HISP 216 - Topics in Multidisciplinary Analysis

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

This course develops a set of methodological and theoretical tools for the investigation of cultural practices such as literature, popular and mass culture, social movements and institutions in Spanish-speaking countries.

Topic for 2016/17a: Fiction and Non-Fiction in the Multidisciplinary Classroom. This course develops the theoretical and methodological tools for the study of the ambiguous boundaries of the fictional and scientific representation of social reality in Latin American cultural discourse and practice. Through the examination of hybrid texts which combine elements of fiction, science, journalism, photography, and art the course explores assumptions underlying different conceptions of documentary and imaginary representation. Students consider models of analysis originating in cultural studies with others from the social sciences in order to arrive an an integral and multidisciplinary understanding of the formal and social characteristics of these diverse texts and practices. Michael Aronna.

Topic for 2016/17b: Contemporary Andean Poetry. This course will introduce the student to a critical analysis of contemporary Andean Poetry. Readings will be selected from poetic works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including poetry of the Andean region of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. We will also learn how to make connection among different poetic works in order to situate them within specific moments in the history of the region. This course will concentrate on that poetic image that invites us to experience the poem rather than just reading it. Responding to this invitation through deep interpretation will build the path we will undertake. In order to do so we will keep four groups of questions in mind. (1) What kind of voice is the one we can hear in the poem? Is this voice suffering or fighting? Is this voice political? Is it in silence? Is it a collective voice or a disappeared body? (2) What is this voice trying to tell us? What is the image we are invited to see in the poem? Is it an historical event? Might it be a specific understanding of life? Maybe an absent image? (3) What is the image in the poem creating? What is this image transmitting? Is it an experience, an emotion, hope, void, or a variant conception of reality? (4) What is the poem inviting us to do with that image? How does the poem affect us? How does it change- or not- our perception of life and reality? María Ximena Postigo Guzmán.

Prerequisite(s): HISP 206 or permission of the instructor.

Two 75-minute periods.