Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Paper Sp 1

Introduction to the Language, Literatures and Cultures of the Spanish-speaking World

*The SPECIMEN PAPER for this new paper Sp1 can be found here.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PAPER WILL BE COMPULSORY FOR PART IA OPTION B STUDENTS FROM MICHAELMAS 2012 AND THAT IN PART IB IT WILL ONLY BE AVAILABLE TO PART IB OPTION A STUDENTS, I.E. THOSE STUDENTS WHO IN THEIR FIRST YEAR WERE AB INITIO SPANISH STUDENTS.

THIS PAPER WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE TO OFFER AS A PORTFOLIO OF ESSAYS.

Reading List

Spanish Lecture List 2012/13 (the complete lecture list for each course or paper)

This paper has a Learning Resources Web Site.

This new paper Sp1 is designed to give you an introduction to the main areas of study in the Spanish Tripos, allowing you to sample study of literature, linguistics and film, from medieval to contemporary periods and from Spain and Spanish-speaking America.

Lectures will be given during the Michaelmas and Lent terms and take place on Fridays at 2 p.m. and some weeks also on Thursday at 4 p.m.

You are strongly encouraged to read as many texts as possible from the reading list over the summer vacation. You should read the following as A MINIMUM by the time you arrive in Cambridge: Lazarillo de Tormes, García Lorca's Romancero Gitano, García Márquez's Cien años de soledad and Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. (N.B. Where the Department recommends a specific edition or editions, details are given in the reading list.) You can purchase these texts from local bookshops (Heffers and Waterstone's are aware of our reading lists), or from online book-sellers like Amazon, alibris or abebooks.

Paper structure

On the paper there are twelve literature texts, divided into three topics:

Section A (Medieval and Golden Age Spain):

1. Manrique  Coplas por la muerte de su padre
2. San Pedro  Cárcel de amor
3. Anon. Lazarillo de Tormes
4. Cervantes  ‘El casamiento engañoso’ and ‘El coloquio de los perros’ (from the Novelas ejemplares)

Section B (Post 1800 Spain):

1. Pérez Galdós  La de Bringas
2. García Lorca  Romancero gitano
3.  Unamuno  Niebla
4.  Almodóvar  Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (film)

Section C (Spanish-speaking America):

1. Sor Juana  Antología
2.  Castellanos  Meditación en el umbral
3.  García Márquez  Cien años de soledad
4.   Vargas Llosa  La tía Julia y el escribidor

There will be five lectures for Linguistics (Section D), split into two strands:

Structure

1. Phonetics and phonology of Spanish
2. Morphology of Spanish
3. Syntax of Spanish

Varieties

4. Varieties 1 (Andalusian, Judeo-Spanish)
5. Varieties 2 (LAS, Spanish-based creoles)

In addition three lectures will provide support in approaching and reading the language and styles of the literature and film.

The subjects of all these lectures have been chosen on the basis of their recognised individual merits, and because they introduce you to critical approaches needed in later study of literature and linguistics. All the lectures are given by specialists in the area which provides a means for you to sample the teaching of a variety of members of the department.

At the same time, you will be covering some of the material in supervision. 

For the Linguistics topic you will have one supervision per term, organised centrally. With your literature supervisor, you will normally have three supervisions in Michaelmas and Lent Terms. The department’s policy is:

• that supervisions should as far as possible keep in step with the lectures, so that the lectures provide background information for work being done in detail with supervisors
• that students attend supervisions on literature and linguistics
• that students should normally do detailed work on six of the texts
• that these texts should be drawn evenly from each of the three sections.

In the Easter term, before the examination, there are no lectures but you may have revision supervisions.

Examination

In the examination you are asked to answer three questions, each taken from a different section. Each of the literature sections includes a commentary question; this is not compulsory, but no more than one commentary question may be answered in the exam.

It is expected that you will have prepared more than the minimum required to answer three questions in the examination; you will have done preparation for the paper skimpily and unproductively otherwise.