A beginning course designed for students who wish to start their study of Portuguese and have no proficiency in another Romance language. The four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing are developed at the basic level.
Prerequisites: PORT W1101 or the equivalent. A course designed to acquaint students with the Portuguese verbal, prepositional, and pronominal systems. As a continuation of Elementary Portuguese I (PORT W1101), this course focuses on the uses of characteristic forms and expressions of the language as it is spoken and written in Brazil today.
Prerequisites: knowledge of Spanish or another Romance language. An intensive beginning language course in Brazilian Portuguese with emphasis on Brazilian culture through multimedia materials related to culture and society in contemporary Brazil. Recommended for students who have studied Spanish or another Romance language. The course is the equivalent of two full semesters of elementary Portuguese with stress on reading and conversing, and may be taken in place of PORT W1101-W1102. For students unable to dedicate the time needed cover two semesters in one, the regularly paced sequence PORT W1101-W1102 is preferable.
Prerequisites: PORT W1120 or the equivalent. General review of grammar, with emphasis on self-expression through oral and written composition, reading, conversation, and discussion.
Prerequisites: PORT UN1120 or PORT UN1320 or the equivalent. General review of grammar, with emphasis on self-expression through oral and written composition, reading, conversation, and discussion.
Prerequisites: PORT UN1102 or PORT UN1320. Prerequisites: this course is an intensive and fast-paced coverage of both PORT UN2101 and PORT UN2102. Students MUST demonstrate a strong foundation in Portuguese and meet the following REQUIREMENT: A- or higher in PORT UN1102 or PORT UN1320. If you fulfill the above requirement, you do not need the instructors permission to register. HOWEVER the instructor will additionally assess student proficiency during the Change of Program Period. Students who do not have the necessary proficiency level may not remain in this course. This course replaces the sequence PORT UN2101-PORT UN2102.
Corequisites: PORT UN1220 An intensive exposure to advanced points of Portuguese grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Portuguese. This course is required for the concentration in Portuguese Studies. This course is intended to improve Portuguese language skills in grammar, comprehension, and critical thinking through an archive of texts from literature, film, music, newspapers, critical reception and more. To do so, we will work through Portuguese-speaking communities and cultures from Brazil, to Portugal and Angola, during the twentieth and twenty-first century, to consider the mode in which genre, gender and sexuality materialize and are codified, disoriented, made, unmade and refigured through cultural productions, bodies, nation and resistant vernaculars of aesthetics and performance, always attentive to the intersections of gender with class and racism.
Prerequisites: L course: enrollment limited to 15 students. Completion of language requirement, third-year language sequence (W3300). Provides students with an overview of the cultural history of the Hispanic world, from eighth-century Islamic and Christian Spain and the pre-Hispanic Americas through the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period until about 1700, covering texts and cultural artifacts from both Spain and the Americas.
This course surveys cultural production of Spain and Spanish America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students will acquire the knowledge needed for the study of the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic world in the context of modernity. Among the issues and events studied will be the Enlightenment as ideology and practice, the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the wars of Spanish American independence, the fin-de-siecle and the cultural avant-gardes, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century (Spanish Civil War, the Mexican and Cuban revolutions), neoliberalism, globalization, and the Hispanic presence in the United States. The goal of the course is to study some key moments of this trajectory through the analysis of representative texts, documents, and works of art. Class discussions will seek to situate the works studied within the political and cultural currents and debates of the time. All primary materials, class discussion, and assignments are in Spanish. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
This course surveys cultural production of Spain and Spanish America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Students will acquire the knowledge needed for the study of the cultural manifestations of the Hispanic world in the context of modernity. Among the issues and events studied will be the Enlightenment as ideology and practice, the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the wars of Spanish American independence, the fin-de-siecle and the cultural avant-gardes, the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century (Spanish Civil War, the Mexican and Cuban revolutions), neoliberalism, globalization, and the Hispanic presence in the United States. The goal of the course is to study some key moments of this trajectory through the analysis of representative texts, documents, and works of art. Class discussions will seek to situate the works studied within the political and cultural currents and debates of the time. All primary materials, class discussion, and assignments are in Spanish. This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies.
From a cognitive and operational point of view, this course aims to reflect on the theoretical and, mainly, practical limits of traditional grammar explanations, contributing with a new meaningful, experiential and representational understanding of Spanish as a human mean of communication. Within this framework, some of the most representative aspects of the grammar of Spanish will be studied from a fully practical perspective, favoring the comparison with the grammar of English. In each case, the reflection will lead to turn the traditional rules and their exceptions, into operational laws without exceptions, as well as to highlight the natural logic underlying every single grammar decision in the use of language.
Each week, a historical period is studied in connection to a particular theme of ongoing cultural expression. While diverse elements of popular culture are included, fiction is privileged as a source of cultural commentary. Students are expected to assimilate the background information but are also encouraged to develop their own perspective and interest, whether in the social sciences, the humanities (including the fine arts), or other areas.
Prerequisites: reading knowledge of Spanish Reading knowledge of Spanish is required. By conceiving authoritarianism as a historically produced–and therefore historically changing–notion, we will travel across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to examine how phenomena associated with different forms of political domination were understood in their time and how they are understood today. Nation-building processes, class and gender conflicts, cultural politics, and the examination of past and current political and social movements will be the center of our discussion. Several questions will be raised (and hopefully answered) along this journey: How can we understand the specificity of Spanish forms of authoritarianism in the Euro-Atlantic scenario? How can we explain the reappearance of extreme right-wing populisms? How have transnational forces influenced old and new authoritarian dynamics? To address these issues, we will read essays, short stories, graphic novels, as well as theoretical texts that offer varied approaches to history, aesthetics, and politics. The works by writers Juan Marsé, Sara Mesa, Isaac Rosa, Carmen Martín Gaite, film-makers like Edgar Neville, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, Carlos Saura or philosophers such as Benjamin, Adorno, Schmitt, Villacañas or Rodríguez Palop will be some of the materials from which to study the cultural logics of Spanish authoritarianism in a Global Age.
This graduate seminar serves as a continuation of SPPO GR6001 (“Theory and Practice of Second Language Teaching”) and it is intended for in-service instructors of language, and language and content courses at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. It focuses on the application in the second language (SL) classroom of the pedagogical principles reviewed in the previous semester, with emphasis on methodological approaches and applied techniques.
Students will be directly mentored regarding the classroom treatment and presentation of grammatical, lexical, socio-cultural, and pragmatic aspects of the language in the SL classroom. From a communicative approach and beyond, they will also continue to engage with basic teaching techniques such as lesson planning, use of the target language, technology integration, task design, and the use of written and oral authentic materials. They will learn practically how to promote the development of students’ abilities for literacy and critical thinking. Finally, they will be carefully guided through the actual design and implementation of testing and assessment measures for the course they are teaching. In this seminar, we will also analyze real and potential case scenarios that will/may arise in the classroom and we will consider tactics to resolve problems that typically occur. Reflective teaching practices (teachers as learners of teaching, dynamics of classroom communication, the role of teachers’ beliefs about pedagogical practices) will be revisited and rethought.
The Early Modern origins of the “public” museum have been studied, in the last decades, under the categories of curiosity and wonder. Revising this literature, the seminar intends to introduce the students to a wealth of primary sources, in order to find novel conceptual avenues of research. We will look at the most important illustrated catalogues that were written, painted and often printed between the 16th and 17th centuries: from Ferrante Imperato’s
Dell’Historia Naturale
, published in Spanish Naples, in 1599 to the beautiful
Manoscritti Campori
, the
Museum Septalianum
(1664) and the
Galeria
(1666) of the museum opened by Mandredo Settala in Spanish Milan, from the Roman museum of Athanasius Kircher, passing through the public museums of Ulisse Aldrovandi and Ferdinando Cospi in Bologna, of Oleus Worm in Copenhagen, to the documentation about the collections of Juan de la Espina in Madrid, of Lastanosa in Huesca, the Kunstkammerns of Sweden, and that Rudolf II's in Prague, among others. While acquiring a panoramic and critical view on a major field, on its sources and studies, the seminar’s participants will be guided by the following topics: 1) the tight relationship between Iberian colonization and collecting, in the selection and circulation of the art pieces and natural species that will enter the space of the museum and its catalogues 2) the intertwining between art pieces and natural species coming from afar with those produced or generated locally; 3) the different actors implicated in the
museification
(in space and on paper) of the objects and natural species; 4) the aesthetic education implemented by the items’ public display and by their published descriptions.
Plato banished poets from his
Republic
on the account of their being thrice removed from the truth. Accused of artfully and seductively lying, poets were deemed dangerous, confusing, and unfit to guarantee the stability of the polis and were consequently extricated from it. Since then, the relationship between art and truth has been a contentious one. Art is fiction and fiction, at least in common parlance, is opposed to fact, to things as they
really are
. This historical kinship with lying has often justified accusations of art as being a frivolous, lighthearted discipline, detached from the real. It has also, however, equipped artists with a ‘license to lie’—a prerogative that they have used frequently to reclaim art’s position in the realm of the real, to reinstate the poet’s place in the polis.
This seminar will interrogate modern and contemporary artistic practices that have an act of deception at their core—
pieces
that, for some people and for some time, succeed in obscuring their fictional origins and acquired truth status. We will couple case study analysis with discussion of theoretical works to explore questions such as: How do these practices structure and produce their lies? In what ways do their acts of deception posit a different understanding of the real? How do these practices dialogue with and intervene in the philosophical debates that have explored the tensions between art and truth? What does it mean to lie after the ‘postmodern turn’? How do different definitions of the real affect the interpretation and effects of these works? What is the role of belief in understanding and assessing these practices?
Since we will mostly study Latin American works, we will also speculate about the possibilities of identifying the peculiarities of the region’s relation to deception, both inside and outside the boundaries of the art world.
The course will culminate with a symposium, open to the public, at which students will present their research. Presentations will be followed by discussion, and the symposium will include the participation of an artist and a scholar whose works explore some of the issues studied over the semester.
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.
Prerequisites: graduate standing. Students register in this course while preparing their M.Phil. examinations and prospectus--usually in the fall and spring of their third year.