Graduate Courses

SPAN 239A | Instructor: Luis Avilés
This course will focus on the teaching of literature and culture. It is designed specifically for graduate students who would like to continue in a teaching career. It will help students transition from graduate school to a teaching position at a college or university. The course has a theoretical component that seeks to work with the complexities of literature, why read or teach literature, and what is the relationship between literature and teaching from the perspective of both the teacher and student learners. The second part of the course will be more practical. It will require the preparation of lesson plans, come in contact with a diversity of teaching strategies, learn about syllabus preparation, and actually perform by teaching short texts in class. Students will be evaluated on a variety of activities (active participation, oral presentations, teaching performance, and a short final paper).

SPAN 265A | Instructor: Lillian Jones
This seminar is designed for all graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who are teaching a second language (L2), but particularly for those that are in their first year as a PhD or MA students at UCI. This course may also be of interest to other graduate students teaching an L2 in the School of Humanities.

This course equals one seminar that stretches over two quarters, with the first half in the spring quarter prior to beginning teaching and the second half in the fall. Although theory and practice will be integrated throughout both quarters, the first half of this course (SPAN 265A) is targeted to be more “theoretical”, introducing you to the most important theories, models and approaches of L2 development and teaching, while the second half (SPAN 265B) is more “practical,” in that it focuses on developing successful and effective teaching practices and techniques, linked closely to your first quarter teaching in the School of Humanities.

In today’s academy, a key component of a language profrofessional’s portfolio is what many job notices call “evidence of teaching excellence.” The first step in building this is becoming an outstanding university teacher. Teaching students to speak, understand, read and write in a new language, even if that language is a heritage language for some students, is immensely challenging, and qualitatively very different from teaching in English. In addition, helping students gain access to new cultures and new cultural perspectives in the institutional environment of the classroom adds a further dimension of difficulty for learners. This course supports instructors in meeting these challenges and refinding their teaching practice.

The overarching goals of the SPAN 265 A/B seminar are:
(i) provide language instructors with a working knowledge of second language acquisition; (ii) provide language instructors a working knowledge on research-informed, current approaches and best practices to language teaching and learning;
(iii) facilitate a space where instructors can develop effective teaching approaches and strategies, continuously building their toolkit for the evolving process of teaching language;
(iv) support the professionalization of language instructors by fostering theoretical and practical classroom knowledge and skills, developing teaching portfolios, and creating essential job market materials.

SPAN 270 | Instructor: Jacobo Sefamí
This is a course oriented towards graduate students, without prior experience as writers, interested in developing creative writing skills in Spanish (students who are already writers may find this course too basic). The course explores various kinds of writing, including fiction, non-fiction, autofiction, and perhaps poetry. It aims to promote the habit of creative writing through multiple exercises that could (or not) end in a major project. To this end, texts by well-known authors will be studied to illustrate their writing forms and strategies, with respect to specific techniques and practices. We will do thorough reviews of the texts prepared by the seminar participants. The objective will not be to judge the texts, but to become aware of the mechanisms of writing to be able to express oneself in an optimal way.

Note for students in the Spanish Department: This course will not count towards your 8 courses for the MA, or 8 courses for the PhD. It does count for your credits, in order to be a full time student

SPAN 239C | Instructor: Rocío Pichon-Rivière
Narrative medicine is an interdisciplinary field where anyone (literary authors and amateurs, health care professionals and patients alike, filmmakers and comic artists) tell stories about caregiving, illness, healing, and about living with disabilities. In this course we will read narrative medicine in order to critically examine contemporary notions of health and systems of care.
The term “narrative medicine” was originally coined to name a form of medical training that teaches literature under the assumption that medical students can become better listeners by learning how to analyze and tell stories. Narrative medicine also includes illness narratives told by patients. A demand for epistemic justice echoes the increasing attention paid to the knowledge patients have over their own bodies and conditions. And with it, the need to collect and study such narratives has become apparent to anyone interested in changing health systems and creating alternative webs of care. The notion of the patient expert is slowly gaining traction to reimagine who are the actors of health and healing in complex social and ecological systems.
Stories of illness (pathographies) can take form as literary narratives or poems, as comics (graphic pathographies), as films, and any other media or genre. In so many cases, the stories told by people living with disabilities took the form of brilliant essays, which led to the development of a discipline in its own right (disability studies) and a critical movement within it (disability justice) which today is leading the most interesting conversations in health humanities. The field that was once called “medical humanities” more recently grew into what is now called “health humanities” to include a diversity of perspectives, disciplines, and aesthetic practices that discuss health within but also without medical settings, and no longer centering the experiences of medical doctors. In this graduate seminar, we will discuss how narrative medicine can be analyzed from the perspective of health humanities and disability justice research. Some of the authors we will read are Kiese Makeba Laymon, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Jorge Luis Borges, Nehal El-Hadi, Jessica Hernández, Renato Rosaldo, Lisa Cooper, Rupa Marya & Raj Patel, Jasbir K. Puar, José Sbarra, and MK Czerwiec.

SPAN 260 | Instructor: Santiago Morales-Rivera
The sisterhood between poetry and song, words and sounds, literature and music have been the hallmark of most verbal compositions from Antiquity (Sumerian chants, Homeric poems, Hebrew psalms, etc.) to the beginnings of print culture in the Renaissance, when a profound transformation begins to take place in modern lyric due, among other things, to the invention of the printing press. Since singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the relationship between poetry and music has once again become among literature professors a controversial topic of discussion. Starting from some historians and thinkers who are key in the so-called literary sound studies (Ted Gioia, Ramón Andrés, Jacques Attali, Peter Sloterdijk, and Anna Snaith), we will examine the contribution made to 20th century poetry by several Latin American and Spanish singer-songwriters, such as Atahualpa Yupanqui, Violeta Parra, Agustín Lara, Víctor Jara, Silvio Rodríguez, Joan Manuel Serrat, Javier Krahe, Kiko Veneno or José Antonio Labordeta. The seminar will be conducted in Spanish.

SPAN 233 | Instructor: Viviane Mahieux
This course will cover literary and popular conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in Mexico, with emphasis on the late 19th to the early 20th century. Special attention will be paid to representations of figures such as the dandy and the decadent woman, revolutionary fighters and the soldadera, the flapper and the bohemian, as well as to episodes such as the “Baile de los 41” and the debates on the “feminization” of Mexican literature. Our readings will cover a range of inquiries surrounding the revolutionary struggle of 1910-1920. How do gender and sexuality shape the concept of citizenship? How is citizenship transformed and reimagined through a conflict such as the Revolution? How are categories such as gender and sexuality articulated in relation to nationhood?  How fixed and/or malleable are such categories?

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SPAN 270 | Instructor: Julio Torres
This course exposes students to the components of task-based language teaching with the aim to design language courses for specific purposes or the professions (e.g., business, healthcare). Specific topics include conducting a needs analysis to derive tasks, exploring different task features and conditions, designing task-based methodology, and addressing task-based assessment.

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SPAN 265 | Instructor: Lillian Jones

This seminar is intended for all graduate students in the School of Humanities who are teaching a second language (L2), but particularly those in their first year as Ph.D. or MA students at UCI. The course equals one seminar that stretches over two quarters, with the first half in the spring quarter prior to beginning teaching and the second half in the fall. Therefore, the first half is more “theoretical,” introducing you to the most important theories, models and approaches of L2 development and teaching and the second half is more “practical,” in that it focuses on developing successful and effective teaching practices and techniques, linked closely to your first quarter teaching in the School of Humanities. 

In today’s academy one of the most important aspects of a language professional’s portfolio is what many job notices call “evidence of teaching excellence.” The first step toward creating that evidence is to become an outstanding university teacher. Teaching students to speak, understand, read and write in a new language, even if that language is a heritage language for some students, is immensely challenging, and qualitatively very different from teaching in English. In addition, helping students gain access to new cultures and new cultural perspectives in the institutional environment of the classroom adds a further dimension of difficulty for learners.

SPAN 233 | Instructor: Jacobo Sefamí
This course will offer a panoramic view of Jewish writing in Latin America. After an introduction about the Jewish presence in Spain, and basic concepts of Judaism, it will study the experience of Crypto-Jews in New Spain, through the autobiography by Luis de Carvajal. Then, it will take The Jewish Gauchos (1910), by Alberto Gerchunoff, as a seminal book in this type of production. We will cover a variety of writers from different regions in Latin America, and literary genres, including novels, short stories, autobiography, autofiction, poems, essays, theater, and a few films, with authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Margo Glantz, Juan Gelman, José Kozer, Isaac Chocrón, Issac Goldemberg, Gloria Gervitz, Eduardo Halfon, Sabina Berman, Myriam Moscona, among others. 
Isaac Goldemberg’s large anthology, El gran libro de América judía, included 140 Jewish writers, and demonstrated a strong emergence of this type of literature, especially after the decade of 1990. Many studies and scholarship have also developed in the last years creating an important new phase in the panorama of the literature in Latin America.
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SPAN 220 | Instructor: Rocío Pichon-Rivière
This seminar studies recent vernacular theory produced by femme thinkers (trans and non-trans women) in Latin America and the Latinx diaspora. Vernacular theory is a form of thinking that takes place in the margins of academia, in colloquial when not profane language, often resorting to multimedia and live performance—utilizing the aesthetics of art forms to reimagine the concepts that organize social and political experience in order to transform it.
The course begins with an archive of recent protest songs and viral transnational performances to visualize the massive dimension of the feminist movement in contemporary Latin America and to listen to the rhythm and voices that compose its sonic landscape. The syllabus examines as well the intellectual labor of trans thinkers in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil and their ambivalent relations with contemporary feminist movements. In conversation with Black, decolonial, and communitarian feminists in Latin America, this course interrogates how “trans” and “feminism” can ethically come together, in light of Marlene Wayar’s travesti call to not be reduced to an intersectional chapter of feminist theory. Going beyond the necropolitics of police brutality, colonialism, and femicides that often dictate the urgency of both feminism and trans activism in Latin America, this syllabus focuses on the creative theorizing and transformative practices that reimagine the social on the basis of care and collective liberation.
Authors include: Lohana Berkins, Moira Millán, Graciela Huinao, Krudas Cubensi, Renee Goust, Claudia Rodriguez, Camila Sosa Villada, Marlene Wayar, Beatriz Nascimento, Julieta Paredes, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Linn da Quebrada, Erica Malunguinho, and Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez.
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SPAN 239A | Instructor: Luis Avilés
The course will explore a group of topics related to language, subjectivity, and recognition. Students will explore and reflect on a group of what can be called ethical categories that have to do with the self, discourse, and contact with others. The approach will be theoretical, with illustrative examples from literature, painting, possibly film. How do humans give accounts of themselves to others? How do they build trust and confidence? How do they manage insecurity? How do they meet strangers and recognize each other? What is the relationship between the self and their inner truth? These are some of the questions that will guide the course. Readings will include essays by Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Judith Butler, Paul Ricoeur, Agamben, Derrida, and Luhmann. Students will need to write a research paper and deliver oral presentations.
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SPAN 233 | Instructor: Horacio Legrás
In this course, we will engage in a close reading of the later prose production of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. We will read Pizarnik in close connection to the role of the work of art in post-avant-garde aesthetics, and more concretely in reference to theories of literature (Barthes, Bataille, Blanchot) that present themselves as post-humanist.

SPAN 220 | Instructor: Viviane Mahieux
This seminar offers an overview of the various collective literary and artistic movements that surged in 1920s and 1930s Europe, Spanish-America, and Brazil. Course material draws from literature, painting, photography and serial publications. We delve into the cultural and political implications of the avant-gardes in a transatlantic context, with emphasis on notions of center and periphery, imitation and parody, art and politics. Particular attention is given to the movement of people, texts, art and ideas between France and Mexico, especially in the context of Surrealism. An important aim of the course is to introduce students to archival research and to the study of collective publications (such as magazines) as rich and complex sources that can offer insights into cultural movements that cannot be garnered from the focused study of a given text or image taken out of its material context.
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SPAN 239A | Instructor: Luis Avilés
The course will explore Cervantes' work along with some of the most relevant and recent reflections on literature and literary theory. Although some classical ideas that are highly relevant in order to understand Cervantes' work will be studied (texts from Plato and Aristotle), the bulk of the readings are intended to explore more recent discussions on fictional analysis. Students will read significant chapters of Don Quijote and other works written by Cervantes, along with theoretical works dealing with poetics, character, narrative, authorship, and event, among other topics. Despite the appearance of a formal approach to these topics, the class will also explore issues related to race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as more ethical and political reflections by philosophers and scholars such as Foucault, Rancière, Agamben, Bal, and Felski. Students will be required to deliver oral reports and write a final paper.

SPAN 239C | Instructor: David Colmenares
Before the European invasion, the American continent was a vast inscribed surface. Peoples throughout the continent inscribed, incised, scarred and painted animal and human skin, stones, deserts, mountains, and even the sky. Many of these practices survived and new ones arose during the Colonial period, and have continued to evolve until the present day. Long dismissed as deficient or underdeveloped writing systems vis-a-vis the purported superiority of alphabetic writing, these alternative literacies stand today as challenges to Western onto-theology and logocentrism. By following the social life of inscribed lines as they interlace surfaces, bodies, landscapes and topographies, the course dialogues with the anthropology of images (Aby Warburg, Carlo Severi), poststructuralist critical theory (Gilles Deleuze, Andrea Bachner), Indigenous studies and poetics (Edgar García) and the anthropology of lines and symmetry (Tim Ingold, Dorothy K. Washburn). We examine these and other theoretical and philosophical responses elicited by the encounter with non-glottographic graphism throughout the Americas, including Mesoamerican pictorial codices, Andean quipu or knotted strings, Nazca geoglyphs in southern Peru, modern Kuna pictography in Panama, abstract body marks among Amazonian “graphic peoples,” Anishinaabe pictography, and Plains ledger art. At the end of the course, we turn our attention to the work of contemporary artists and poets, including Raúl Zurita (b. 1950) , who inscribed his poetry across the Chilean sky and deserts, and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948), who continues to explore the creative potentials of the quipu.

SPAN 233 | Instructor: Jacobo Sefamí
This course will be devoted to two major trends in contemporary Latin America: Surrealism and political and colloquial poetry. We will examine the work of poets linked to those tendencies, such as Octavio Paz, Nicanor Parra, César Moro, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Gonzalo Rojas, Ernesto Cardenal, Juan Gelman, Alejandra Pizarnik, José Emilio Pacheco. After a review of the Avant-Garde movements, we will concentrate on Surrealist manifestoes and their influence on Lain American literary journals in Argentina, Perú, and Chile. We will also study the antipoetry of Nicanor Parra, and the political poetry developed by Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, and the use of colloquialism in other countries.This course will be devoted to two major trends in contemporary Latin America: Surrealism and political and colloquial poetry. We will examine the work of poets linked to those tendencies, such as Octavio Paz, Nicanor Parra, César Moro, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Gonzalo Rojas, Ernesto Cardenal, Juan Gelman, Alejandra Pizarnik, José Emilio Pacheco. After a review of the Avant-Garde movements, we will concentrate on Surrealist manifestoes and their influence on Lain American literary journals in Argentina, Perú, and Chile. We will also study the antipoetry of Nicanor Parra, and the political poetry developed by Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua, and the use of colloquialism in other countries.

SPAN 260 | Instructor: Santiago Morales-Rivera
A reflection on cynicism as the dominant mode of thinking in Western culture after 1968's events (Prague, Berkeley, Paris,
and Tlatelolco), this seminar analyzes works written by some of the most irreverent authors in contemporary Spain and Latin
America, such as Fernando Vallejo, Agustín García Calvo, Pedro Lemebel, Félix de Azúa, Rodolfo Fogwill, Rafael Sánchez
Ferlosio, Fernando Savater, and Antonio Escohotado, among others.

SPAN 220 | Instructor: Gonzalo Navajas
An in-depth analysis of the intellectual history of the twentieth century centering on Spain and Europe and focusing on the dialectical exchanges of the major ideological paradigms that have shaped the ideas of the century and have determined the emergence and evolution of historical events.  High Modernism, Existentialism, Utopian Thought, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism are the central theories to be studied alongside practical texts that will be used to verify and contrast the different theoretical proposals.  The course will work toward the configuration of a post-utopian model of aesthetics and social ethics.  The course includes literary, philosophical, and historical texts as well as visual materials.

SPAN 233 | Instructor: Jacobo Sefamí
This course aims at studying 20th and 21st Mexican poetry, analyzing major authors as well as current trends. It starts with a review of prior production (an overall review that includes Sor Juana and Modernismo), then examines the poetry of Ramón López Velarde and José Juan Tablada, as the source of modern poetry in Mexico. It moves to the Avant-Garde, through the Contemporáneos group (Xavier Villaurrutia, José Gorostiza, and others) and the Estridentistas (Manuel Maples Arce). After that, it considers the poetry by Octavio Paz and Efraín Huerta. Then, we'll study the generation of the 1960s, including Jaime Sabines and Rosario Castellanos, and the irony of José Emilio Pacheco. For end of 20th century, we will examine poets born in the 1940s, such as Elsa Cross, Gloria Gervitz, and David Huerta; and in the 1950s, with Coral Bracho, and Myriam Moscona. For the 21st century, in addition to
contemporary poetry in indigenous languages (Natalia Toledo, Irma Pineda), we will consider specific interests from the seminar participants, and develop the curriculum accordingly.

SPAN 239A | Instructor: Luis Avilés
This course will focus on friendship as one of the tools by which bonds of solidarity can unite groups and sometimes cultures into political communities able to live alongside each other. At a time when concerns
about security and immunity create distance and mistrust among nations and peoples, thinking on topics that involve friendship, community, and trust become more important. The course will begin by establishing the
grounds for the anthropogenic need for sharing and living together. Afterwards, the topic of friendship will be introduced through new scientific evidence of the existence of friendship among non-human animals. By establishing some of the main examples of biological and social benefits of friendship among animals (coupled with the need for protection and care), we can then reflect on the social functions of friendship in the context of human society. Several authors (from classical times to our present day) will be read, from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plutarch to Butler, Agamben, and Esposito. The course will explore how friendship has a direct relation to other working keywords, such as community, generosity, and vulnerability. The course will study examples of literary texts of the Spanish early modern period that emphasize what bonds people together in non-violent exchanges, along
with some of its limitations.
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SPAN 220 | Instructor: Ivette Hernández-Torres
The course will explore written examples of the Hispanic Caribbean in order to focus on topics such as cultural uncertainties, transformations and, at times, a contextual exhaustion and the ruin affecting the Archipelago of islands. Students will analyze contemporary literary examples, films, and recent critical works that will help recuperate a space of reflection on the contemporary Caribbean. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussion, prepare oral reports, and write a final research paper.
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SPAN 260 | Instructor: Horaio Legrás
This course maps the transformation of the notion of jouissance from a mostly aesthetic or anthropological reference in the 1960s (Bataille, Barthes) to the dominant form of the social link (and of its destruction) in the early twenty-first century. In the first part of this course, we will reconstitute the different approximations to the question of jouissance in the work of Jacques Lacan (with special emphasis on Seminars 7, 16, 17, 20 and the "Other Ecrits"). The second part of the class attends to post-Lacanian approaches that connect the development of late capitalism (neo-liberalism, consumerism) to subjective changes which have deeply altered the subjects of emancipation, politics and satisfaction. In addition to the authors mentioned in the description, the course includes readings by Rita Laura Segato (The War Against Women), Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, J.A. Miller et.al. The Time of Ordinary Psychoses, Samo Tomsic, (The labour of Enjoyment), and essays/chapters by Anne Dufourmantelle, Slavoj Žižek, Colette Soler, Stijn Vanheule, Tod McGowan and Bert Olivier.

SPAN 233 | Instructor: Viviane Mahieux
This seminar brings together select texts on urban theory with chronicles that evidence diverse approximations to Latin American cities. The idea is not to use theory as a lens through which to read literary chronicles, but rather, to put in conversation these two modes of thought. Oftentimes, a chronicle might yield an abstract approach to the city, while a text that we read for its theoretical concepts can also be grounded in a concrete urban experience. Although the seminar will mostly follow a chronological order, readings will be grouped according to their conceptual implications, for instance: urban journeys and public identities, memory sites and practices, the city as a media spectacle and the narrative overflow of the megalopolis.

SPAN 260 | Instructor: Gonzalo Navajas
Exile, in its various forms and versions, has been a key component of modern literature.  In the introductory segment of the course, we will consider some cases of forced exile due to circumstances, external to the author, that emerged because of ideological and political confrontations and conflicts.  However, the nucleus of the course focuses on the notion of self-exile as the defining position of the writer that opts for deliberately cutting his/her ties with the surrounding social and cultural environment making of that self-imposed separation the main thrust of his/her work. We will analyze texts that emphasize the critical and often merciless exposure of the secret aspects of the self with the purpose of uncovering the false alibis of the writer’s conscience as well as those around him/her.  The works of Pedro Salinas, Virginia Woolf, Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Juan Goytisolo, Jean Genet, and Javier Cercas provide the central illustrations of this exploration of the self. Additionally, the course will consider the narrative strategies that can be followed in the challenging process of transferring the personal traumatic experience of self-exile to the specific conceptual and technical demands of fictional texts. This approach will give an opportunity to the students with an interest in creative writing to hone their own skills in that area of work.

SPAN 235 | Instructor: Ivette Hernández-Torres
This course will explore the theoretical, religious, and political discourses on war and ethics that were instrumental during the Early
Modern period, and the colonization of the Americas. The main objective is to explore some of the most significant sources on war (understood from an ethical perspective), and how they manifested themselves in literature, humanistic thought, art, and historical texts. The goal of the course is to view these topics in a European and transatlantic perspective. Students will read representative texts dealing with war and ethics, written by authors such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Erasmus, Vitoria, Clausewitz, Kant, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and others. Several literary examples will also be explored, including sections of La Araucana, Historia de la monja alférez, Las Casas, and Sepúlveda, among others. Some of the major topics that will be discussed are: the tradition of just war theory, the differences between a soldier and a commander, cleverness or malicia, prudence, the nature of courage, violence and cruelty, visual representations of war, and spectatorship. Students are required to give oral presentations, and write a final research paper.

SPAN 239C | Instructor: Horacio Legrás
Heidegger says that we recognize the principles that organize a time only when these principles have lost their grip on the present. The idea for this class confirms but also contradicts this affirmation. In this course, I argue that goce (jouissance in French, enjoyment in English) represents a powerful tool for a retrospective understanding of Latin American modernity but an unavoidable notion for describing some of the most novel and relevant cultural articulations of our present. In this class, we will tackle the issue of jouissance at three different levels: as an economy of passions (Bataille, Lacan), as a revelation of the fundamental (that is, not merely aesthetic) subversion of national languages, and as a new, unavoidable term, in the political grammar of the present. Theoretical readings include essays and excerpts from R. Barthes, G. Bataille, J. Lacan, A. Dufourmantelle among others. Primary material includes, Severo Sarduy, De donde son los cantantes (and essays), Haroldo de Campos, Galáxias, C. Lispector, La pasión segun G.H., Alejandra Pizarnik, “La condesa sangrienta” and poems, Salvador Elizondo, Farabeuf and three movies by Lucrecia Martel: La ciénaga, La mujer sin cabeza and La niña santa.