2008-2009 Graduate Courses in Portuguese
| AUTUMN | WINTER | SPRING |
|---|---|---|
| 30100 Intermediate Portuguese | 30200 Advanced Portuguese | 31500 Estilística da língua portuguesa |
| 30400 Intermediate Portuguese | 42100 Readings and Research | 36801 The Alice Books |
| 42100 Readings and Research | 38701 Latin American Essay | |
| 42100 Readings and Research |
Graduate Course Descriptions
30100. 30400. Intermediate Portuguese. In this intermediate/advanced-level sequence, students review and extend their knowledge of all basic patterns (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, phonetics, sociocultural norms) of the language. They develop their oral and written skills in describing, narrating, and presenting arguments. They are exposed to texts and audio-visual material that provide them with a deeper understanding of Portuguese literature, culture, and contemporary society. A.M. Lima. Autumn.
30200. Advanced Portuguese. PORT 20200 is specifically designed to help students develop their descriptive and narrative skills through exposure to written and oral documents (e.g., literary texts, interviews). Students are taught the grammatical and lexical tools necessary to understand these documents, and to produce their own analysis and commentaries. A.M. Lima. Winter.
31500. Estilística da língua portuguesa. This course is specifically designed to help students develop their skills in understanding, summarizing, and producing written and spoken arguments in Portuguese through readings and debates on various issues of relevance in contemporary Luso-Brazilian societies. Special consideration is given to the major differences between continental and Brazilian Portuguese. In addition to reading, analyzing, and commenting on advanced texts (both literary and nonliterary), students practice and extend their writing skills in a series of compositions. A.M. Lima. Spring.
36801. The Alice Books. We will read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Some topics to be discussed are (alphabetically) animals, children, conversation, intention, justice and fairness, meaning of a word, malapropism, manners, pastoral, pictures, poems. Discussions will sometimes be accompanied by additional texts, which only occasionally count as secondary bibliography. Among these, we may read texts by Austin, Davidson, Empson, Oakeshott, Pitcher, Rawls, Russell, Wittgenstein and others. Miguel Tamen. Spring.
38701. Latin American Essay. The essay of “national identity investigation” is a very Latin American genre. Throughout the 19th and 20th century Latin American intellectuals were engaged in the nation-building project, trying to understand what would be the meaning of their national culture, employing sociological, anthropological and philosophical insights. In this class we will approach this long tradition through specific thematic clusters. On each thematic cluster, we will find writers from Spanish America and Brazil. I invite students to bridge some gaps between these two essaystic traditions of the Latin American culture, analyze their differences and similarities. Alfredo Cesar Melo. Spring.
42100. Readings and Research. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.