Courses

Some texts resist “competent” readers with barriers that more reading will not overcome. Anglo as well as Latin Americans (Morrison, Menchú, Garcilaso, Rodriguez, Poniatowska, among others) use various strategies to defend difference, as a kind of strategic essentialism, and...

Explores esthetic and historical experiments in farming throughout the Spanish Carribbean, using “The Cuban Counterpoint Between Tobacco and Sugar” (1940) by Fernando Ortiz as a guide. As we will see, different crops produced varied political and cultural responses. Along...

A reconsideration of standard authors, including Aristotle, Vico, Kant, Schiller, Shklovsky, and Barthes through engagements with Latin American interpreters and practitioners of literary arts, such as Paz, Borges, Rama, Carpentier, Lezama, and Cortázar among others.

Hispanics in the United States show that double consciousness is not only a burden, but can be a blessing too. Hybrid identities develop irony about simple belonging. What is particular and what shared by other “minorities” about Latino writing, education, music, visual arts...

Bilingual practices are everywhere, though we are only beginning to address them in academic disciplines. We will explore the aesthetic dimensions of bilingualism, and some effects in related areas, including politics, language philosophy, and psychology. How do bilingual...

Bilingual practices are everywhere, though we are only beginning to address them in academic disciplines. We will explore the aesthetic dimensions of bilingualism, and some effects in related areas, including politics, language philosophy, and psychology. How do bilingual...

As moderns, we may assume that national identity is as natural as gender identity. This course explores the analogy between nation and sexuality through the examination of selected “national romances,” and theoretical speculations by Benedict Anderson, Foucault, Lukács, de...