Updated on July 23, 2024.
Not all courses listed below are offered each year. For courses that are currently offered, please see Current Graduate Courses.
1000 SERIES - LINGUISTICS
SPA1053H: History of the Spanish Language
A detailed study of the external and internal history of the language. Topics treated: a brief outline of factors involved in linguistic evolution and language formation; fragmentation of Hispano-Latin into several Romance dialects; preliterary Spanish; medieval Spanish; formation of the literary language and the evolution of modern standards. The main features of the phonetic evolution from Latin to Spanish are studied with emphasis on the formation of speech sounds and the factors which spearheaded the mutations. It should be noted that the references to Latin are of a general nature and no formal knowledge of this language is required.
SPA1080H: Descriptive Grammar of Spanish
This course is designed for future teachers of Spanish who wish to strengthen their grammatical background. We will review traditional topics of Spanish grammar such as the verbal and pronominal systems, the two copula verbs, and issues on subordinate clauses. The course will focus on reflection on grammatical structures and detailed analyses of structures based on current analytic approaches to grammar. It will help students develop critical thinking and acquire conceptual tools to develop pedagogical strategies in the foreign language classroom, including basic form oriented lessons and error analysis.
Target audience: MA and Ph.D. students who have not taken a comparable course; not recommended for graduate students in Hispanic Linguistics.
SPA1081H: Structure of Spanish
Explore the foundations of the Spanish simple and complex sentences, with particular interest in grammatical topics of pedagogical interest. This course provides an introduction to the formal analysis of language applied to the basic grammatical construction of Spanish, covering topics in Spanish morphology (the analysis of word structure), Spanish syntax (the analysis of sentence structure) and semantics (the study of sentence and word meanings). Classroom activities focus on the analysis of actual language use, and the explanations for why speakers do what they do, rather than on prescriptive or stylistic approaches to grammar. Students will prepare a research project on one aspect of Spanish grammar of potential pedagogical interest.
SPA1082H: Sociolinguistics of Spanish
This course is conceived as an introduction to the study of linguistic variation across the Spanish speaking world. It covers the central issues in phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation, analyzed from a geographical as well as from a social point of view.
SPA1084H: Experimental Approaches to Hispanic Linguistics
This course introduces students to experimental approaches in linguistics, with a special focus on central topics in Hispanic linguistics. It will cover all aspects of experimentation, including hypothesis development, experimental design, and data-collection techniques. The course will also cover discussion and training in presentation of experimental results. Students will receive training in the use of different experimental and corpus analysis techniques and will discuss paradigmatic examples of research papers in the areas of phonetics-phonology and morpho-syntax. Students will undertake empirical research on a theoretically relevant dimension of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics of (any variety of) Spanish or Portuguese. This course is taught in English.
SPA1089H: Spanish Morphosyntax
This seminar focuses on the internal structure of words and sentences. It will serve as an introduction to the main topics and theoretical discussions in Spanish morphology and aspects of syntax. Some of the topics to be covered include noun and verbal morphology, and opaque clitics. The focus on syntax will be on the structure of the verbal phrase, case theory and movement. The course presupposes some familiarity with formal linguistics and basic grammatical notions.
This graduate course compliments other graduate courses in Spanish linguistic by covering the two other core areas of grammar: morphology and syntax. It also serves as the descriptive and theoretical basis for courses on acquisition and applied linguistics.
Prerequisites: LIN100Y or permission of the instructor.
SPA1090H: Second Language Speech Learning
This course aims to provide students with theoretical background and experimental experience in second language speech learning. After providing a brief overview of second language (L2) models of speech learning and discussing the factors affecting L2 speech perception and production, the course will focus on the effects of phonetic training on the perception and production of L2 segmentals and suprasegmentals with L1-L2 language pairs that will include Spanish as the target language or the native language. The course will include a laboratory component in which students will develop skills in experimental design and data analysis. Taught in English.
SPA1091H: Second Language Acquisition of Portuguese and Spanish
The course introduces students to the main findings, theoretical models, and research methods in the field of second language acquisition and it surveys general issues such as the role of internal (e.g., native language, age) and external (e.g., input, context of learning) factors on second language development. The principal aim of the course is to promote discussion and critical reflection about the acquisition of Portuguese and Spanish as non-native languages and analyse phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic and lexical aspects in the linguistic performance of bilingual speakers and learners of Portuguese and Spanish as a second language. The experimental component of the course provides students with experience in designing and carrying out studies in second language acquisition. Taught in English.
SPA1092H: Portuguese and Spanish Semantics
This course is an introduction to semantics both from a formal and an experimental perspective. We will discuss a variety of topics in dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, including bare nominals, definiteness, genericity, adjectives, ser and estar, modality and number in the nominal and verbal domain. Students will gain a solid understanding of the core issues in formal and experimental semantics and will be introduced to the design and realization of a project in this field.
SPA1093H: Linguistics in Spanish
The basic concepts and analytic tools of linguistics applied to the study of Spanish, with a focus on the Spanish phonological, morphological, and syntactic systems. Theoretical discussion and practical exercises in analytic techniques.
SPA1094H: Spanish Bilingualism
This course aims to present fundamental issues on Spanish bilingualism from three different perspectives: linguistic, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic. The course aims to explore implications of linguistic theory for the study of bilingual populations. Activities include: analysis of typical language contact phenomena with materials from Spanish, case studies of Spanish in contact, evaluation of results on the psychological consequences of bilingualism, and conducting and reporting on an empirical study on a topic to be determined in consultation with the instructor.
SPA1096H: From Reflective Planning to Delivery in Language Teaching
This course is designed to guide reflection on what informs the decisions made for the planning, management and delivery of academic projects, with an emphasis on language teaching. We will focus on core skills that students will adapt and apply to various contexts and projects. These include delivery-related skills (public speaking, effective communication, time management), and planning and management skills (basic information management and analysis, project management, assessment of outcomes, problem solving). We will start by considering pedagogy as a decision-making process, and then will explore some related ideas that support it: content knowledge, content representation, professional identity, and recontextualization.
SPA1101H: Topics on the Acquisition of Spanish
This course will be an introduction to research on language acquisition from the perspective of generative grammar. We will explore the first and second language acquisition of aspects of Spanish syntax that are determined by lexical structure and lexical parameters. Students will be expected to participate in class discussion and activities and to present a report and a research paper on an experimental study on a topic to be determined in consultation with the instructor.
SPA1104H: Experimental Approaches to Sound Variation and Change
This course is intended to provide students with practical experience in undertaking laboratory research in Romance phonetics and phonology. This will be accomplished by having students undertake an experimental study of a phenomenon of their choice. Each class will involve an hour-long seminar, followed by an hour of hands-on experience in the lab. Discussion will center on foundational papers in experimental approaches to the study of segmental and prosodic phenomena.
SPA1150H: Directed Research in Hispanic Linguistics
This course is a guided introduction to the experimental research process, including hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data gathering, statistical analysis of data and writing in the social sciences. Students will conduct a full-sized study on the acquisition of Spanish or another Romance language. The course aims to explore implications of syntactic theory for language development. Background in graduate level syntax or morphology is required.
JRL1101H: Topics in Romance Laboratory Phonetics and Phonology I: Theory
This course is designed to introduce students to laboratory approaches to phonetics and phonology using examples from Romance, particularly French and Spanish. We will begin by providing the necessary theoretical background to undertake experimental studies via an overview of laboratory phonology, Optimality Theory, the phonetics-phonology interface, and phonetic theories of speech production and perception. Once presented, these theories will be illustrated with topics in first and second language acquisition, and sound variation and change.
2000 SERIES - LITERATURE
This seminar addresses the aesthetics and ethics of passion in Western culture from classical antiquity to the early modern period, with a special focus on a selection of Castilian literature written between the 15th and the 17th centuries. Structures of power in the representations of love will be explored through the rhetoric of passion, a key concept for comprehending premodern amorous literature. In addition to medieval and early modern poetry and prose, we will read philosophical, theological and medical literature, which were essential parts of institutional discourses of the period. These texts will be read along current theories in order to examine the ways in which discourses about sexuality, love and gender have contributed to the conceptualizations of masculine and feminine subjectivities in premodern, as well as in our contemporary, culture.
SPA2152H: Cervantes' Don Quixote
This seminar will encourage a close reading of Don Quijote (1605/1615) while keeping in mind its medieval and renaissance literary intertexts, and the influence of the literary and socio-cultural debates and events that inform the text. Established and current scholarship will be critically examined to promote inquiry on the textual issues and a reflection on the state of the Quijote studies.
SPA2160H: Transatlantic Hispanic Baroque
Study of the 17th century Transatlantic Hispanic world that, after the epoch of the discovery and expansion in the 16th century, faces economic and political downfall. This downfall is accompanied by a social and spiritual crisis that results in the culture of baroque. Readings include classical theories of the baroque, of the 20th century Latin American neobaroque, and of postmodernism. These theories serve as a backdrop to the reading of a selection of literary texts by such authors as Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, Sor Juana, Sigüenza y Góngora, Gracián, Zayas and Calderón, and a selection of 20th century neobaroque Latin American authors.
SPA2186H: House, Home and Dwelling in Latin America
The course explores forms of domesticity, the politics of domestic labour, stories of dwelling, and figures of the house in Latin American culture. We will explore how the household has been portrayed in Latin American culture as a contested node in a larger network of social, political, cultural, and physical interactions. Challenging its usual association with familiarity and the family, the home will be approached as a multi-layered and multi-species place that defies conceptions of the proper. Concepts such as biopolitics, necropolitics, social reproduction, and more-than-human relations will guide our discussions of selected films and literary texts. Some of the topics we will examine are the home as an allegorical figure for the nation in 19th century literature; representations of domestic labour and the legacies of slavery; house and social utopia in modernist architecture; queer homes and multi-species households in literature and film; notions of possession and dispossession and their relationships to writing and film; occupations, experiments in communal living, and the homeless workers movement; and images from quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.
SPA2291H: The Urban Experience in Spain
This course will examine the Spanish urban experience between the late 1800s and the present day. While our main focus will be on treatments of the city in novels, our literary approach will be further informed by considerations of other media as well as by theories relating to urbanism and architecture. Each student will be responsible for a seminar presentation and a research project. Spain's principal metropolises, Barcelona and Madrid, will be the primary (although not exclusive) subjects of this course.
Authors and critics studied may include: Pérez Galdós, Mendoza, Martín-Santos, Rodoreda, Torres, Chacel, Sagarra, Ors, Espina, Gómez de la Serna, Sagarra, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer, Lefebvre, Harvey, Davis, and Soja.
SPA2292H: New Ruralism and Spain
Over the past twenty years, cultural studies in Spain have primarily focused on cities and the urban experience. This interdisciplinary course will take a new tack and explore both theoretical conceptions of “the rural” and cultural production and practices related to it. From early 20th century literary engagements with Spain’s rural areas through to conceptual art dealing with themes of ruin and decay, and more recent insights from tourism and food studies, this course will challenge established notions of rural cultural production. At the same time, given the rise of regionalism beyond traditional nationalisms, the course will pay close attention to the Spanish state’s plural nature. Genres and areas of study will include: essay, poetry, novel, documentary, feature film, gastronomy and tourism studies.
SPA2305H: Auteurism in Spanish Cinema
This seminar will examine the notion of auteurship in cinema as it relates to Spanish film production. We will consider different Spanish film auteurs, including Buñuel, Berlanga, Bardem, Saura, Martin Patino, Almodovar, Bigas Luna, Miro, and Medem. Specific consideration of how the socio-cultural horizon of their respective periods and spectatorship contribute to their status as "auteurs" will be made, in addition to analyses of such fundamental elements as mise-en-scene and thematic preoccupations in their cinema. This seminar will have a strong theoretical component and will contribute to students' film literacy.
SPA2352H: Modern Spanish Drama and its Traditions
Major works of 20th century Spanish drama, studied in relation to influential plays from the formative period of the Spanish theatrical tradition (1580-1680). Parallel readings of modern and early modern plays, with a focus on modernist forms of drama, theatre and the visual arts, and the dramatic uses of popular traditions. Particular attention will be given to early modern precedents for modernist experimentation with the genres and techniques of Spanish theatre. Playwrights to be studied will include Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Valle-Inclán, Lorca, Alberti, and Buero Vallejo.
SPA2400H: Topics in Latin American Culture and Literary Cultures
This course offers an in-depth exploration of a specific topic in Latin American literature and culture. The focus of the course will vary each time it is taught and will be determined by the instructor in accordance with their research interests.
SPA2404H: The Latin American Novel
The narratives selected for this course are deeply involved with matters of the relationship between literatures and the world and they bear witness to a crisis in the mimetic contract that affects: 1) the connections between the work and the referential world; 2) the relationship between different levels and components of fictions, and 3) the ongoing dialogue with other works. Readings may include fictions from a range of historical periods of the 20th and 21st centuries, and from diverse national and transnational origins, as well as those that engage with other genres and political or aesthetic practices.
SPA2406H: Latin American Narratives of Resistance
Latin American narratives of resistance have been produced during every stage of historical development of the region, from the early 16th century period of explorations and conquest to our 21st century era of post, trans, and hyper-national enterprises. Contemporary narratives of resistance are intrinsically related to diverse causes such as national liberation struggles, indigenous movements, global and environmental concerns, identity politics, animal rights and accessibility. The seminar will focus primarily on narratives from the region of Latin America known as the Bolivarian nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, and Venezuela.
We will study narratives of resistance as expressed through essays, manifestos and declarations, testimonios, poetry, song lyrics, short stories, novels, documentaries, and film.
SPA2411H: Latin American Icons and the Sensory Work of Objects
This course considers the notion of the icon as site of cultural production and circulation in Latin American contexts, focusing on transformative processes and practices of embodiment, collection, devotion, and sensation. Readings in literature, film and other media emphasize the unique roles of cultural objects as conduits to expressions of vulnerability, violence, and collective desire. The course builds on new materialist theories in its approach to the icon as sensory object, but also as a sign, while engaging the fluidity between living bodies and inanimate matter.
SPA2412H: Disease Stories: Race and Fears of Contagion in Latin America
This course examines written and visual accounts of contagious diseases and of disease control in Latin America. We will depart from 19th century shifts in the discourses of tropical medicine brought about by the microbiological revolution and their implications for the imperial prospects of capitalist expansion in Latin America, and finish with art production in the context of zika, dengue, and COVID-19. Topics of study include fever as an aesthetic device; cinema and hygiene; the (in)visibility of contaminants; infrastructure, deforestation and disease ecologies; nation building and the racialized fear of the contagious body; DDT contamination, and virus and globalization. Using materials as varied as literary novels, drawings, newspaper chronicles, and photographs, we will build a critical vocabulary that will guide us through the ruptures and continuities between current and past disease stories. Course taught in English.
SPA2415H: Disability and Latin American Cultural Production
This course proposes a series of encounters between critical models derived from Latin American literary and cultural studies, and from the field of Disability Studies. We will consider the ways in which these models change and mutually illuminate one another through their possible points of contact. Discussion will focus not only on the long history of representations of disability and corporeal difference in Latin America, with emphasis on Mexico, but in addition on the processes of interaction between bodies and the production and circulation of discourse and cultural objects. The course includes contemporary and 20th century Latin American narrative and cultural production, along with theoretical texts. Topics may include the history of the medicalized body, eugenics, Otherness and the tropology of monstrosity, disability aesthetics, and disability as critical methodology.
SPA2424H: Spanish American Poetry and Poetics
Spanish America has produced a large number of poets of great international importance, including two Nobel Prize winners. This course covers Spanish American poetry in cultural context through the late 19th century Modernismo movement to the Neo-Baroque aesthetics of the late 20th century and the present time. It will focus on key themes in Spanish American culture: postcolonial identity, resistance culture, exile and migration, memory. The authors discussed range from Martí, Vallejo, Neruda and Mistral, to Paz, Mir, Pizarnik, Perlongher and Reina María Rodríguez.
SPA2425H: 21st Century Latin American Art and Culture
This course is based on the premise that literature and art are produced within a broader cultural context, and that contemporary authors and visual artists draw not only from international theories of aesthetics and form, but also from each others’ production. In the contemporary moment, the distribution and dissemination of images and text through the web and social networking facilitates the interactions and overlaps that create a fertile discourse amongst young cultural producers today. In this class, the students will learn about newly established and up-and- coming writers and artists from Argentina and Mexico, examining not only their work and their online visibility, but also the institutional and discursive structures that facilitate and shape their production. Discussion will be in Spanish and at a high level, since it will involve direct communication with writers and artists from Latin America.
SPA2428H: Latin American Visual Culture
This course will approach the political genealogies and implications of the global circulation of images through the perspective of Latin American studies, drawing examples from the colonial period to the present. The readings will focus on photographic medium, although we will also discuss other examples throughout the course. We will examine the main contributions of Latin American artists, writers, and scholars to the methodological and theoretical debates in the field of visual culture. Additionally, we will examine how visual practices, languages, and archives shed new light on central themes in Latin American studies, such as colonial image wars, technologies of racialization and surveillance, violence and memory, Indigenous and environmental activism, literature, and photography. Ultimately, we will focus on how each of these topics allows us to think of images not in isolation, but entangled with bodies, commodities, ideas, and the material structures and networks that enable their circulation to take place.
SPA2802H: The Politics of Errantry in the Hispanic Caribbean
This course will examine the rearticulation of local identities and the emergence of alternative subjectivities in contemporary cultural production from Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Analyzing a wide variety of historical, sociological, political, filmic and literary texts, we will explore theoretical debates surrounding the notions of hybridity, race, exile, nationhood and insularism. Such analysis will ultimately help us reconsider the specific poscolonial dilemmas of the Hispanic Caribbean within the larger context of globalization.
SPA2900H: Issues in Literary Theory and Hispanic Texts
This seminar offers an approach to a corpus of literary theory and criticism from the twentieth century to the present. Discussions and assignments will focus on the descriptive, analytical and practical study of texts representing key theoretical tendencies relevant to the study of literary and cultural production. Readings may include literary works that act as theoretical projects, or through which we can observe the potential of various critical perspectives.
SPA2905H: Latin American Cultural Theories
This course will examine a long-standing tradition in Spanish American literature: the essay of cultural self-definition. Analyzing seminal texts from 19th and 20th centuries, we will explore the subtleties of a cultural critique that both map and query Latin American culture on its way to modernity. Authors will include: Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, Mariátegui, Reyes, Henríquez Ureña, Paz, Lezama Lima, González, García Canclini.
SPA2940H: Pursuing the Post-Revolution: Literature and Philosophy of Mexicanidad
This course engages the problem of its own point of departure: when and where do we locate a Mexican (post)revolution, and with what parameters may we begin to frame it? The question is more than a strictly formal one, because of the many Mexican intellectuals whose work has merged ideological or aesthetic orientations with programmatic reflections on the nature of nationally specific historical time. Through analysis of works by writers and intellectuals of the early to mid 20th century, such as Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos, Juan Rulfo, and Agustín Yáñez, as well as more recent figures including Roger Bartra, Carlos Monsiváis, Claudio Lomnitz and Sara Sefchovich, we will consider what is at stake politically, philosophically and ethically in these textual negotiations of Mexican time and history.
SPA2947H: Transparency and Politics in Contemporary Mexican Literature
This course focuses on a corpus of recent literature by established and emerging Mexican authors. Readings are framed through the malleable concept of transparency, understood in aesthetic terms as a quality allowing for the penetration of light, and unobstructed visibility, but also as a political concept, a position or strategy of revealing or purporting to reveal complete, accessible truths. In the political sphere, the notion of transparency has achieved currency as a defining discourse of public life, particularly in response to potential or real accusations of violence, and subsequent obfuscations. In this context, language and action become situated in relation to demands for evidence, and for particular modes of self-revelation. Literary works, such as the novels and other texts to be studied in this course, participate in a related, overlapping dynamic, in which narrative voice and aesthetics negotiate their proximity and affect vis à vis the histories and worlds that shape them.
3000 SERIES - SPECIAL COURSES
SPA3000H: Directed Research in Hispanic Literatures
An individual student may propose a series of readings and assignments on a topic of academic interest and relevance to their degree. The topic, materials, and requirements are selected and designed in consultation with a graduate faculty member who agrees to supervise and evaluate the student’s work.
SPA3300H: Hispanic Literature and Linguistics Research Forum
This course seeks to develop students writing and presentation skills in order to allow them to disseminate their research more effectively. It will expose students to the research tools available in each discipline and will train them to find support for their research and to disseminate it in academic and non-academic venues. The course seeks to create an interdisciplinary environment, mimicking the one found in most language departments, where students have to discuss their research with an educated but heterogeneous audience.
SPA3400H: Research Development
This course provides a structure and credit for students’ engaging in research activities beyond coursework. The course allows students to engage in a research project outside of their coursework, or in research training and production that goes beyond the requirements and expectations of a course paper.
Courses in Cognature Units and Collaborative Programs
Our students typically benefit from the possibility of taking courses (for credit or as auditors) in other graduate units and collaborative programs. The links below can be followed to find information on graduate course offerings from some of these units. Enrolment in courses from other units is done with the approval of the Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, Spanish, and of the cognate unit.
Book History and Print Culture