Senior Sophister (SS)
Spanish Language
In the final year students attend two classes a week in written Spanish and one in spoken Spanish.
Medieval Literature (Dr García)
All TSM students attend the course on Medieval Literature. Over two terms, this course will analyse the three core texts of Medieval Spanish literature, each set within a comprehensive contextual background. The focus will be on the reception of the texts in contemporary criticism.
Prescribed Texts
Poema de Mio Cid, ed. Ian Michael (Castalia)
Juan Ruiz. Libro de Buen Amor, ed. G.B. Gybbon-Monypenny (Castalia)
Fernando de Rojas. La Celestina, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Cátedra)
Options
All students select two year-long options from the following:
The Writer as Exile (Dr Cosgrove)
Exile will be understood here, not only in the usual sense of physical displacement (though Cortázar, Nabokov, Beckett, and more recently, Saramago, celebrated and lived out such displacement), but, more importantly, in the sense of cultural and linguistic displacement, or what the critic George Steiner has described as the 'linguistic unhousedness' of the contemporary writer. The course will examine the representation of exilic angst and experiences of deracination in authors such as Joyce, Beckett and Camus, Vallejo and Saramago. But, in line with Steiner’s broader definition of ‘exile’, it will also attend to practices of writing that may be said to be associated with an exilic consciousness. Such practices are: cultivation of artifice in the literary form itself, ludic procedures and ironical strategies, all to be found in Borges and Cortázar. The notion of exile then will be amply understood within Steiner’s postulation that ‘the liberating function of art lies in its singular capacity to “dream against the world”, to “structure worlds that are otherwise”’.
Spain of the Three Cultures (Dr García)
It is the aim of this course to provide an insight into the complex historical, cultural and social circumstances that shaped the cultural phenomenon known as the Spain of the Three Cultures. The course will cover, among others, the following themes: the Visigothic kingdom and its significance in the shaping of the national conscience of the Iberian Christian kingdoms; Muslims in Iberia: the rise, glory and decline of Al-Andalus; the contribution of Jews to the cultural and economical development of both Muslim and Christian Iberia; consolidation of the Christian kingdoms and the Reconquista. Based on contemporary texts, the course will also explore the intellectual and material contribution of Christians, Muslims and Jews to the cultural climate of Medieval Spain, drawing particular attention to the interaction of these three ethnic and religious groups. The lectures will be complemented with visual documentation as well as sound recordings.
Don Quixote: Content and Context (Dr Brewer)
In this course we will read Don Quixote first and foremost as one of the greatest stories ever written: an exciting, surprising, comic, moving, emotional rollercoaster that, over 400 years after its original publication, remains startlingly, vibrantly alive. We will also situate Don Quixote in its proper literary and historical context so that we learn to appreciate it both as an innovative product of its time and place as well as a timeless work of universal relevance.
The Myths of Time: Spain 1930-1945 (Dr Bayó Belenguer)
The years 1930-1945 were among the most significant and controversial in the history of Spain. As dissension escalated into full-scale civil war the conflict became a prelude to the clash of ideologies that would tear Europe apart. The era will be examined from a variety of sources, including personal testimonies, memoirs, film documentaries, and propaganda, as well as through the fiction and cinema of the time and later, from both a national and international perspective. The canonical history of the period will be compared with these sources in the light of current debates about historical and collective memory.
Competing Representations of America in Enlightenment Spain (Dr O’Hagan)
America has been central to the literature and thought of the European Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, prominent Enlightenment thinkers debated the legitimacy of the New World conquest and even speculated on whether it would have been better if the New World had never been discovered at all. It is therefore a curious fact that the role of America in Spanish Enlightenment literature should have received such scant critical attention, especially when it is remembered that it was during the eighteenth century that the Spanish American empire – the largest colonial power in the world at this time – began to falter. It is the aim of this course to redress the critical neglect of America at such a crucial moment in the history of Spanish imperialism by re-reading a range of eighteenth-century texts (both fictional and non-fictional) against the politico-colonial context of Enlightenment Europe. Through a detailed and chronological analysis of the set texts, it will be revealed that the need to defend Spain’s New World record in Europe prompted a rhetorical crisis in Spain as writers scrambled for the most effective way to defend Spain. The effectiveness of their rhetoric will be examined, as will the extent to which Spain’s preoccupation with the defence of her American conquest led to the neglect, in Spain, of the popular Enlightenment myth of America.
Literature, Cinema, and Metamorphosis (Dr Bayó Belenguer)
The interrelationship between Spanish fiction and cinema has been particularly fruitful for some sixty years and the principal objective of the course is to study a selection of literary genres and the film versions, adaptations, re-creations or variations of these texts in the light of the literary and film debate of how images ‘translate’ text. A major focus will be how the narrative is constructed in both media, and how the 'convergencias' and 'divergencias', ‘cruces’ and ‘diálogos’ between them have continued to influence and modify one another.
The Languages of Spain and Latin America (Dr García)
The course will be divided into two sections as follows:
(1) The first section of the course will introduce students to the main theories of Romance Linguistics. These lectures will also provide a comparative description of the family of Romance languages, backed up with textual material and various sound recordings.
(2) In its second part, the course will analyse the main dialects of Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula and the American Continent. Attention will be drawn to the history and methodology of Dialectology as a linguistic discipline. In addition to the main Spanish dialects, creoles and mixed-languages evolved on the basis of Spanish will also be considered.