Courses

This course offers an introduction to modern and contemporary French literature through a selection of major works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our discussions, complemented by film excerpts and other resources, will gravitate toward questions that remain pressing today: How do we read and interpret others? How do we make sense to one another in a fast-changing era? How do humans inhabit and transform environments shared with animals, objects, technologies, and other forms of life? Reading authors including Albert Camus, Marie Darrieussecq, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Georges Perec, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Boris Vian, we will engage with a range of prose forms: fiction, prose poetry, autobiography/autofiction, diaristic writing, autoethnography, and the philosophical essay. Particular attention will be paid to the ways words, nonlinguistic signs, and material forms shape—and become part of—the environments we co-inhabit.

Taught in English. Students seeking credit for FREN major/minor will complete readings/writing in French.

Poetry articulates the expression of life and the news of the world; its forms can celebrate and critique, while teaching us about the language we use every day. This class explores the long history of poetry in France: readings include Louise Labé, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Students will practice different ways of engaging with poetry, such as close reading, translation, pastiche, and performance.

Taught in French. This is an introductory-level course.

Prerequisites
FREN 20300

Crosslistings: GNSE 12152

How did the individual understand their societal role in the early modern period according to the norms of their gender? Was it possible for the individual to challenge, or even transgress, the gendered norms to which they were subject? What protofeminist discourses existed in the early modern Hispanic world? How were ideals of femininity and masculinity constructed in artistic and literary production during the Spanish Golden Age? These are but a few of the questions that will be addressed in this course, as we examine the complexities and nuances of gender and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The course will begin with a foundational exploration of the querelle des femmes, before delving into its influence in Spanish literary and artistic production. The primary corpus we will study will encompass scientific, moral, and theological treatises, conduct manuals, as well as more “traditional” literary genres, such as poetry, drama, and narrative from both male and female writers alike. We will also dive into literary criticism with secondary texts from scholars of early modern gender and sexuality. While the course focus is broadly on gender and sexuality, students will also gain a preliminary knowledge of major Spanish literary works as well as engage in practices of textual analysis through a variety of activities, such as biweekly commonplace book entries, short close-reading essays, and collaborative podcasts.

Taught in Spanish. All primary texts and assignments will be read and completed in Spanish.

Crosslistings: CMST 22440, GNSE 22440

In this course, we will study filmic representations of women in Italian organized crime, and the implications these portrayals have on the understanding of gender and the mafias through Italian cinema. Sociological and psychological studies have underscored the importance of female roles in relation to mafia organizations, notwithstanding the rigid patriarchal structure that allows only male affiliation. One of the main goals of this class is for students to gain an understanding of different Italian mafias and to get a deeper comprehension of the construction of gender in a selection of films centered around these organizations. We will also discuss how movies contribute to the perception of organized crime. This class will draw on a variety of fields, including sociology, gender studies, and film studies. 

Taught in English. Students seeking credit for the Italian major/minor must complete a substantial part of the course work (e.g., readings, writing) in Italian.

Crosslistings: CMLT 22501/32501, FNDL 21408

This course offers a close reading of Giambattista Vico’s seminal work, New Science (1744), which aimed to challenge prevailing notions regarding the fundamental principles of humanity. Often dubbed the “last Renaissance man” or a representative of the “Counter-Enlightenment,” Vico rejected the detached rationalism of his time as he set out to recover the attitude and emotions relevant to the humanities in contrast to the natural sciences. His inquiry revolves around the connection between the factum or what is “made” – anything resulting from human skills (literature, art, law, institutions, etc.) – and the verum or God-begotten truth. What kind of epistemology and interpretive methodologies arise when we turn to Vico, Descartes’s scourge? In our own dissatisfaction with rational empiricism, Vico’s alternative unfolds as an epic exploration through time, guiding us to witness primitive humans uttering their first word, partake in Noah’s ark journey, and retrace the origins of writing and the foundation of civilizations. 

Taught in English.

This course takes inspiration from the success and popularity of family stories in contemporary French literature (from the mid-1980's to the present), and will explore some of the most iconic examples of such works by writers including Annie Ernaux, Maryse Condé, and Emmanuel Carrère. How does recounting the trajectory of family members differ from other sorts of life-writing projects? To what extent does the focus on others allow for the staging of the self ? What conflicting visions of the family fuel such endeavors ? Our investigations will be organized around a series of key topics such as the use of documents, the ethics of life writing, and the impact of historical violence on family secrets that will allow us to locate family stories within their larger social, political, historical, and cultural contexts. Students will have the opportunity to deepen their literary analytical skills and enhance their understanding of contemporary French society. 

Taught in French.

Prerequisites
FREN 20500, 20501, or an introductory-level course taught in French.

Crosslistings: TAPS 28475

In this introductory-level literature course we will study the evolution of French comedy from the seventeenth-century until today, probing issues such as the problem of laughter, theatricality and performance practices, and the depiction of social and political change. We will in particular study representations of gender from the Ancien Régime (Madame de Villedieu, Molière, Françoise de Graffigny), through the Revolution (Olympe de Gouges), and to twentieth-century experiments in queer performance (Genet) and biting social satire (Yasmina Reza).

Taught in French. This is an introductory-level course.

Prerequisites
FREN 20300

Crosslistings: FNDL 23205

This course examines a remarkable season of Italian children’s literature (1960–1980), focusing on its radically experimental character and its engagement with the legacy of the historical avant-gardes. The authors under study were often directly involved in movements such as Futurism and Surrealism, and they translated these movements’ aesthetic theories into works created for young readers. As a result, beneath the genre’s apparent simplicity and naiveté, we encounter a high degree of formal sophistication: linguistic play that subverts established orders of meaning, investigations into spatial dynamism, and sustained experiments with nonlinear narrative.
Throughout the course, children’s literature will serve as a lens through which to explore the avant-garde, while avant-garde aesthetics will, in turn, illuminate the distinctive possibilities of children’s literature. We will begin with the pioneering work of Iela Mari and Bruno Munari, both of whom challenged conventional definitions of the book by stripping it of its primary function as a vehicle for textual information and transforming it instead into a visual and tactile object. We will then turn to Toti Scialoja’s nonsense-inflected poetry and to Gianni Rodari’s Grammatica della fantasia, a foundational theoretical reflection on the uses of imagination. The course concludes with Leo Lionni’s fables of racial identity, composed through innovative materials and cutting-edge visual techniques.

Taught in Italian.

Crosslistings: GRMN 23227

For as long as there has been art, there have been social critics worried about its potential for negative moral effects on its audience, from Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal city to conservative critics of Hollywood today.  This course will examine such controversies in the context of theater, and will ask what role music plays in connection to spectators’ affective, aesthetic, and ethical experiences and responses. Does adding music to theater, as in an opera, heighten moral risk to the spectator? Or, instead, does music make theater more capable of operating as a social good? How does music (instrumental and/or vocal) relate to spoken theater? What are the pleasures and purposes of music? We will explore these questions across a wide range of time periods, reading and/or watching works by authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Racine, Boileau, Lully, Rameau, Rousseau, Goethe, Wagner and Brecht. In doing so, we will confront some of the (often strange and fascinating) criticisms that some observers have leveled at theater – as well as the ways in which playwrights and musicians have sought to redeem it.

Taught in English.

Reading French for Research Purposes prepares students to read and do research using scholarly texts in French. Students will build on their fundamental knowledge of French grammar and the most common vocabulary terms used in scholarly writing, while developing reading comprehension skills and working intensively with academic texts in their areas of research specialty. Students who perform well in FREN 33333/23333 will be able to synthesize key points, arguments and evidence in scholarly texts into their own research. The course also includes practice of skills necessary to pass the Academic Reading Comprehension Assessment (ARCA) in French, administered by the Office for Language Assessment (OLA). Undergraduate students have the option of taking the ARCA, or completing a final assignment in which they identify, cite, and describe the relevance of multiple French secondary texts in their discipline or to a specific project. Note: this course can be counted on a case-by-case basis and with approval from the French Undergraduate Adviser.

No auditors permitted. If course is full, or total enrollment is less than enrollment limit & you can't register, attend on 1st day. Registered students who don't attend on 1st day may lose spot.

Prerequisites
PQ for 23333: FREN 10300 or 13333, placement into FREN 20100, or instructor consent. PQ for 33333: FREN 10300 or 13333, placement into FREN 20100, or the equivalent of one year college-level introductory French.

Crosslistings: ANTH 23335/33335, RDIN 23335/33335

Over the last two decades, questions of race, racial identity, and racial discrimination have come increasingly to the fore in France, despite (or because of) the country's prevailing rhetoric of colorblind indivisibility. These issues are becoming ever more pressing on a background of intensifying racisms and right-wing populisms in Europe. The purpose of this course is to offer analytical perspectives about these critical tensions and their ripples across the landscape of contemporary French politics. Using readings from a wide variety of fields (among others, anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, history, political science, and news media), we will unpack the discourses and lived experiences of race that have shaped the politics of national identity and difference in France since the late 18th century. We will see that the question of 'racial France' has been intimately bound up with the country's history of colonialism and decolonization, with its Republican ideology, with matters of law and government, with questions of citizenship, religion and sexuality, with recent debates on multiculturalism, and with white malaise and resentment stirred by the growth of right-wing extremisms. In the course of our examinations, we will also reflect on the specificity of race and racialization in France, and its differences from racecraft in the United States.

Crosslistings: FNDL 21714, MDVL 23502

One of the most important and influential works of the middle ages—and a lot funnier than the "Divine Comedy." Written in the midst of the social disruption caused by the Black Death (1348), the "Decameron" may have held readers attention for centuries because of its bawdiness, but it is also a profound exploration into the basis of faith and the meaning of death, the status of language, the construction of social hierarchy and social order, and the nature of crisis and historical change. Framed by a storytelling contest between seven young ladies and three young men who have left the city to avoid the plague, the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s "Decameron" form a structural masterpiece that anticipates the Renaissance epics, Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales," and the modern short story. Students will be encouraged to further explore in individual projects the many topics raised by the text, including (and in addition to the themes mentioned above) magic, the visual arts, mercantile culture, travel and discovery, and new religious practices.

Taught in English.

Crosslists: LACS 23525, CMST 23525

This course explores how Latin American cinema reacted to the changing political contexts of the region during the second half of the 20th century. Using the 1950s as a starting point, when the establishment of the constitution of Puerto Rico in 1952 and the success of the Cuban revolution in 1959 brought new models for state-sponsored experimental cinema, we will see movies that mix documentary and fiction in a manner that the aesthetics of film language are used as an expression of a collective political subjectivity. The relationship between Latin America and the United States will be crucial for this analysis because it points to the colonial/postcolonial context of the fight against imperialism that is manifest in these movies. In this regard, we will see cinema related to the processes of resistance during and after the dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and the ways the precarious economies of Colombia, Perú and Puerto Rico required the development of new ways of cinematographic self-representation at the turn of the 21st century. The emphasis will be on experimental film, focusing on their guerilla production strategies and the aesthetic innovations that are explored in these movies. Some of the filmmakers we will discuss are Raúl Ruiz (Chile), Luis Ospina (Colombia), Santiago Álvarez (Cuba), Amílcar Tirado (Puerto Rico), Gianfranco Annichini (Perú), Albertina Carri (Argentina) and Eduardo Coutinho (Brazil); among others.

"What does it mean to express consent or dissent? What is at stake when agreement breaks down? This course explores how Italian culture, from the Middle Ages to modernity, helps us confront these questions. Focusing on literary texts and films by authors such as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante, and Amelia Rosselli, we will examine how these works stage, complicate, and challenge the dynamics of obedience and resistance in relation to political order, gender relations, and ethical life across different historical contexts. Throughout the course, we will ask: When does agreement create stability, and when does it conceal constraint? When does dissent open new possibilities—and when does it become difficult to sustain?

Taught in English and open to undergraduate and graduate students (MA and PhD) from all academic backgrounds, the course emphasizes close reading, comparative analysis, discussion, and critical thinking. Students taking the course for ITAL credit will complete readings and assignments in Italian."

Crosslistings: GNSE 20173/34555, MDVL 23555

The hegemonic narrative of knowledge production in the Iberian Peninsula has historically centered on male writers, thus excluding contributions of women. This seminar will explore the intellectual interventions of medieval and early modern Iberian poets, professors, encyclopedists, and theologians who also happened to be women. Did these women present a perspective on knowledge-making different than their male counterparts? More importantly, what were the paths to knowledge that were available to them in a society that offered women limited social and intellectual roles? In this course we will be reading sources by Florencia Pinar, Teresa de Cartagena, Leonor López de Córdoba, Oliva Sabuco, among others; and critical pieces by Judith Butler, Andrea Dworkin, Silvia Federici, Luce Irigaray, and Sophie Lewis.

Taught in Spanish.

Prerequisites
SPAN 20300

Crosslistings: CEGU 23727, LACS 23727, RDIN 23727

This course explores the vibrant cultural landscape of the Andes through literature, music, visual arts, and cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will examine how "nature" is far more than just a backdrop—it is a contested space that oscillates between a resource for extraction, a foundation for national identity, and a powerful cosmopolitical agent for indigenous communities. By examining these diverse aesthetic and historical traditions, students will gain a deeper understanding of how nature is inextricably linked to Andean politics and global economic shifts. From the colonial legacies of myths such as El Dorado to groundbreaking contemporary laws that recognize rivers and mountains as legal subjects with their own rights, we will analyze the cultural responses emerging from Andean social movements to contemporary pressing challenges such as extractivism and ecological decline, social justice, and the survival of indigenous communities in a globalized world. We will read works of contemporary Latin American fiction writers such as Liliana Colanzi and Daniela Catrileo, discuss visual and performative arts from major exponents of Andean anticolonialism such as Mujeres Creando, and Colectivo Ayllu. We will study texts by indigenous thinkers and activists such as Manuel Quintín Lame and discuss cinematographic material from Bolivia, including works by Jorge Sanjinés, among others.

Taught in Spanish.

Crosslistings: LACS 23827

What can objects tell us about the people who made them, the cultures they passed through, and the histories they helped shape? This interdisciplinary course examines the rich and complex lives of objects in the Early Modern world as they traversed and shaped cultures and spaces. We will study how these objects are portrayed in colonial texts and paintings —relics, featherwork paintings, textiles, biombos (folding screens), ceramics, and books—all products of cultural contact in the Iberian World. How did these objects shape identities, influence worldviews, and contribute to the formation of ideas about race, gender, and empire? Special attention will be given to the global networks of the Spanish Habsburg Empire across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and how these objects functioned within the systems of colonial rule, religious conversion, and trade. A central question will be: How do objects propel or, at times, resist colonial rule? 

Students will develop tools for interpreting the political and cultural lives of objects and gain a deeper understanding of how material culture shaped—and was shaped by—the global dynamics of the Early Modern period. Course materials include colonial texts, visual and material sources, and case studies from cities such as Acapulco, Mexico City, Seville, Cartagena, Cuzco, and Manila.

In this course, students will participate in class discussions, write weekly responses, lead one class session, and complete a final research project.

Crosslistings: GNSE 24027

This transhistorical course surveys nine approaches to writing the body in French and Francophone literature. It starts with the 16th-century poetic form of the “blason,” which turns the description of a woman’s body into an anatomic and erotic experiment. Studying various forms of writing—novels, essays, poetry, and theater—this course introduces students to references such as Molière, Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, and Monique Wittig. Each of these authors will guide the class to different literary perspectives on the body, from questions of aesthetics, race, and politics, to radical sexualities and body horror. 

Taught in French.

Prerequisites
FREN 20500, 20501, or an introductory-level literature course taught in French.

Crosslistings: CMLT 28101/38101, FNDL 21211, SCTH 38250

In this course we will read Cervantes’s "Don Quixote" (1605, 1615), paying attention to narrative aesthetics, language, genre, the politics of the novel, and the history of interpretation, among other aspects. Our close reading of the text will be informed by thorough contextualization within the social, cultural, and intellectual history of early modern Spain, Europe, and the Mediterranean, as well as by major critical and theoretical approaches to the novel.

This course is taught in English and has no prerequisites. Additional discussion sessions in Spanish will be available for interested students.

Crosslistings: ARTH 24420/45885, CDIN 24420/44420, CMLT 24420/44410, TAPS 25222/44420

This seminar has two goals. One is to combine the text-based tradition of French literary studies with the image-based, comparative tradition of art history—and, in so doing, to change the taxonomies of both. The other is to re-evaluate French Classicism by attending to practices of reading, writing, performing, looking and making. The seminar’s breadth is designed to appeal to all students interested in the theory and history of aesthetics, and the interleaving of visual and literary evidence. Looking will be no less important than reading, as we will conduct sessions with original objects in the Art Institute and in Regenstein Special Collections. Authors studied will include Corneille, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, and Descartes; among the artists, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, La Tour, and Callot. Critical readings will range from Leo Spitzer to Louis Marin and Foucault. 

The seminar will be conducted in English; all primary texts will be made available in both English translation and, for those with reading knowledge, in the French original. This seminar will travel to Paris during exam week (March 2027); airfare and lodging covered by university.

Prerequisites
Consent of instructors required for all students. For French credit, FREN 20500, 20501 or an introductory-level literature course taught in French is also required.

Why do some memories become official history while others are silenced? Why does a survivor’s testimony carry a different kind of authority than a historian’s footnote — and what happens when that authority is challenged, denied, or weaponized? This course examines how societies remember: how stories about the past are told, contested, and given (or denied) legitimacy in public life.
The first half of the course builds the conceptual tools for this inquiry — narrative as a way of organizing experience, the construction of individual and collective identity, the relationship between memory and historical evidence, and the particular authority carried by first-person testimony. The second half turns to real and urgent conflicts over memory: Holocaust denial and its rhetorical strategies, the abuse of memory for political ends, and the fraught, often weaponized vocabulary that circulates in public debates about the past. We’ll look at historical case studies, literature, and current controversies, asking how people argue about the past and why those arguments become so contentious.
At the center of the course is a question we’ll return to throughout: who gets to decide what the past means?
No prior background in history, memory studies, or the humanities is required.

PQ: Taught in English.

Crosslistings: GNSE 20171/30171

La plupart des contes de fées que vous connaissez, de "Cendrillon" au "Chat Botté", ont été écrits en français d’abord, et au dix-septième siècle, qui a été l’âge d’or de ce genre en France. Les enfants et les adultes connaissent bien les contes d’auteurs comme Charles Perrault ou les frères Grimm. En France, pourtant, les femmes ont été cruciales au développement du conte de fées, avec Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, la comtesse de Murat, ou Gabrielle Barbot de Villeneuve (qui a écrit "La Belle et la bête"). Etant donné qu’ils sont en grande partie responsables de ce en quoi consiste, de nos jours, la beauté, et d’une certaine image de l’amour et de la place de la femme dans la société, aussi bien que de ce qui est relégué aux marges, se pencher sur la formation de ce genre et analyser ses histoires est nécessaire pour comprendre pourquoi et comment ces idées prirent racine. Est-ce que les contes de fées sont les premiers récits à mettre en scène des héroïnes de caractère, ou est-ce qu’ils n’ont fait que perpétuer le motif de la demoiselle en détresse ? S’ils étaient, comme un article l’a récemment proposé, les premières critiques du patriarcat, peut-on le percevoir également chez ceux écrits par des hommes et ceux écrits par des femmes ? Nous étudierons des contes de fées français, anciens et modernes, à la fois des textes et des adaptations cinématographiques, en nous appuyant sur des lectures théoriques au sujet du folklore et du féminisme.

Taught in French.

Prerequisites
FREN 20500, 20501, or a literature course taught in French.

Crosslistings: LING 24730, SPAN 24730

In the last 30 years, the Basque language has seen an increase in the number of speakers, especially among younger groups. The implementation of several language and cultural policies, along with a transformation in the educational system, has been key to this development. In this course we will explore these revitalizing practices used in the Basque Country by analyzing the sociolinguistic situation of Basque language from the transition to democracy in the late 1970s to the present.

Taught in English.

Crosslistings: CMLT 24905

Ce cours est une introduction au genre de la nouvelle au Maghreb. En travaillant sur une sélection de nouvelles et de textes courts d’auteurs marocains, algériens et tunisiens, on s’intéressera aussi bien aux thèmes abordés (reconstruction historique, critique sociale ou politique, réflexions sur l’identité et l’altérité, etc.) qu’aux schémas narratifs et aux procédés esthétiques. À travers l’étude de la mise en scène des personnages, de la construction de l’intrigue et du dénouement des récits, on interprétera la concision de la nouvelle et sa capacité à représenter, souvent de manière saisissante, des éléments majeurs de la société et de la culture maghrébines. Parmi les autrices et auteurs étudiés : Driss Chraïbi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Siham Benchekroun, Leïla Sebbar, Maïssa Bey, Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Salah Garmadi et d’autres.

Taught in French. This is an introductory-level course. 

Prerequisites
FREN 20300 or consent of instructor.

Are we the true authors of our own actions, or do these follow from causes beyond our control? This course follows one of the great debates of early modern France, from the quarrel over grace that set Pascal and Port-Royal against the Jesuits to the materialism of Diderot, a period in which "fatalism" served as both an accusation and an alibi. The question took theological, moral, physical, and political dimensions: whether human freedom can coexist with Providence, whether the mind is ruled by the body, or whether peoples are shaped by climate and history. We will explore how this high-stakes debate ran through nearly every genre, from theater to the novel, letters, philosophical essays, and political treatises, drawing on writings by Pascal, Racine, Mme de Lafayette, Montesquieu, Mme de Graffigny, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and many others. Alongside close reading, students will be introduced to digital humanities as a research method and will learn how working with large collections of texts can complement the reading of individual works. No programming or technical background is required.

PQ: FREN 20500, 20501, or an introductory-level course taught in French. Taught in French.

Crosslistings: GNSE 20172/36210, LACS 26212/36212

This course examines representations of women's bodies and sexualities in early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American writings. We will study the body through a variety of lenses: the anatomical body as a site of construction of sexual difference, the witch's body as a site of sexual excess, the mystic's body as a double of the possessed body, the tortured body as a site of knowledge production, and the racialized bodies of women as sites to govern sexuality, spirituality, labor, and property in the reaches of the Spanish Empire.

Taught in Spanish.

Prerequisites
For undergrads, SPAN 20300 or consent of instructor.

Semiotics is the study of how meaning is made — how a sound, an image, a gesture, or a clue comes to stand for something beyond itself, and how entire systems of thought are built from these small acts of interpretation. This course offers a systematic introduction to the field through its two founding figures, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce. From Saussure, we’ll examine how language works as a structured system of arbitrary signs. From Peirce, we’ll explore inference, doubt, and the logic that moves us from evidence to belief. These two traditions converge in the semiotics of Umberto Eco, whose model of culture as an open, ever-expanding “encyclopedia” gives us a way to think about meaning-making across every domain of human life.
Rather than limiting itself to abstract theory alone, each week pairs a foundational idea with a concrete case: Umberto Eco’s "The Name of the Rose" and its medieval detective-monk; Eco’s revisitation of the labyrinthine library of Jorge Luis Borges; Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty arguing with Alice about who controls language; Sherlock Holmes’ methods of investigation; Galileo defending science against scriptural authority; the portraits and death masks of the poet Giacomo Leopardi. By the end of the semester, you’ll have the tools to notice, analyze, and understand the countless systems of meaning we live inside every day, largely without realizing it.
No prior background in linguistics or philosophy is required.

PQ: Taught in English.

Crosslistings: FNDL 27970, GNSE 27970/37970

Françoise de Graffigny’s novel, "Letters of a Peruvian Woman" (1747-1752), was one of the greatest critical and commercial successes of the French Enlightenment. By adopting the voice of a captured Incan princess, Graffigny presents a startling critique of European colonialism, social inequalities, and gender hierarchies, while also exploring the problems of cultural appropriation, translation, and the construction of individual identity. We will study the novel in dialogue with related readings from the period, including the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the feminist writings of Marie Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will also explore Graffigny's text  in relation to the evolution of the European novel and its representations of non-European societies (Montesquieu and Diderot), as well as indigenous accounts of colonialism (Garcilaso de la Vega). 

The course will be conducted in English. French readings will be available in both English translation and the original French. Students taking the course for FREN credit will read French works in French and complete written assignments in French.

Prerequisites
For French credit, FREN 20500, 20501 or an introductory-level literature course taught in French. No prerequisites for GNSE or FNDL students.

Crosslistings: CMLT 28302, LACS 28300, RDIN 28300

In this course, we will study key manifestations of the Afro-Hispanic Caribbean poetic tradition, from its earliest known expressions in the nineteenth century to present-day practices in hip-hop and reguetón. The course examines what is meant by Afro-Caribbean poetics, the tropological systems and thematic repertoires that have characterized it, how these have transformed over time, and the extent to which this poetry has served as a vehicle for exploring the cultural and racial identities of the region and as an instrument of resistance to various forms of extreme violence. The course will also introduce the concepts and methods necessary for poetic analysis. Materials to be studied will include the work of enslaved and free Afro-descendants in the late period of Spanish colonialism in the Americas (Plácido and J. F. Manzano); the experimental approaches of the Negrista avant-garde (Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos); feminist reformulations of these traditions (Nancy Morejón, Mayra Santos); and the music of contemporary artists such as Calle Trece, iLe, and Bad Bunny.

Taught in Spanish.

Prerequisites
SPAN 22005 is recommended.

Crosslistings: HLTH 28700

In this course, we will explore a selection of Spanish early modern texts that foreground disability and bodily difference in their narratives. Through our analysis of these texts, we will examine how early modern Spanish authors constructed and challenged notions of difference in relation to the cultural, social, and political context of their time. Moreover, we will reflect on how these representations, produced before the notion of a "normal body" came into being, inform our understanding of human diversity and social inclusion. Critical readings from disability literary studies will provide us with the necessary theoretical and conceptual tools for understanding and analyzing the texts. We will read literary works of diverse genres written by canonical authors of the period, such as Miguel de Cervantes, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Tirso de Molina, and Mateo Alemán.

Taught in Spanish.