Course Proposal, CCIC: Global Perspectives
Spanish 140: Latin American Literature
Department of Modern Languages
Claude-Rhéal Malary
cmalary@stmarys-ca.edu
1. A brief narrative (300 words) that explains how the course will guide students
toward achieving the Learning Goal. The CCC believes it would be simplest both
for the proposer and for the Working Groups if the narrative addressed the
Learning Outcomes one by one.
Spanish 140 is the first part of the 140-141 sequence. It is meant to serve as a
building block for, as the first half of 141, even though students don’t necessarily
take them in this sequence. It is an upper-division survey course that features an
array of literary texts. I, the author of this proposal have taught this course six of
the last seven times it has been offered: hence, the designation “Global Perspectives
Worthy” should only apply when I teach the course or when my syllabus is used by a
different instructor. The first text, the Popol Vuh, is pre-colonial. The second set of
texts is from the colonial age, i.e. from the time of the ‘conquest’ of the Americas.
The last ones are culled from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth century. The text from the pre-colonial period offers the students a
peek into the difficulty of clearly discerning a non-European view of a society’s
foundational myths after colonization has interrupted that society’s development.
The texts from the colonial period pit European imperial imperatives against nonEuropean sensibilities. The effects of colonization, missionary zeal, and European
pathogens are evinced, analyzed and contextualized. In the process, links to
contemporary globalization, which some leading lights in Latin America liken to
neo-colonialism, are inevitably found. Inasmuch as the ‘conquista’ incontrovertibly,
disproportionately shaped Latin American subjectivity, the remnants of colonization
manifest themselves in subsequent texts, which all reflect Latin America’s social and
cultural history, as well as its history, tout court. Sundry poems, testimonials,
chronicles, historiographies, short stories, and the one film invite students to
differentiate between literary genres and to entertain queries about the difficulties
inherent in the attempt to form non-European or non-first-world cultural identities.
These texts also seek their thoughts about the necessity and (im)possibility of
complete de-colonization. Latin America’s political agency, its class struggles, its
racial tensions, its ethnic divisions, and its gender chasm are all objectified thanks to
the verses, characters, and thoughts rendered through the written word, which as
this course makes clear, seldom fails to mirror social, political, and existential
reality. Special attention is also paid to rhetoric, the means by which the activist
writer, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, achieves his or her goals.
Course Proposal, CCIC: Global Perspectives
Spanish 140: Latin American Literature
Department of Modern Languages
Claude-Rhéal Malary
cmalary@stmarys-ca.edu
2. Learning: A brief explanation of how coursework (e.g., papers, exams,
videotaped presentations) will be used to measure student achievement of each
of the Learning Outcomes. Please address the outcomes directly and one by one.
The first assignment, a five-page paper, invites students to delve into the effects of
Spanish colonization as they are evinced by the texts on the syllabus. They use
Albert Memmi’s classic The Colonizer and the Colonized as a frame to discuss the
extent to which Bartolomé de las Casas and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca transcend
or fail to transcend their identities and their statuses as Spanish colonizers. In the
process, they are compelled to render judgment about the benefits and
shortcomings of the liberalist activism of Las Casas, whose passionate plea on behalf
of indigenous subjects, led to the enslavement of African subjects. The second
obstacle, a two-fold exam comporting an oral segment and a written one, invites
them to share their thoughts with each other and with their teacher about
colonization, conquest, forced conversion, the rhetoric of Las Casas (especially his
use of pathos, ethos, and logos), and the dangers of the notion of noble sauvage dear
to the best of colonizers. The second paper and the second exam, also two-fold, ask
them to consider the myth of the Black Legend propagated by Las Casas in the light
of Noble David Cook’s seminal Born to Die. The latter posits that pace Las Casas,
disease, not European cruelty, accounted for the ‘success’ of the European colonial
project. These obstacles also beckon them to identify and render judgment about
the double consciousness discernible in the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. “What compels these writers to pick up a pen?” they are
asked. “Who are they writing for? “ “Does ‘history’ hold the same importance for
the post-colonized subject as it does for the post-colonizer subject?” “Does the
hyphenated identity (Spanish-Indigenous) of the writer condition the text he
produces?” As for the remaining paper and the final exam (only written), they
gauge whether the students grasp the extent to which the modernismo movement
(with its heavy doses of orientalism and other fetishizations) represents literary
globalization avant la lettre. They also measure the degree to which the students
grasp that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is a feminist avant la lettre. In the process, they
are asked to put a fine-tooth comb to the rhetorical strategies that Sor Juana
employs and to assess whether her deft use of rhetoric (pathos, ethos, and logos)
mirrors that of Las Casas, her (ig)noble precursor.