Spanish

This course provides a study of pre-Hispanic literature, examining the Nahuatl and Mayan cultures and their respective literatures. Topics include: characterization of pre-Hispanic culture (social and political organization, economy, religion, philosophy and art), literary genres, and author style. Texts covered include: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, HISTORIA GENERAL DE LAS COSAS DE LA NUEVA ESPAÑA; HUEHUETLATOLLI: LIBRO SEXTO DEL CODICE FLORENTINO; Ángel María Garibay Kintana, POESÍA NÁHUATL; CANTARES MEXICANOS; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, LOS OLMECAS: ESENCIA Y FUNDACIÓN; Miguel León-Portilla, QUINCE POETAS DEL MUNDO AZTECA.

This course is designed for UCEAP students at the higher intermediate (B2) level to improve, consolidate, and expand their grammatical knowledge of the Spanish language. Class meetings are supplemented with practical experiences where students visit emblematic locations in Madrid to practice Spanish communication in real-time.

This course studies the great Latin American figures from cultural and political history. The course is conducted in Spanish and French with an emphasis on translating and transcribing texts between both languages. The course focuses on how heroes stand between myth and reality, and how they relate to the individual and the collective. It analyzes the processes of heroization carried out since the Latin American independences to highlight the ruptures and continuities in their contemporary political uses.  Written sources, territorial marks, and iconography constitute the main materials used to approach heroic cults from a critical perspective.

This course reinforces and broadens grammatical knowledge and prepares students for the use of Spanish in a university setting. It focuses on the four traditional language skills: oral and written comprehension and oral and written expression. Other areas of learning include comprehensions issues and additional vocabulary.

This course is designed to deepen and refine the oral and written communicative competence of students at the B2.2 level (according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Specific objectives of the course include developing the capacity to present ideas in a clear, detailed, and complex manner; to write clear, complex, structured text on any subject; participate in daily conversations on general topics, using formal and informal styles. Grammatical forms covered include: the imperative; non-personal forms; the future and perfect future; the conditional and the perfect conditional; the subjunctive; conditional sentences; conditional compound; referenced speech; introductory verbs.