The course offers students the possibility of learning and putting into practice the advanced oral skills necessary to be able to handle oral exposition and discussion in a well-organized and rhetorically correct Spanish. The class will focus on such skills as debating, interviewing, and role-playing, among others. Topics will cover current cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues in the Hispanic world.

This course will equip students of Spanish with a variety of skills that prepare them for upper-division courses. Specific areas of study will include introduction to literary genres and movements; practice in critical reading and writing; study of figures of speech, rhetoric, and style; presentation of oral reports; use of library resources. In addition, students acquire basic knowledge of the geography, history, and culture of the Hispanic world.

This course will equip students of Spanish with a variety of skills that prepare them for upper-division courses. Specific areas of study will include introduction to literary genres and movements; practice in critical reading and writing; study of figures of speech, rhetoric, and style; presentation of oral reports; use of library resources. In addition, students acquire basic knowledge of the geography, history, and culture of the Hispanic world.

Who are we? This is the question that Latin American writers, artists, philosophers and politicians have attempted to answer through fiction, nonfiction, visual arts, and film. Through representative cultural texts from figures such as D. F. Sarmiento, Jos Martí, Gabriela Mistral, Marta Rojas, and Hugo Chávez, we will explore discourses of identity, different sociopolitical positions, and the representation of race and gender in the construction of 'latinoamericanidad.'

In 1492, the Spanish conquest forever changed indigenous America and created a 'new' world. European imperial discourses collided with resistance movements and the emerging voices of oppressed peoples, including indigenous communities, women, and mestizos. This course traces the tensions between imperialist and resistance discourses during both the colonial period and today. We will analyze the 'fighting words' that consolidated the Spanish empire and later opened the path to Latin American independence.

Are you avant-garde? To be 'avant-garde' once meant to be 'ahead of your time' or to be situated along the cutting edge of an artistic or political movement. In the first part of the twentieth-century, a cadre of artists in Europe as well as in Latin America put forward subversive critiques of art by considering innovative form and content as political tools for change. In this class we will read avant-garde artists from Spain and Latin America alike to explore the productive tensions between peninsular and Latin American trends as well as between art and activism, theory and practice.