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Description:
This course provides a survey of the representation of Spain in Anglo-American letters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will analyze major writings by such authors as Washington Irving, Henry W. Longfellow, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Gerald Brenan, and Richard Wright (alongside other texts by lesser known authors) in order to discuss the most prevalent commonplaces on Spain present in the fiction and the travel writings from this period. The course will examine the role that these texts have played in disseminating a slanted view of things Spanish, and more specifically it will analyze why this view has had such a lasting influence and often appears closely connected to certain settings and historical events. In another strand, students will also gain some knowledge of the concepts required to analyze the main rhetorical conventions present in travel narratives.
Methodology:
This course will be taught in English and will combine introductory lectures, discussions, student presentations, film screenings and a visit to an exhibition. The reading assignments will all be in English and the films both in English and in Spanish (with English subtitles).
Class Requirements and Assessment:
The final grade will take into account class participation (15%), a midterm exam (25%), a term paper to be presented in class (20%), and a final exam (40%).
Content:
Unit 1: Openings: Spain in the Travel Writings of the Enlightenment.
Unit 2: A Place in the South: the Rise of Romantic Spain.
Unit 3: Granada and Orientalism: Washington Irving.
Unit 4: Neglected Voices: Women Travel Writers in Spain.
Unit 5: Into the Twentieth Century: Hemingway and Waugh.
Unit 6: The Spanish Civil War: George Orwell.
Unit 7: Nostalgia and the Advent of Tourism: Gerald Brenan.
Unit 8: The "New" Spain: Stale versus Contemporary Views.
Required Readings:
- Washington Irving, The Alhambra (1832)
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
-George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)
- Gerald Brenan, South from Granada (1957)
- Anthology of Texts (coursepack)