, the original meaning of revolution - an astronomical rotation - was transformed in order to apprehend a social and political overthrow. This course will investigate the multiple uses of this crucial concept of political theory, from the revolutionary canon (Blanqui, Marx, Fanon...) to the classics of conservatism (Maistre, Cortés, Schmitt...), which depict contemporary history as a conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, socialist and fascist revolutions. We will explore the connections between history and theory, and stress the global dimension of revolutions, forged by a permanent transfer of ideas and people from one continent to another.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ROMS 4650 - Revolution: An Intellectual History

This practicum is designed to better enable the TAs to meet the needs of their students in the understanding and acquisition of the linguistic forms, notions, and functions covered in their course.

Full details for ROMS 5080 - Pedagogy Practicum

Designed to give insight into how to formulate projects, conduct research, and publish one's work, the colloquium offers a venue for faculty-graduate student dialogue in a collegial, intellectual setting.  Meetings are biweekly, 2-3 hours, and are open to all students and faculty in Romance Studies, but required for first year students in the program.  Each meeting, two faculty members will be invited to discuss their scholarship and also a short text of their choice, to be distributed beforehand.

Full details for ROMS 6100 - Romance Studies Colloquium

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Hervé Guibert, Pepe Espáliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

Full details for ROMS 6224 - Beauty, Grief

This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

Full details for ROMS 6324 - Writing for the Public: Adapting Academic Work for a General Audience

For more than two centuries, revolutions have marked the rhythm of modernity. In 1780, the original meaning of revolution - an astronomical rotation - was transformed in order to apprehend a social and political overthrow. This course will investigate the multiple uses of this crucial concept of political theory, from the revolutionary canon (Blanqui, Marx, Fanon...) to the classics of conservatism (Maistre, Cortés, Schmitt...), which depict contemporary history as a conflict between revolutions and counter-revolutions, socialist and fascist revolutions. We will explore the connections between history and theory, and stress the global dimension of revolutions, forged by a permanent transfer of ideas and people from one continent to another.

Full details for ROMS 6650 - Revolution: An Intellectual History

FREN 1210-FREN 1220 is a two-semester sequence.  FREN 1210 is the first 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 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 develop their writing skills by writing and editing compositions.  Readings are varied and include literary texts.  Daily preparation and active participation are required.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 1210 - 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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

This course is specifically designed for premed students and students at large with an interest in medical related topics who wish to be better equipped with language skills that will enable them to convey more empathy and multicultural sensitivity while communicating with diverse patient populations throughout the Francophone world.  This course aims as well to prepare students to engage in global health equity and promote awareness of language barriers in today's medical field, both domestically and abroad. This is a mid-intermediate level course, and as such, it will continue to develop and reinforce writing, reading, speaking, listening and presentational skills via an array of communicative tasks based on real-life situations.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 2070 - Medical French

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

The palace of Versailles has been an object of fascination for over three hundred years.  A place of splendor and squalor Versailles has been identified with French culture as the epitome of elegance and grace from Louis XIV to Karl Lagerfeld.  It has also been the scene of scandal and tragedy.  This course will examine the importance the reality and mythology of Versailles has played across the centuries and across the world.  We will examine the construction, the art, architecture, garden construction music and social history of the palace and its place both in Absolutist France and in our contemporary world.  Using movies, reproductions or art and architecture as well as revealing the secrets of its sexual politics and murderous plots we will attempt to understand why the fascination of the greatest of all palaces continues to draw millions of visitors each year trying to discover its grandeur and decadence.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for FREN 2270 - Versions of Versailles

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course adopts an interdisciplinary lens to reflect on how we can think difference productively in our current global condition, through examining some of the challenges that traditionally normative legislative systems (French secularism, shari'a laws in Francophone muslim countries) come up against when faced with increasingly multi-ethnic and pluralistic societies. We will examine a wide array of contemporary issues in the French metropole and the Francophone sphere, as well as their particular histories. Combining an interdisciplinary approach, we will look at a set of current events, legislations, and public debates, such as the burqa ban, terrorism, the same-sex marriage debate (marriage pour tous), and immigration 'queston'.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 2692 - Thinking Difference in the 21st Century

Part theory, part textual analysis, and part creative writing, this course aims to help students develop a richer, more nuanced understanding and command of both the spoken and written language. As students refine their understanding of style and learn techniques for characterizing stylistic varieties, they apply these concepts both to the reading of a singular (and yet very plural) literary text. Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style, and to the writing of new exercices de style of their own. We also consider the relevance of stylistics to translation and of translation to Queneau's text.  Seminar-style participation in class discussions and activities is expected.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3120 - French Stylistics

The concept of "intellectual" - the writer or scholar who takes a political commitment - was born in France at the end of the nineteenth century. From the Dreyfus Affaire to the recent polemics on French "identity," passing through Vichy, the Algerian War and May 68, intellectuals established a symbiotic relationship between culture and politics, becoming a sort of national brand, object of both admiration and contempt outside of the country. The aim of this course is to revisit some crucial moments of this history, focusing on different attempts to define the nature and function of the intellectual, from Emile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Simone de Beavoir to Michel Foucault.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3460 - Intellectuals: A French History

Literature offers valuable perspectives on medicine and the human body that help us focus on the humanity of the individual who is the object of medical interventions. This focus often occurs as a result of carefully chosen languages that can be seen as constituting a poetics of the body. In this course, we will examine the poetics of the body in a range of literary, philosophical, and scientific works. We will explore how literary authors revise or rework medical representations of the body and of the individual in order to evoke the value and complexity of the human body.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 3525 - Bodies in Medicine

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for FREN 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

The course is a survey of Feminist Islamic thinkers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and their diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur'anic surats/hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradion of qur'anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Readings might include: Fatema Mernissi, Asmaa Lamrabet, Qasim Amin, Naguib Mahfoud, Assia Djebar, Mona Eltahawy, and Nawal El-Saadawi.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 3685 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

This course will introduce students to the contemporary ecofeminist theories which are being developed in the francophone world today in parallel with the analysis of different case studies, using literary, philosophical, scientific French and Francophone works. The course seeks to look at some of the engendered frameworks that have led to political, sociological and ecological impasses and explores how solutions to ethical, environmental and economical problems may require a feminist perspective. The goal of the course is to open a dialogue between these works, as they represent, symbolize, translate the so-called "universal" knowledge of the Western World and the emerging "situated knowledges of the "Other Non Western World."

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3750 - Ecofeminisms and Wonder Stories in the Francophone World

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French "memory" of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 3840 - Occupied France Through Film

Western modernity and humanism have been the target of decisive critique over the past decades in philosophy and theory.  But these trends are not contemporary in any simple sense; they have strange affinities with the premodern modes of writing and thinking put forth in the Essays (1580-95) of Michel de Montaigne. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of Montaigne by rereading the Essays in dialogue with influential philosophers and theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway.  While studying Montaigne's untimely place in intellectual history, we will examine related aesthetic modes and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essay resonates with posthumanist styles and questions in ecological thought, philosophy, politics, and indigenous studies.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4140 - Thinking With Montaigne: The Essays in The History of Philosophy and Theory

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4190 - Special Topics in French Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4290 - Honors Work in French

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

The course will propose a parallel reading of some of the most famous texts of romantic literature with texts less known in order to develop and challenge both the canon of literary history but also to extend the field of romantic studies beyond purely literary concerns and geographies. Taking as a starting point Harold Bloom's famous definition of Romanticism as "the internalization of romance, particularly of the quest" we propose to scrutinize some of these canonical works. Texts to be read could include Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir, Germaine de Staël's Corinne ou l'Italie, Chateaubriand's Atala, Flora Tristan PéIrégrinations d'une noir, George Sand's Indiana, Suzanne Voilquin, Mémoires d une fille du peuple en Egypte, Louise Michel's L'ère nouvelle.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 4745 - Romantic Quests, Imperial Conquests

Western modernity and humanism have been the target of decisive critique over the past decades in philosophy and theory.  But these trends are not contemporary in any simple sense; they have strange affinities with the premodern modes of writing and thinking put forth in the Essays (1580-95) of Michel de Montaigne. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of Montaigne by rereading the Essays in dialogue with influential philosophers and theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway.  While studying Montaigne's untimely place in intellectual history, we will examine related aesthetic modes and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essay resonates with posthumanist styles and questions in ecological thought, philosophy, politics, and indigenous studies.

Full details for FREN 6140 - Thinking With Montaigne: The Essays in The History of Philosophy and Theory

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Édouard Glissant (1928-2011).  We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought. 

Full details for FREN 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6390 - Special Topics in French Literature

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Hervé Guibert, Pepe Espáliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

Full details for FREN 6424 - Beauty, Grief

This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small groups.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 1110 - Elementary Italian In Rome I

The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest one in all of Europe, dating back to 200 B. C., and the authors of some of the most important twentieth century works of Italian literature are Jewish. In this course we will examine how some of these writers (Moravia, Bassani, Primo Levi, Carlo Levi, Ginzburg, Sereni, Bruck, Loewenthal, Janaczek, Elkann and Pipermo) have articulated the self against the background of the historical events that have shaped the past hundred years; two world wars and different social movements of the pre- and post- WWII eras. This seminar includes two film screenings.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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

This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all the language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small groups.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 1120 - Elementary Italian In Rome II

ITAL 1201 is a fast-paced, introductory-level course, designed for students with no previous knowledge of Italian.  Students will be guided in developing four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in the context of everyday topics (school, housing, travel personal preferences, simple exchanges about past, future and possible events, etc.).  They will also be introduced to culturally acceptable modes of oral and written communication in Italian, some fundamentals of Italian history, and select current social and political issues.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 1201 - Italian I

This is an all-skills course designed to improve speaking and reading ability, establish a groundwork for correct writing, and provide a substantial grammar review.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2110 - Italian Intermediate Composition and Conversation I in Rome

This course provides a review of composition, reading, pronunciation, and grammar review, as well as guided practice in conversation.  It emphasizes the development of accurate and idiomatic expression in the language.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2130 - Italian Intermediate Composition and Conversation II in Rome

An intermediate-level course that aims to further develop intercultural, reading, listening, speaking, and writing abilities.   Students will be guided in perfecting their communications skills, improving their cultural proficiency, and developing a critical eye toward printed and visual material drawn from literature, history, politics, 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 parts of contemporary novels.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2201 - Italian III

This course aims to introduce students to Italian literature mainly through readings in prose and poetry from the 20th and 21st century. The course includes significant practice in grammar, vocabulary building, and composition. Course Topic: Living Together in a multicultural society. Our principal reading will be Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio, a 2006 award-winning novel by Algerian-Italian writer Amara Lakhous who came to Italy in 1995 as a political refugee; with this novel, he invites Italian readers to examine their 21st-century reality through the eyes of the immigrant.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2203 - Languages-Literatures-Identities

In this class we will trace the genre of the mystery story in Italy from Pinocchio (the mystery of who or what qualifies as a human being) through the 20th century across Italian art, literature, and cinema.  works by Carlo Collodi and Leonardo Sciascia will be featured along with classic cinema from Italy in order to answer a question that haunts Italian culture: who is the puppet and who is the master?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ITAL 2290 - Italian Mysteries

This course, offered in Romance Studies in the Italian Section, is meant for students who have no prior knowledge of Machiavelli, political science, or for that matter the Renaissance.  It is both an introduction to one of the greatest political thinkers of the modern period, the father for many of what has come to be called political science, and a chance to reflect upon why it is that no thinker has been more cited or called upon in the last decade.  Whether it be on questions of populism or the effects of climate change how people are governed, Machiavelli seems to speak to us directly in ways that few others do.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ITAL 3600 - Machiavelli, Yesterday and Today

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for ITAL 4190 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ITAL 4290 - Honors in Italian Literature

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Hervé Guibert, Pepe Espáliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

Full details for ITAL 6224 - Beauty, Grief

In this seminar, dedicated to a close reading of Dante's Commedia (1321), we will consider how Dante's poem explores such issues as: the search for language adequate to convey experience surpassing human comprehension; the creation of a narrating "I"; the education of the reader; the relation between truth and enterprise; the redemptive potential of art (and its ability to deceive as well as to enlighten and console): the call to bear witness, both to life and to loss.

Full details for ITAL 6270 - Dante's Commedia

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for ITAL 6390 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

In this course, students will work on their four language skills: listing, speaking, reading, and writing as well as cultural competence. We will focus on practical communication. The instructor uses communicative language teaching (CLT) with an emphasis on structured input.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for POLSH 1131 - Elementary 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 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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for POLSH 2033 - Intermediate Polish I

This course introduces students with no knowledge of Portuguese and with limited or no knowledge of Spanish to the Lusophone (Portuguese speaking) world.  Emphasis is given to the development of language skills (e.g., speaking, listening, reading, and writing), as well as the appreciation and awareness of Global Portuguese-speaking cultures, prompting students to make comparisons to their own culture.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for PORT 1210 - Elementary Portuguese I

This is an intensive introductory course for those who are native/near native speakers of Spanish.  Emphasis will be given in the development of the four skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), as well as the appreciation and awareness of Portuguese-speaking cultures.  Students will engage with a broad range of topics related to Afro-Luso-Brazilian culture through art (e.g., painting, theater, cinema, literature, photography, dance sculpture, etc).

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

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 for 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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1120 - Elementary Spanish: Review and Continuation

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 1210 students may take SPAN 1120 (fall) or SPAN 1220 (spring).

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1210 - Elementary Spanish I

SPAN 1230 is the third course in the Spanish language sequence. It is designed to help students progress from the "novice high" level to the "intermediate mid" level in speaking, listening, reading and writing.  The course is structured around four thematic units: fashion and art; the natural world; personal relationships; and health. In each unit, we will learn the vocabulary and grammar constructions that are necessary to talk about the unit's topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the skill of giving and defending opinions. Throughout the semester, we will discuss and analyze a wide variety of art from the Hispanic world, including songs, fashion, visual arts, TV shows, films, performance art, newspaper articles, documentaries, film shorts and podcasts. The overall goal of this course is to develop students' ability to comprehend authentic materials in Spanish and formulate nuanced opinions about those materials.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

This innovative course focuses on basic oral communication in Spanish. 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 1502 - Conversational Skills for Spanish in Global Contexts

Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2070 - Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions

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 2095.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop

This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call "Spain." Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generación '98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine español and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2230 - Perspectives on Spain

This course offers a broad introduction to modern and contemporary Spanish culture of the late 19 - early 21 centuries. Throughout the semester we will examine key works from various cultural genres, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, including film, painting, photography, poetry, documentary, newsreels, theater, and architecture, with the main objective being to explore diverse perspectives that are all unique to the ever-evolving place we call "Spain." Additional topics of study include: empire and nation-state formation, Generación '98, intellectual literary and artistic movements, architectural movements and styles, dictatorship and democracy, folklore and tradition, Catholicism, fascism, revolutionary aesthetics, the politics of censorship, modernization, la Apertura, counter-cultural movements (such as the NCE-nuevo cine español and La movida), gender and identity, Francoism, nationalisms and regionalisms, and the politics of Historical Memory.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for SPAN 2235 - Perspectives on Spain in Spanish

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 Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval "Spain." Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3539 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society

"Foreign in a domestic sense" is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called "Insular Cases" of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3675 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Documentaries are born out of the necessity to capture the real and to tell a truth.  When we watch documentaries, we tend to comfortably rely on that claim and, often, take what they teach us as indisputable evidence of what reality is.  In this course, we will put into questions the "reality" that documentaries portray-and the possibility itself of portraying reality-by discussing a selection of Latin American documentaries that raise important issues regarding the ethics and politics of representation. In our discussions, we will critically engage with the boundaries of the cinematic frame and debate the ethical responsibilities of the filmmaker, the value and the political and social impact of the image, the role of the spectator, and the implications of filming and being filmed by an "other".

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3710 - Latin American Documentary

This course aims at introducing students to the core elements of the thought, praxis and way of life of one of the key bastions of indigenous resistance in the New World since Columbus's arrival in 1492: South America's Andean region. We will study the region's key cultural categories, following Cuzqueñan poet and thinker Odi Gonzales's claim that any study of the region requires taking these categories as starting point. These include questions of time, space, life, death, society, religion, number, and gender. We will study how these categories are formed in tension, syncretism and co-transformation with other languages and cultures—especially Spanish—over centuries of colonial and neocolonial domination. Primary material examined include films, photography, drama, novels, poetry, testimonies, and religious texts.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 3760 - Thought, Praxis and Way of Life in South America's Andean Region

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

Full details for SPAN 4190 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for SPAN 4290 - Honors Work I

This course explores the relationship between food and culture in Latin America. It asks what we eat and why, and in what contexts. We will examine how colonialism and globalization have shifted consumption patterns in Latin America, as well as the environmental implications of different agricultural practices. Students will whet their appetites with a variety of literary texts, films, and images about food.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 4765 - Latin American Food Studies

What is literary creation? How does it relate to thinking, to doing, to being, to nothingness, to the cosmos?  What is its temporality, identity, spatiality/place?  What is literature's violence? Moreover, how do these questions relate to our sociopolitical realities,including questions of gender, class and race?  These are just a few problems that one of the greatest women writers (and thinkers) of the twentieth century, the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, invites us to pose anew.  In this course, we will dive deeply into her works, embracing the challenge of bridging the philosophical and the political through the literary, and doing so from the sociocultural complexities of twentieth-century Brazil.  Alongside reading her works, we will watch film adaptations and trace cultural, literary and philosophical resonances.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SPAN 4880 - Clarice Lispector: Philosophy, Politics and Literature

The publication of 2010 of The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, officially marked the consolidation of the "Affect Theory Turn," a turn triggered by the debates and discussions around a vast interdisciplinary corpus that challenged a view of the subject as individual and self-contained, as if focused on the intensities that pass between bodies and the "bindings and unbindings", becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements" they provoked. The Affect Reader 2, published in 2023 and edited by Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, raised new questions that considered both the potentialities and limitations of affect theory and how it has changed in the last decade.  This course takes these debates and questions and puts them in conversation with theoretical, literary, and artistic works that, grounded in Latin America, both challenge and expand our understanding of affect by introducing the cultural, linguistic, political, and social nuances of afecto.

Full details for SPAN 6180 - Affect-Afecto

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Hervé Guibert, Pepe Espáliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

Full details for SPAN 6224 - Beauty, Grief

Guided independent study of specific topics. For graduate students interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 6390 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval "Spain." Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.

Full details for SPAN 6539 - Islamic Spain: Culture and Society