Undergraduate Seminar in Spanish Literature and Culture

3 units

Taught in Spanish. Topics vary. Can be repeated for credit. This course can be counted as one of the three surveys required to obtain a Spanish major. Prereq: Span 307D; concurrent registration in Span 308E is recommended. SECTION 01. SPANISH-AMERICAN SHORT NOVEL. Study of the twentieth-century short novel in Spanish America. Authors include Bombal, Bioy Casares, Hernández, Castellanos, Fuentes, García Márquez, Ferré, Valenzuela, del Río. SECTION 02.THE SPANISH SHORT STORY DURING THE PAST FIFTY YEARS. An explosion of story-tellers: the rise and fall and rebirth of a genre. This course reviews a half century of short fiction in Spain, emphasizing the works written since 1970. We will focus on the most significant, representative movements in relation to their historical and social contexts. Writers studied include Camilo José Cela, Miguel Delibes, Ignacio Aldecoa, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite, Juan Benet, José María Merino, Luis Mateo Díez, Esther Tusquets, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Soledad Puértolas, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina and Marina Mayoral. Paper, mid-term and final exams. SECTION 03. EARLY MODERN SPANISH TEXTS: WHOSE GOLDEN AGE DO THEY REPRESENT? This course studies a series of works from sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain canonized by later readers as classics of national Spanish literature, whose original audiences viewed them as comical, even subversive experiments that went beyond the limits of known literary forms to incorporate discourses of material experience, revealing the decadent underside of imperial Spain's so-called Golden Age. Includes the LAZARILLO DE TORMES, FUENTEOVEJUNA, selections from DON QUIJOTE, and other readings. Satisfies the 300-level literature survey requirement for the Spanish major and minor.