Hispanic Popular Culture from Bad Bunny to Don Quixote

3 credits

Conducted in Spanish and Fulfills the Pre-1800 Peninsular requirement for majors. What is good taste and bad taste? What is popular culture and how it becomes mainstream? How is a literary classic born? Taking Cervantess masterpiece Don Quixote as our anchoring point, we study the rich popular cultures of the Hispanic worlds. For the past decade, Hispanic peoples around the world have been influencing music, literature, film, and television. Bad Bunnys music will not be the last time Spanish language becomes global, and Cervantess was not the first. This course pairs chapters of Don Quixote with contemporary popular culture (music, film, television) to question whether a literary masterpiece is that much different from other artworks. We explore issues of taste, identity, aesthetics, politics, gender, and global circulation of goods and ideas.