Latin American and Latino Studies - Winter 1998

Latin American and Latino Studies Program
Merrill College Annex 58 (lower level)
459-5897 (jafox@ucsc.edu)

This LALS core course focuses on social science concepts and methods in Latin American and Latino Studies, with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary analysis of politics and power relations. The course highlights diverse analytical strategies, as well as the application of selected social science concepts in Latin American and Latino Studies (such as ethnicity, gender, the state and political culture). The focus is on developing analytical skills, including how to assess explanatory arguments, how to construct hypotheses, how to use the comparative method, the use of case studies and indicators, the interaction between quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as library and internet research skills. The course is primarily designed for LALS majors, but will be open to other students who have some background in LALS courses by permission of the professor.

three short written exercises (3-5 pages), regular class attendance and participation and a final exam based on the readings and lectures. Course readings mainly draw from articles and book chapters, as well as Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996).

The first short paper will involve developing a detailed bibliography of the books and academic articles produced on a topic of the student's interest (chosen in consultation with the professor or TA). For the second paper, students will choose a specific journal article or book and analyze the author's key assumptions, methodology, evidence and the overall logic of their argument. For the third paper, students will choose a major social science concept and compare the way in which two or more different authors apply it.

A practical, hands-on survey of print, broadcast, audiovisual, and electronic media that requires no prior media experience. Students evaluate and produce media across the range of categories through copmpletion of daily, weekly, and term assignments, many of them presented in class for peer review. More advanced assignments may be undertaken collaboratively. All assignments are expected to have a Latin American/Latino focus and become part of a permanent, individual portfolio that also includes evaluation logs of all in-class presentations by both guest speakers and classmates.

• To develop criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of various media
• To engage in peer critique and develop constructive modes of criticism
• To develop/enhance skills in the production of various media
• To compile a portfolio for possible use in job-seeking
• To become more conscious and critical of the way media shape daily life, cultural identidy, and social-political understandint.

This survey course focuses on the work of leading Latin American and Latina filmmakers, concentrating on fictional films made by women between 1980 and the present, after an initial overview of women's participation and representation prior to and during the classic commercial period of the 1940s and 1950s (in Mexico) and the new cinema movement of the l960s and 1970s. Students will develop a basic understanding of the elements of cinematic signification and familiarity with Latin American social and cinematic histories. No prior film study is required. A laboratory fee will be charged.

• critical vaocabulary specific to film analysis
• analytical, interpretive, and research skills
• overview of Latin American and Latino film histories, with emphasis on women's representation and creative agency
• appreciation of key films/videos by women across six decades, with emphasis on the 1980s and 1990s
• articulation of points of convergence and divergence between Latin American and Latina women's creative and socio-political agendas.

PLEASE NOTE: A WEB PAGE WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THIS COURSE SOMETIME IN DECEMBER; PLEASE CHECK THE SYLLABUS CLEARINGHOUSE PAGE AT CATS/INSTRUCTIONAL COMPUTING.

Rather than attempt to survey the whole of contemporary American writing, this seminar will investigate the fate of genre-- the most venerable philosophical category in literary theory-- in the wake of postmodernism's claim to have done away with the boundaries it enforces. We will read influential works that subvert, problematize, or re- invent the old Aristotelian hierarchies of genre: novels that look like dramas, commentaries disguised as lyric, cartoons that wear the mask of tragedy. Postmodern writers have invigorated traditional literary forms by borrowing stylistic cues from formerly lowly subgenres such as crime fiction, romance, and the Western, as well as film and the mass media. In blurring the distinctions between "high" and "popular" culture, some theorists claim, such texts undermine the class structure to which these boundaries correspond. Yet at the same time, mass-market fiction, television, pop music, Hollywood films, and other products of what Theodor Adorno called "the culture industry" are bound to rules of generic convention as strict as anything court poets of the Renaissance could have devised. In this context, genre has become a means to convert cultural artifacts into easily recognizable, marketable commodities: a way to organize readers as consumers.

Our overview of contemporary writing, then, will revolve around the following set of questions: How do we reconcile the apparent death of genre in "serious" writing with its ongoing vitality in the sphere of popular culture? What social pressures account for the waxing and waning a particular genre's influence and dominance? How might genre theory illuminate the phenomenology of literary experience-- the process by which readerly expectations are created and manipulated? Finally, what does it mean to "read" a text in a world that has become predominantly aural and visual-- and increasingly oriented toward the non-vertical pathways through which electronic information flows?

• The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, ed. Robert Alexander
• Bernadette Mayer, Proper Name and Other Stories
• Rolando Hinojosa, The Valley
• Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
• Art Spiegelman, Maus
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
• Louis Edwards, N: A Romantic Mystery
• a course reader of critical/theoretical materials

• mandatory attendance/participation
• biweekly short assignments: some structured, some asking for detailed responses to the texts, some asking you to do additional critical reading
• a term-long project on a literary genre of your choice, either mass-cultural or high-cultural, describing its evolution and analyzing some samples of it. We'll start working on this during the 3d week; it will go through revision and presentation stages before the final paper (15 pp.) is due at the end.

Revised 7/12/04.