Course Offerings

Summer 2026

SPAN 5343: Studies in Spanish: The Poetics of Everyday Life                                                       

MW 10:00am - 11:50am, Online synchronous
Dr. Susan Larson

In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes was one of the first philosophers of language to take mass culture seriously, applying methods of analysis that were formerly the preserve of high culture to the most mundane, banal and everyday-ness of mass-produced objects. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2011) David Shields argues against the linear, the realist, the plotted, and the “true” in the name of the random, the fragmented, the collaged, and the “real.” This course takes these two provocations to heart to explore how literature and film in Spain account for, question and describe the everyday. 

Key questions we will work to answer include

• How have literature and film dealt with the banality, intimacy, and repetitions of everyday spaces during times of social and political upheaval?
• Why do contemporary Iberian artists seem to be returning to the poetics of everyday life?
• How do the writing and close reading of narratives of everyday life encourage us to develop and cultivate new understandings of our own everyday experiences?
• How can we transfer this knowledge of the poetics of everyday life into our own courses through first-person writing and other creative pedagogical exercises?

REQUIRED READING AND FILM VIEWING

--Mitologías. Roland Barthes. Trans. Hector Schmucler. Siglo XXI Editores, 1999. [1957] (theory)
--El cuatro de atrás, Carmen Martín Gaite (short novel, published in 1978)
--El verdugo (film, directed directed by Luis García Berlanga, 1963)
--Paseos con mi madre. Javier Pérez Andújar (short novel published in 2011)
--La trabajadora, Elvira Navarro (novel, published in 2014)
--A selection of academic articles that serve as models for how to critically engage with the topic.

Luis García Berlanga's 1963 film El verdugo.

FALL 2026

SPAN 5366: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spanish Prose: Urban Ruin Narratives
W 3:30 - 6:20
Dr. Susan Larson

This course will be dedicated to the study of ruins and the Spanish urban experience between the 1930s to the present day as represented in prose, poetry, film, and comics. Architectural and economic ruins force us to reconsider some of our basic assumptions about what modernity, modernization and urban centers have been and can be. Iberian ruin narratives create new ways of re-assembling the past, understanding the present and imagining post-urban futures.

Class discussions of our primary objects of study will be in dialogue with theories from urbanism, architecture, and recent academic scholarship on ruins by Gastón Gordillo, Miguel Caballero and Jacqueline Sheean. All students will be responsible for a seminar presentation and a final research essay. PhD students will turn in a full-length research essay, and MA students a shorter close analysis in dialogue with at least one theory discussed over the course of the semester and two critical essays.

Questions? Contact Dr. Susan Larson at susan.larson@ttu.edu