1000

This course focuses on an approach to the main questions posed by literature, such as its origin, its relationship with reality, with the receiver, with other fields of human experience, its transcendence, etc. This brings students into contact with literary text by means of the analysis of aspects such as genre, poetic and narrative resources (versification, rhetorical figures, composition, time, place, action, narrator, construction and presentation of characters). With the tools provided, hypotheses are formulated and discussed keeping the connotational, multi-faceted and historic nature of poetic language in perspective.

This course provides students with an introduction to the most outstanding problems of literary theory. Although the critical perspective is from out century, a presentation will be given on the critical tradition of the ancient world. The main purpose is to make it easier for students to access texts of contemporaneous critical theory thanks to their familiarity with the poetry of authors such as Plato and Aristotle.

Students start out in their understanding of Latin starting with its basic syntactic and grammar elements, going on to reading and the interpretation of classic texts.

Students start out in their understanding of the Greek language starting with its basic syntactic and grammar elements, going on to reading and the interpretation of classic texts.

This course starts out with an introduction to novels as a literary genre and its leading role in the French 19th Century, to study some of the main authors including Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant. The course will analyze: Pere Goriot, Red and Black, Madame Bovary and Bel Ami, to examine the procedures by means of which these pieces delve into the analysis of society. It also studies the narrative techniques that appear in an innovative manner in the different pieces and the theoretic conceptions on literature and love exposed by the masters in their essays and correspondence.

By borrowing the title of Jenefer Robinson’s book, this course attempts to analyze the place and the treatment given to emotions in classic works of world literature. As the central topic of many pieces, emotion becomes the theme of the narrations on which we will focus this semester. The analysis will concentrate on decoding the way characters are constructed – destroyed while chasing after their emotions. At the same time, it will attempt to disentangle the position of each period regarding moods reflected in the pieces themselves. Students will read Medea by Euripides or Seneca, Shakespeare’s Othello, parts of Enchiridion by Epictetus, a selection of rhymes by Becquer, a part of the Iliad, De Ira (On Anger) by Seneca and Memories of Adriano by Yourcenar.

This course is designed to promote reading and writing skills that allow students to properly face the intellectual challenges that they will find in their academic and professional lives. Firstly, the course encourages students to read articles, reports or books written for a specialized audience. Secondly, it stimulates students to make connections between various sources and compare different types of explanations. Thirdly, it exhorts students to construct academic arguments based on substantiated, independent and critical positions.