Spanish

This course offers an overview of the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the Spanish-speaking world today through exploration of key contemporary issues. It discusses the impact of Spanish culture as well as the extent to which it has been perpetuated or undergone changes in Spanish-speaking Latin America. This courses uses a variety of source materials including audio-visual media (documentary and film), essays, short or extracted fiction, artworks, online media platforms and podcasts.

This course offers the tools to build Spanish language fluency by introducing and contextualizing vocabulary and grammar typically used in a health care setting or involving health-related issues. It reinforces communicative competence by focusing on complex grammatical structures through analysis, discussion, and debate of literary sources from current events related to health and cultural aspects of Hispano-America and the Dominican Republic. The course is divided into four units: introduction to Spanish for the health sciences; infectious diseases and community; health institutions; a special case in health culture.

This course provides a study of fundamental texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on the theory of the novel. It examines writing styles of different authors and delves into diction, detail, and themes presented in their works. The readings include theory texts by Ortega y Gasset, Barthes, Todorov, Genette, Bakhtin, and Goldmann, among others.

This course provides an analysis and contextualization of periods, movements, authors and representative works of Chilean, Latin American, and Spanish literature from the end of modernism to the 1960s. It identifies the main themes and aesthetics of this extensive period, placing specific focus on narrative and poetry, the relationships between the two and with their respective cultural, social and political fields.

This course explores the representation of power as manifested in Hispanic literature and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Through a detailed reading of a series of primary texts belonging to different genres and media (novel, short story, theater, cinema), the focus is on different strategies of representation of power and counterpower. Some of the questions that are addressed in the course are the following: What is the relationship between the political and the literary in the Hispanic world? By what strategies do the authors manage to dismantle or mock the established power? What is the healing power and the revolutionary, transforming role of literature, particularly under dictatorships? The course examines the institutions that embody power (the Army, the Dictator, etc.), and more diffused mechanisms of the exercise of power through discourse. For this purpose, the focus is on some historical figures or regimes in particular (e.g. Facundo Quiroga, Porfirio Díaz, Perón, Pinochet, Batista, Franco), as well as in the authoritarian and propagandistic language and the parodic deformation of East. At the same time, the case studies are related to broader theoretical debates about the representation of violence, the cult of personality, censorship, trauma, or the relationship between authority and literature. The corpus of texts analyzed varies each year. The course is taught in Spanish, but is open to students who have a passive command of Spanish (as a receptive language). These students may participate in English, and may be tested in that language. Students must make this request with the instructor directly.

Students develop the four fundamental skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in this course. Additional grammar points and vocabulary are introduced and students expand their awareness of Hispanic cultures.

This course presents a study of Spanish language phonetics and phonology and examines dialectal variation within Spain and across Latin America. The first portion of the course surveys phonemes; physiological sound articulation; the consonants and vowels of the Spanish language; accent and intonation; and syllabification. The latter portion of the course studies Spanish language register and dialect; regional variation among northern Spain, Andalusia, and the Canary Islands; phonetic and lexical variation in Latin American Spanish; and the influence of indigenous languages in Latin America. Assessment is based on participation, assignments, midterm, and final exam.