Golden Age Poetry and the Hispanic World

Catalog description

This course is the senior seminar for Spanish majors and will explores the lyric traditions if the early modern Hispanic World. From courtly sonnets to villancicos and popular ballads, we will trace how poetry shaped and reflected early modern experiences of love and death, joy and anxiety, carnality and spirituality. Students will master their language skills as they practice with different approaches to reading poetry: from rhetorical analysis and recitation to close reading, critical theory and cognitive poetics. With these abilities, we will trace the birth of modern subjectivity with Garcilaso de la Vega, engage with satire and metaphysical anguish with Francisco de Quevedo, delve into the art of obscurity with Luis de Góngora, and we will discover the limits of knowledge with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.