Course Description
This course examines how contemporary Spanish identities are narrated and shaped by a range of media and cultural forms. With an emphasis on multimedia and digital tools, this course explores the field of Spanish cultural studies and provides students with an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing identity construction in the literature, television, film, photography, theater, and digital and graphic arts of Spain since the death of dictator Francisco Franco (1975). The course’s chief objectives are for students to:
(1) gain exposure to contemporary Spanish cultural production, both canonical and otherwise;
(2) learn to close-read and engage critically with different media and their historical and social conditions of production, and
(3) experiment with different media practices, textual, visual and digital, for the purposes of cultural and intellectual engagement and scholarly research.
A key component of this course is that students will learn to critically respond to texts using different digital and media-rich tools such as wikis, geo-spatial and visualization software, social media platforms, and content management systems, and regularly contribute to the course project and website.
Reading within six thematic units (Transition and Transgression, Technologies of Memory, Gender and Sexuality, Migration, Regionalism and Nationalism, and Digital Identities), students in this course will learn to interrogate questions of collective and individual identities, authorship, media, and cultural formation. They will also gain critical awareness of the generative role of technology in culture, society, and politics.
Goals and Prerequisites