Sample of Courses Taught by Elena
 |
SPAN 242 Literary Genres of Spain and Latin America |
| A course to serve as a transition between language study and literary analysis; speaking and writing organized around interpretations of different genres by modern Hispanic authors; creative writing; oral presentations on current events relating to Spain and Latin America; a review, at the advanced level, of selected problems in Spanish structure. Two periods. |
|
SPAN 260 Women Writers of Spain, 1970 to the Present |
| A selection of readings - novels, poetry, essays, theater- by Spanish women writers of the 1970s and 1980s. Carmen Martín Gaite, Rosa Montero, Esther Tusquets, Adelaida García-Morales, Cristina Fernández-Cubas. A close study of the development of their feminist consciousness and their response to the changing world around them. |
|
SPAN 268 Contemporary Spanish Cinema |
| A survey of Spanish Cinema. Themes of history and society as depicted by major directors since the Spanish Civil War of 1936. We will analyze films of important directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Luis García Berlanga, Victor Erice, Bigas Luna, Pilar Miró and Itziar Bollaín. |
|
SPAN 314 Seminar. All about Almodóvar: Spanish Cinema in the Transición |
| An examination of the culture of Spain of the last two decades seen through the eyes of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. We will study those films and literary texts which depict the development of Spain as a country which experienced a transition from a repressive dictatorship to democracy and post-modernism. Themes of freedom, homosexuality and cross dressing, family, violence, and the transcendence of love and death in our contemporary society will be analyzed. Films will range from Almodóvar's first, Pepi, Lucy y Bom to his last, Todo sobre mi madre, with special attention given to Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios and Tacones lejanos. |
|
|
| Students will read the scripts and view the films most representative of alternative possibilities of freedom expressed by Luis Buñuel. The course will focus on the moral issues posed in his films and will start with a revision of the historical motivations of the Buñuel perspective: Marxism, Freudianism, and Surrealism as depicted in selected films of Buñuel, from his first An Andalusian Dog (1928) to his last That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). |