Spanish

The course provides students with specialised knowledge of language, literature, film and society in Spain or Latin America. It contains an independent thematic study in the area of Spanish-speaking culture. The course provides further practice in oral and written proficiency.

This five-week intensive Spanish course is geared for students with previous language study experience and aims to build on this foundation to develop further communicative skills. The lectures are divided into five units which cover one or more forms of grammar each week and are complemented with readings, exercises, games, and songs. Basic forms of grammar covered include: accentuation; gender/number agreement; review of ser and estar; reflexive verbs; perfect present; conditionals, past perfect; subjunctive; imperative; relative pronouns; por and para; future tense. Assessment is based on class participation and a final exam.

This course focuses on Spanish theater and dramatic literature. It examines the world of the theater: actors, producers, and the public; theatrical movements at the turn of the century; continuity and modernization; innovative playwrights and conceptual theater; tradition and avant-garde; the theater of "urgency" during the Civil War and the playwrights of exile; post-war theater, escapist conformity, and humor; the new realism; theater as spectacle and experiment; and new trends and "theatre groups."

This course examines the early linguistic development of the Spanish language, with special emphasis on the sociological and historic elements that have influenced this development. It covers the basics of diachronic linguistics, the evolution from Latin to hispanicized Latin to Romance to Spanish, the Germanic and Arabic substrata of Spanish, medieval Spanish and its linguistic affinity with other Romance languages, modern Spanish including major changes of the 15th to 17th centuries, and contemporary trends and variations in the Spanish language.

This course provides a study of the theoretical and methodological approaches used in teaching and learning comprehension, oral, and written expression skills necessary for the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. It covers linguistic and non-linguistic elements of oral and written communication; the relationship between speaking and writing; conversational, standard, formal and specialized styles. 

This course discusses some of the most representative and foundational texts of the narrative genre from the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, as well as several lesser-known authors who were marginalized within the canon during the boom in Latin American literature. Topics include: the Latin American short narrative of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; an overview of the Latin American short novel-- from the late 1920s to the 1950s; the tensions of the canon and the boom (1950s and 1960s).