University of Arizona
Masters Courses Completed
Here you will find a list of courses I have completed contributing to my formation as a graduate student at the University of Arizona. The course numbers, titles, professors, and descriptions are provided below in order starting with the most recently taken. Descriptions and titles were provided by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and/or course syllabi.
SPAN 510 - Development of Spanish Medieval, Renaissance, and Golden Age Literature
Dr. Eliud Chuffe
Spring 2012
Wives and Wife-Murder in the Spanish Golden Age Novella & Theater
Wives and Wife-Murder in the Spanish Golden Age Novella & Theater is designed to introduce you to the cognitive and neurosciences scientific approach to the study of the Spanish Golden Age Drama. Students will familiarize and explore the literary work using theory of narrative empathy, cognitive neuroscience and its relations to embodied representations in the presence of the spectator and/or reader, as theater to be staged or novella to be interpreted by the reader. The mirror neuron system response will be relevant when we reconsider and explore what we think we know about feelings, motivations, behaviors, identities, and even thinking about the message and analysis of the art of narrative and performance of the masterpiece. Furthermore, students will analyze the language, what occurs in each masterpiece, what we see and the meanings hidden conscious or consciously embedded within each play. In addition, graduate students will read several required articles and theories related to each one of the plays, and be exposed to its historical, ideological, and aesthetic significance, while analyzing theater and novella throughout cognitive and neuroscience approaches involved in the performance and reading of each piece. Students will also analyze how individual mental and social representations affect and contribute to the meaning of the representations/text. Finally, students are all required to attend, view and analyze one “real life” comedia performance at El Chamizal Golden Age Theater Festival at El Paso, Texas, put together by the Association of Hispanic Classical Theater.
SPAN 696B - Spanish American Literature
Dr. Lanin A. Gyurko
Fall 2011
This seminar will focus on the theme of the fantastic in Argentine literature, with emphasis on the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Examination of the elements of the fantastic: psychological, supernatural, mythic, metaphysical will relate these fantastic elements to themes of the Time, Space, Memory, and Infinity. Theories of the fantastic, with emphasis on Todorov and Rabkin, will be considered.
SPAN 599 - Independent Study
Dr. Eliud Chuffe
Fall 2011
Shakespeare’s Seven Stages of Man represented in Don Quixote
This fall I plan to begin a study that I will continue in following years in pursuit of my Ph.D. This project will entail the study of Shakespeare’s seven stages of man and explore their presence in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixoteand the Golden Age. In addition to studying the greatest spanish novel of the 17th century, Don Quixote, I will also study the texts of Shakespeare’s productions The Tempest and As You Like It, in which, the seven stages of man are outlined as, infant, schoolboy, lover, solider, justice, pantaloon, and second childishness and oblivion. As You Like It, which clearly describes these seven stages of man in detail, is most commonly believed to be written in 1599, predates both parts of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), as well as Shakespeare’s own The Tempest (1611). Thus, the potential influence of Shakespeare’s monologue on Cervantes’ most renowned novel will be considered. As a tertiary application I will look into l’Commedia dell’Arte and the development of these iconic characters, paying special attention to the roll of Pantalone, or the pantaloon.
A strong base of theory surrounding Don Quixote will be considered. My study this fall will include, but not be limited to the following titles: “Don Quixote as a Funny Book” by P.E. Russell, “Don Quixote: Hero or Fool?” by John J. Allen, “La cultura popular en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento” and “Discourse in the Novel” by Mikhail M. Bajtin, and “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” by Hayden White.
SPAN 501 - Introduction to Hispanic Studies
Dr. Malcolm A. Compitello
Fall 2011
Spanish 501 gives new and continuing M.A. and Ph.D. students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese an overview and introduction to graduate studies and to the profession. Class sessions are dedicated to introducing graduate students to the variety of professional and academic skills that will hold them in good stead as they progress through there professional careers. The course will introduce students to the types of activities they will undertake as researchers and teachers and will familiarize them with current research on teaching and evaluation as well including the incorporation of web based materials into classes and your research. The course will examine how to undertake research, how to document that research properly and how to present it in the form of a research paper or conference presentation. Students enrolled will also learn the ins and outs of seeking employment including the interviewing process and the production of an academic c.v.
This course will combine some lecturing by the instructor with a seminar format requiring intensive and extensive participation by students working individually, with a partner or in small groups. The class discussions will revolve around three interrelated topics; technology and how to harness it for your own and your students use, mastering the basic skills of research, and issues of professional development and the nature of work in the academy and outside of it. The fact that we will be able to conduct our class sessions in the College of Humanities Collaborator [The COH Lab, 412 Modern Languages] will greatly facilitate our work.
SPAN 696B - Spanish American Literature
Dr. Malcolm A. Compitello
Spring 2011
Real Spaces, Virtual places: The Urban Experience in the Hispanic World
"The historical geography of capitalism has to be the central object of theoretical inquiry in the same way it is the nexus of political action." In this quote from David Harvey's seminal The Urban Experience (1989) we find a synthesis of Harvey's arguments about the central place that space and place must play in a rearticulated materialist theory and primordial role that the urban plays in the history of capital.
In this course we will examine the fundamental role of Harvey and others who work in the tradition of critical geography that he helped to create and use their work and insights to explore the nature of the urban experience in the Hispanic world. This will enable us to construct a frame of analysis with which to contextualize and interrogate the particularly rich cultures produced in urban areas in the 20th century in relationship to the production of urban consciousness.
To undertake our analyses we will "read" a wide range of urban cultural productions from a variety of urban settings. We will scrutinize the role of architecture and urban design, the graphic arts and fashion, mass media and literature and see how they are mediated by the urban experience and also contribute to the construction of urban identity. We will pay particular attention to how film portrays the urban process. Examples will be drawn from the rich tradition of urban culture with particular attention given to recent urban developments in Latin America and Spain--the instructor's areas of specialization.
The truly innovative aspect of this seminar will be to provide students with a unique opportunity to explore the relationships between the real, its imaginary projection and virtual articulations of those relationships. Students enrolled in the class will work to help develop the virtual reality space, Cibola, partially funded through a grant from the Center for Latin American Studies’ Title VI National Resource Center and currently being developed for the Second Life Virtual Reality Project by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Students will complete a number of assignments which will flesh out the site and the buildings from a number of cities in Latin America and Spain that will be represented there. Through this process of information collection and dissemination students will acquire an understanding about how urban spaces are built out through the planning process and the relationship between real spaces and cultural imaginaries of them and will create the materials that will be used on the site in the future. Through this process they will develop a deep understanding of how virtual 3D spaces work and be able to assess their efficacy as sites for academic study and cultural and intellectual interaction that transcends the classroom environment.
SPAN 571 - Topics in Literary Theory and Criticism
Dr. Laura G. Gutiérrez
Spring 2011
Toward a Critical Visual Culture Studies in Latin/o America
In his usual style of photographing the everydayness of the urban landscape, the Mexican modernist photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo took a picture of an optician’s shop, reversed the negative, and created a parable about our ‘modern’ ways of seeing (Parabola óptica (1931)), the topic of this course. In this regard, the basic impulse behind this class is to move the student toward a critical visual culture studies that understands that within a scopic regime it is not just how we see things, but how we are able, allowed or made to see them. Using a number of seminal texts as our point of departure—among them: Michel Foucault’s “Las Meninas” from The Order of Things (1966), John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)—this course is an introduction to the emerging field of Visual Culture Studies. We will consider the field’s interdisciplinarity, as it stems from art history, photography, and Film/Media Studies, and will also pay attention to the ways in which Visual Culture Studies intersects with Performance Studies, Border Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Feminist Theory. Of primary interest, however, is for the student to develop critical methodologies in order to have a wider understanding of the cultural and visual turns within academic discourses and thus expanding the possibilities of the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. Thus, and with this in mind, the class will address concerns regarding representation, circulation, and spectatorship within the Latin/o American context and as they intersect with the following: colonialism (and the imperial gaze); modernity/modernism; questions of space; issues of control and censorship; and questions of the (human) mediated body. The class material draws principally from cultural theory pertinent to the field of visual studies—among them: G. Rose, N. Mirzoeff, E. Shohat and R. Stam, W.J.T. Mitchell, R. Williams, J. Berger, M. Foucault, S. Hall, R. Barthes, V. Burgin, W. Benjamin, S. Sontag, G. Debord, D. Taylor, A. Sekula, R. Krauss, L. Althusser, S. Freud, K. Silverman, L. Mulvey, H. Bhabha, M.A., Doane, R. Dyer, F. Fanon, M.L. Pratt, K. Mercer, D. Haraway, E. Grosz A. McClintock C. Fusco, F. Jameson, Celeste Olalquiaga—as well as visual material from the Latin/o American context, mainly photography and film.
SPAN 540 - Development of Spanish American 19th-21st Century Literature
Dr. Lanin A. Gyurko
Spring 2011
Latin American Film
This course will concentrate on the development of Latin American film in teh 20th and 21st centuries. Film will be examined both as a reflections of the sociopolitical reality of Latin America as film, and arte combinatorio. Cinematic techniques will be explored, and how they make a film work. Films from México, Argentina, Perú, Brazil, Cuba, and U.A. Latino films will be examined. Directors to be studied include Emilio Fernández, Robert Gavaldón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Luis Estrada, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Francisco Lonbardi, Luis Puenzo, Marcel Camus and Fernando Meirelles.
SPAN 581 - Foreign Language Teaching: Theory and Methodology
Dr. Eliud Chuffe
Fall 2010
The goal of this course is to systematically examine methods, approaches, techniques and activities for the teaching of foreign languages. It will include an overview of learner strategies and cooperative learning, the use and adaptation of textbooks, and some of the journals available in the field. Participants will be introduced to second language acquisition theories, course design, lesson planning and testing, which they can use in their field of endeavor and have experience creating a cohesive instructional unit.
Objectives:
To introduce students to issues in second language acquisition (SLA) research and to link such issues to the teaching of language in a classroom setting. To become familiar with various methodologies and teaching approaches, and to examine them in the context of communicative language teaching orientation. To introduce and familiarize students with the following in light of a communicative language-teaching framework: culture, grammar instruction, oral expression, comprehension (written and aural), and written expression. To develop appropriate materials for the foreign language classroom with specific reference to topics listed in 2 and 3 above. To address issues in language teaching.
SPAN 571 - Topics in Literary Theory and Criticism
Dr. Melissa Fitch
Fall 2010
Global Latin/o America
This course will integrate the work of some of the most important philosophers, theorists, scholars and/or critics in the field of Literary and Cultural Studies over the last century, with a focus on the topic of Global Latin/o America. It will be an interdisciplinary examination of the cultural production that is the result of significant transnational flows of migrants, tourists, labor, ideas, media, capital and/or consumer goods. In the class, cultural production will be understood as process, not product. As such, the focus is on how each narrative, in the words of Dick Schechner, “interacts with those who view it, thus evoking different reactions and meanings; and how it changes meaning over time and in different contexts.” The class will be framed by the following questions: How have people, ideas and artifacts moved across social and geographical spaces? How have they been adapted, resituated, hybridized, and transformed in the advent of globalization and the Internet? How are meaning and ideology, citizenship and nationhood understood and constructed? What are the social, political and economic issues at stake connected to global production, distribution and consumption of representations of Latino/a American identity? We will address the circulation of ideas, traditions and aesthetic forms, the global labor market, local-global connections, issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality and the creation of translocal, and in many cases virtual, networks and communities.
Materials to be examined include: web blogs, television programs, non-fiction narrative, films, performance, popular protests, print and on-line advertising, television programs, on-line social networks, public space, tourist destinations and travel guides, material culture, children’s programming, documentaries, photography, graffiti, personal ads, and the rhetoric of politicians. We will be speaking about the global presence of Latin/o America that may be found not just in the Americas but also in China, Japan, Turkey, Italy, France, England, India, Singapore, Vietnam, Spain, Lebanon, Finland, Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Macao.
Theorists/critics whose work will be utilized, in part, to examine the course topic will come from the following list: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo, Walter Mignolo, Arjun Appadurai, Néstor García-Canclini, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, Henri Lefebvre, Mabel Moraña, Debra Castillo, Kamala Kempadoo, Francine Masiello, George Yúdice, Jean Baudrillard, Marta Savigliano, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Henry Jenkins, Jane Desmond, Gayatri Chakravrty Spivak, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Micaela di Leonardo, Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, James Clifford, George Lipsitz, Guy Debord, Anthony Giddens, Caren Kaplan, Dean MacCannell, Roland Robertson, John Urry, Susan Bordo, Alexander Doty, John Fiske, Wolfgang Iser, Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams.
SPAN 540 - Development of Spanish American 19th - 21st Century Lit
Dr. Eliana Rivero
Spring 2010
Poesíá hispánica: práctica y poética del siglo XIX al siglo XX
Este curso proporciona la oportunidad de repasar el desarrollo poético de la lírica hispánica, tal y cual se muestra en la obra de ocho de sus más destacados exponentes. Con este fin, se estudiarán a fondo textos significativos de cuatro poetas españoles y cuatro hispanoamericanos, cuya producción poética ha impactado nuestra noción de lo lírico como expresión del espíritu humano y de su interacción social y política con el mundo que lo rodea.
Se estudiarán textos de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, José Martí, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado y Rosario Castellanos. El estudio de textos poéticos se combinará con consideraciones conceptuales y teóricas sobre la naturaleza y despliegue de la expresión lírica, con la correspondiente revisión de autores críticos clásicos en el ámbito de la poesía hispánica (Amado Alonso, Carlos Bousoño, Octavio Paz, Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Juan Villegas) y otros contemporáneos.
El trabajo de clase comprenderá, además de las acostumbradas conferencias y discusiones en grupo, participación individual en forma de presentaciones orales y análisis poéticos escritos, amén de la confección de una bibliografía adecuada a un autor específico y que funciona como paso previo a un trabajo final de investigación.
SPAN 511 - Topics in Medieval Literature, Renaissance & Golden Age Lit.
Dr. Eliud Chuffe
Spring 2010
Theoretical Approaches to Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Spanish 511 is designed to guide you throughout a careful theoretical and analytical study of Don Quixote. We will focus mainly on the textual examination the themes, characters, and combination of tragedy and comedy found in D.Q. We will consider many relevant literary influences that can be found in this text, and what critics have written for so many years about Don Quixote. At the beginning students will be exposed to the historic context and the biography of Cervantes. Then students are required to analyze the art and language, that occurs in the book, while simultaneously reading several critical articles related to each chapter on Cervantes.