This course aims to introduce you to Spain as a critical concept: how can we understand Spanish identity as we know it today through past cultural processes, productions, and moments? Through an interdisciplinary panoramic of Spain's most famous and contentious moments and figures, we will piece together a broad cultural history of a nation that has tended to identify itself as "Las Espanas" - in other words, a plurality of identities that reflect regional nationalism, ethnicities, religions, languages, and social structures that then feed into an ethos of what it means to be a "Spaniard." Part of our task will be to assess how Spaniards define themselves and how others define them; more broadly, these discussions will enrich how we think about nationality and culture. The students will examine diverse artifacts - literature, films, art, and the history of different moments in the development of Spanish culture and civilization, including the Convivencia, the Reconquista, the Spanish monarchy, and the so-called Conquista de last Americas, the Spanish Civil War, Franco's subsequent dictatorship, and the transition to democracy. Our readings will be in Spanish and English, but coursework will be exclusively in Spanish. This course satisfies the Inquiry Seminar to complete the HUA requirement in Spanish and would also count toward International and Global Studies. In addition, this course would benefit students interested in WPI's Project Centers in Spain. This course is taught at an advanced level of Spanish.
This course will be offered in academic years ending in even numbers.