181 - 190 of 246 results for: Literary history

This course will explore Cuba's intellectual currents and cultural objects from the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. How did different ideas about modernity, subjection, and revolution emerge and interact with one another in literary texts, visual artifacts, and legal documents throughout Cuban history? How does a conceptual history of these terms look like if we center the island's political, artistic, scientific, and religious movements? How does Cuba and its history inform our own ideas about freedom, slavery, and racial relations? While addressing these questions, we will also reflect on the island's past and present position in relation to other parts of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Atlantic world. Ultimately, this course aims to challenge and historicize the most common connotations attributed to modernity, subjection, and revolution by examining not only European-based philosophical thought, but also cultural objects and discourses produced within the specific contexts of Cuba and the Caribbean. Taught in Spanish.

Focus is on one of the most pivotal (and understudied) years of Iberian history, marked by the outbreak of both the Catalan Reaper's War and the Portuguese War of Restoration. Through primary sources including official documents, literary texts, and art, students will explore the causes, key events, and consequences of these interrelated conflicts. Of particular interest are the socio-political, cultural, and economic factors driving these uprisings, their impact on the broader European context, and their legacy in shaping modern Catalan and Portuguese nationhood. Authors include Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Alexandre de Ros, Francesc Fontanella, Luis de Gongora, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Francisco Quevedo, Jaume Romeu, Antonio de Saldanha, António de Sousa de Macedo, António Vieira, and Violante do Ceu. Readings in Catalan, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Taught in English.

The course involves a detailed reading of Don Quijote from a theoretical and historical perspective to explore the work's pivotal role in the development of the European realist novel. Special consideration is given to Early Modern literary theory, particularly to the commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics and the humanistic polemics on mimesis (imitation and the problem of the emulation of reality and truth in artifice), plus the history and reception of romance in Europe in the century prior to the publication of Don Quijote (1605). Close attention is paid to the interaction of Early Modern theory and moral philosophy in Don Quijote. The course will also introduce the student to the notion of Humanism, while seeking to present the major research sources in Spanish literature. In addition to looking back at the theoretical foundations of Don Quijote, we will also address its subsequent impact upon the later European novel. We will, in short, deal with the problematics of the rise of the realist novel just as students will read and compare several novels of their choosing from the later realist tradition.

Clarice Lispector and William Faulkner are often described as impossible to read: too elliptical, fragmented, or interior. Yet while Faulkner was canonized by American New Critics as a paradigmatic case for close reading, the Jewish Brazilian Lispector was dismissed by Brazil's nova critica for eluding formalist analysis. This course explores the challenges these authors pose to reading itself: how have they been read, misread, or left unread? And what models of reading do they themselves embed or theorize in their fiction? Pairing their works with key texts in the history of literary criticism, we will ask what close reading makes possible - and what it cannot grasp - when confronted with radically experimental prose.

This course addresses Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, writers and literary groups sought a renewal of national literatures through a dialogue with the European avant-garde. These constituted key movements in Latin American literary history that took place alongside the so-called "literary boom" in the sixties, a phenomenon that coincided with the Cuban revolution and political turmoils throughout the continent. We will contrast this artistic moment with the literary and political situation later in the century: after a decade marked by dictatorships in many different Latin American countries, the social, political, and cultural panorama were completely modified, and dystopian narratives arose in this context. Taught in Spanish.

The course offers a journey through Brazilian popular music of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore the origins and transformations of musical genres such as samba, chorinho, maracatu, forro, bossa nova, MPB, axe music, rap, and funk. We will follow the careers of some of the biggest names in Brazilian popular music. Among other things, we will study historical and sociological aspects of music, the relationship between popular culture and literary culture in Brazil, and the poetic aspects of some song lyrics. In addition to listening to music, the course requires the reading of some reference texts. All levels of Portuguese are welcome.

Focus is on one of the most pivotal (and understudied) years of Iberian history, marked by the outbreak of both the Catalan Reaper's War and the Portuguese War of Restoration. Through primary sources including official documents, literary texts, and art, students will explore the causes, key events, and consequences of these interrelated conflicts. Of particular interest are the socio-political, cultural, and economic factors driving these uprisings, their impact on the broader European context, and their legacy in shaping modern Catalan and Portuguese nationhood. Authors include Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Alexandre de Ros, Francesc Fontanella, Luis de Gongora, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Francisco Quevedo, Jaume Romeu, Antonio de Saldanha, António de Sousa de Macedo, António Vieira, and Violante do Ceu. Readings in Catalan, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Taught in English.

A border is a force of containment that inspires dreams of being overcome, crossed, and cursed; motivates bodies to climb over walls; and threatens physical harm. This graduate seminar places into comparative dialogue a variety of perspectives from Chicana/o and Mexican/Latin American literary studies. Our seminar will examine fiction and cultural productions that range widely, from celebrated Mexican and Chicano authors such as Carlos Fuentes (La frontera de cristal), Yuri Herrera (Señales que precederan al fin del mundo), Willivaldo Delgaldillo (La Virgen del Barrio Árabe), Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexico-Texan Novel), Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza), and Sandra Cisneros (Carmelo: Puro Cuento), among others, to musicians whose contributions to border thinking and culture have not yet been fully appreciated such as Herb Albert, Ely Guerra, Los Tigres del Norte, and Café Tacvba. Last but not least, we will screen and analyze Orson Welles' iconic border films Touch of Evil and Rodrigo Dorfman's Los Sueños de Angélica. Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of the US-Mexico border literary and cultural studies, this seminar links the work of these authors and musicians to struggles for land and border-crossing rights, anti-imperialist forms of trans-nationalism, and to the decolonial turn in border thinking or pensamineto fronterizo. It forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production and negative aesthetics especially in our age of (late) post-industrial capitalism. Taught in English.

The rise of clerical culture in thirteenth-century Iberia has yet to receive the attention that it fully deserves, especially in its social and political context. Spanish cultural history has often subordinated the manifestations of clerical culture to a sort of narrow, text-bound philology, generally disregarding its intellectual matter, its social matrix, and its clear ties to a broader European academic milieu, preferring to privilege largely literary forms of cultural expression. With few exceptions the larger cultural importance of the mester de clerecia in thirteenth century Iberia has been met mostly with indifference. Yet the period in which the mester de clerecia flourished is one of intense scholarly curiosity and exploration in all fields of culture, especially religion, politics, science, and philosophy, and marks an awakening of enormous interest in all things, leading to the production of vast bodies of new knowledge, all of which presents two problems: one, the moral efficacy and legitimacy of that knowledge; and two, the cultivation of methods for categorizing, organizing, analyzing, and using it. On the one hand, the discovery of new knowledge produced an age of taxonomies, archives, tools, and methodologies for dealing with and using it; and on the other, it triggered anxieties and set off philosophical and theological polemics and disputes that both emphasized and questioned the very ability of knowledge to know what it claimed to know. In this course, we will examine how the mester de clerecia, especially through the vernacular Libro de Alexandre (The Book of Alexander the Great) brings to its Castilian audience the scholarly ethical and political problematic that points to the mester's links with the cosmopolitan world of the universities, European statecraft, clerks and the affairs of the royal court, especially in relation to nascent imperial ambitions in Castile in the persons of Kings Ferdinand III and Alfonso X. Anchored in the historical moment that coincides with the rise of Castilian imperial ambitions, the very politics of empire and the role played by knowledge and power in relation to the Libro de Alexandre reveal the tension that structured the on-going debate in European learned circles regarding the newly emergent strength and place of human reason, the nature of divine revelation, and the exercise of worldly imperial sovereignty.