SPLT 050 A-Z - (LT) Contemporary Debates in the Spanish-Speaking World

Semester Hours: 3

Periodically
This is a special topics course focused on specific issues, themes, genres, or authors in the Spanish-speaking world. Topics vary each time. This course is taught in English.

Current Special Topics

SPLT 050M - (CC, IS) From Tango to Reggaeton

From Tango to Reggaeton, and beyond. This course looks at the role of popular music in the production, representation, performance, and interpretation of gender identities and sexuality in Latin American, Spanish, and Latinx popular music. How have musicians negotiated traditional categories of gender and sexuality? How have audiences (and dancers) utilize popular music genres to express their sexuality, or to subvert societal norms regarding gender and sexuality? The course will look at popular music genres through the lenses of feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory. Using the tools and insights provided by these interconnected theoretical frameworks, the course invites students to critically analyze the ways in which popular music both reflects and shapes gender, identity, and racialized experiences.

Same as WST 150L , LACS 015Z

SPLT 050N - Mutants and Monsters: New Lit Lat

Narco-westerns, cyber-punk epics, gothic tales. Latin American younge writers producing fiction about the great challenges of our times.

Same as LACS 015E

SPLT 050R - (CC,IS) Outsiders. Fiction and Change in Mexico

The international modernist cannon has a few Mexican writers in it, still widely read internationally. Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo just had new English editions of their most significative books. Carlos Fuentes is still considered a modernist master. But an attentive reader can note that the true motor of change in Mexican literature were unconventional women writers, some of them marginal, some of them acclaimed, that could foresee how the fiction of the future would be. In this class we will review and discuss masterpieces written by Nellie Campobello, Helena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Amparo Dávila.

Same as LACS 016L

SPLT 050S - (CC,IS) Latin American Spanish in the U.S.

This course explores the presence of the Spanish language in the United States and its relationship to Latinx identity, culture, and literature. What does it mean to speak Spanish in the U.S.? Is there a distinctive U.S. Spanish variety? What is “Spanglish,” and what does bilingualism really entail? Through close readings of selected passages from two contemporary novels, we will examine the sociolinguistic, cultural, and literary dimensions of Spanish in contact with English. Students will analyze how language shapes questions of migration, belonging, ethnicity, and national identity, while also considering broader debates about linguistic diversity and cultural change in the United States.

Same as LACS 016J

Prerequisite(s)/Course Notes:
May be repeated for credit when topics vary. As individual subjects are offered, each is assigned a letter (A-Z) which is affixed to the course number. Specific titles and course descriptions for special topics courses are available in the online class schedule.

View Course Offering(s):

Fall 2026

January 2027

Spring 2027