| Viewing Modern Barcelona | Since it hosted the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona quickly became one of the world’s most fashionable cities. An important Western Mediterranean port some 100 miles South of France and a commuter flight away from Milan or Rome, Barcelona is at the crossroads of an active traffic of goods, people, and cultures. This cosmopolitan city is also the capital of Catalonia, home to an old European culture. A bilingual city with a postindustrial economy based on tourism and advanced research, Barcelona combines postmodern features with a long, complex history: Iberian, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, Jewish, Occitan, and Spanish peoples settled here, and, of course, the Catalans, who have shaped the region’s culture for the last 1000 years.
This interdisciplinary seminar will acquaint students with salient aspects of the history of this city, its role in Spain’s modernization and democratization as well as its tensions with the state. Emphasis will be placed on the modern period, from the tearing down of the ancient walls and the city’s expansion in the mid-nineteenth century to the Olympic and post-Olympic definition of public space. Attention will be given to city planning, the architecture of Gaudí, the art work of Picasso and Dalí, popular music and literature about the city. | Aut |
| Survey of Modern Iberian Literature | 1800 to the present. Topics include: romanticism; realism and its variants; the turn of the century; modernism and the avant garde; the Civil War; and the second half of the 20th century. Authors may include Mariano José de Larra, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, Benito Pérez Galdós, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Joan Maragall, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Salvador Espriu.. GER:DB-Hum
| Aut |
| The Films of Pedro Almodóvar | The evolution of Spain’s most recognizable director from marginal, transgressive amateur cinema to polished visual style. The deliberate blurring of frontiers between mass and high culture; his use of metafilmic allusions and attention to sexuality, extreme experiences, and marginal characters. From his early work to recent award-winning films. Prerequisite: spoken Spanish.
GER:DB-Hum
| Spr |
| Josep Pla: From Journalism to Literature | In the 1920s and 30s journalism gave the tone to a “normalized” Catalan culture, whose distinctive traits were a cosmopolitan outlook and a high degree of professionalism. Josep Pla, arguably the most important Catalan prose writer of the 20th century, began his career in this milieu, working for years as press correspondent in various European cities, before he retired to write his massive oeuvre in his family’s farmhouse after the Spanish Civil War. Pla’s works grow from an underbrush of quality journalism that, long neglected, throws light on the social and political situation of the 1920s and 30s and constitutes an unsurpassed civilizational referent for today’s culture wars. Some of the journalists studied are Eugeni d’Ors, Eugeni Xammar, and Gaziel. The core of the seminar, however, will be the works of Josep Pla. Readings in Catalan will be available in Spanish, but students will be responsible for ordering the texts in the preferred version. The reading list will be available in the Fall
| Win |
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