Portuguese (PORT-UA)

Portuguese language courses PORT-UA 10, PORT-UA 3, and PORT-UA 4 are oriented toward achieving oral proficiency and are taught in the native language. The elementary-level course stresses the structures and patterns that permit meaningful communication and encourages spontaneous and practical proficiency outside the classroom. The intermediate-level courses aim to promote fluency in speaking, as well as proficiency in reading and writing. They include readings and discussions on contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian texts.

Prerequisite: native or near-native fluency in Spanish. 4 points. Accelerated introduction to spoken and written Portuguese.

Advanced Portuguese is a four-credit advanced-level course designed to expand the student’s exical and grammatical understanding of the language. It also introduces students to the fundamental principles of expository writing and oral expression through the analysis of videos, examples from the visual arts related to fashion, gastronomy, football, and music, as well as short stories, poems, and essays on culture, sociology, and history. The ultimate goal is to discuss and analyze the constitutive elements of Luso-Brazilian society in the first decades of the 21st Century. Special attention will be devoted to the evolution of Contemporary Luso Brazilian societies in the light of social and artistic phenomena. We will read essential pieces, see images and videos produced by the most sophisticated cultural authors and critics, and compare their views on art and society. The objective is to encourage students to react to the materials by discussing their content, thus stimulating creative thinking and increasing their ability to express sophisticated ideas in oral and written Portuguese. At the end of the semester, students will master the linguistic skills of advanced-level Portuguese.

Prerequisite: permission of the department. Open only to majors. Available every semester. 2 or 4 points per term.

In this course, based on a selection of (canonic as well as more marginal) literary, filmic, and musical works, we will learn about the way in which Portuguese seaward expansion opened the path for Western colonialism and globalization, as well as about the forms of local agency and resistance that challenged or subverted Portuguese colonial rule. We will look at the contested processes of construction and the ultimate demise of Portuguese empire and the emergence of post-colonial nation-states (starting with the independence of Brazil at the beginning of the nineteenth century) through a range of literary, artistic, musical and filmic expressions. Discussion of these materials will raise issues about the ideological underpinnings of colonialism and decolonization as well as on the diasporic memory-work individuals and communities carry out through poetry, music, and dance. The overall aim of the course is to raise sensitivity about the multiple interconnections and cross-fertilizations that sustain and enrich Luso-Brazilian cultures in the present — including, not least, the Portuguese heritage of New York City, with the foundation, in 1654, of its first Jewish congregation by exiles from Recife, Brazil, and the presence until today of sizeable Portuguese, Azorean and Brazilian communities.

This course, CONDUCTED IN PORTUGUESE, introduces students to Brazilian literature and culture through the discussion of short texts, and stresses reading, writing, and oral communication in Portuguese. We will read a selection of stories by major Brazilian writers (Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mario de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, and Marilene Felinto, among others), published in a time period that spans about a century, and that are narrated in the first person. These stories, ranging from the semi-autobiographical to the distinctly fictional, will allow us to consider the multitude of purposes which the strategy of first-person narration can serve and to observe how these apparently self-centered narratives can represent broad aspects of Brazilian culture and often convey a sharp critique of Brazilian society. We will also view films directed by José Padilha (Tropa de Elite), Fernando Meirelles (Cidade de Deus), Consuelo Lins (Babás), and Eduardo Coutinho (Jogo de Cena) that put on display or call into question the special status granted by our culture to true, first-person stories.

Brazil’s “tropicalist” musical, artistic and literary movement of the Sixties and Seventies remains one of the most powerful and influential aesthetic experiences from the late twentieth century in all of Latin America. Its shrill juxtapositions of cosmopolitan with rural, and ethnic with industrial musical forms, of concrete poetry and street slang, hippie fashions and local TV kitsch aesthetics, enraged both the dictatorship and the traditional Left. In the course, we will study Tropicália’s musical expressions (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Tom Zé, Jorge Ben) as well as their visual and literary forerunners and contemporaries (including, for example, the visual artist Hélio Oiticica, the poets Torquato Neto, Ana Cristina César, and Waly Salomão, film and theater directors José Celso Martinez Corrêa and Glauber Rocha, and the writer and underground filmmaker José Agrippino de Paula). We are also going to look into the longer history of the notion of the ‘tropical’ and into the impact Tropicália has had on more recent musical and cultural movements in Brazil (Manguebeat, Afro-Reggae, Fora do Eixo, or Baile-Funk).

Topics vary. Focused on Brazilian culture, society, and/or arts and the relationship between these. Recent topics include Brazilian architecture, the Amazon, and Brazilian poetry and song.

Popular song (samba, bossa nova) is perhaps the Brazilian cultural product that has had the greatest international circulation since the early XXth c. This course aims to contextualize and analyze critically this success (and the political interests that it furthered), and to examine the crisscrossing of mutual influence between literary or "book" poetry and the lyrics of popular song. The course focuses on moments of Brazilian poetry and popular song mainly from 1922 to the early eighties, a time of great artistic creativity in the two genres, and of a productive dialogue between them, and considers the process whereby samba, bossa nova, and concrete poetry became significant transnational presences.

The notion of cannibalism is a recurring concern in the history of ideas regarding the primitive, the animalistic, the monstrous, or any of the other classifications frequently invoked to mark others, regardless of their actual culinary preferences. Reflection upon cannibalism as an intellectual phenomenon suggests how people eating people, or at least the possibility of it, says a great deal about those that do not. In some regions of the Caribbean and Brazil, ideas regarding cannibalism have made an important turn, such that the cannibal has become a provocative affirmation of self. The aim of this course is to think about cannibalism, not, as it often is, as a theme for anthropologists and ethnographers, but rather as an intellectual problem that has enjoyed a very long life in the history of ideas about self. In this course, we shall revisit a selection of texts regarding cannibalism from Columbus’ diaries to the present, and including works by, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Oswald de Andrade, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Suely Rolnik, in the company of some key notions involving postcolonial theory. Readings will be made available in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and course papers may be carried out in any of the three languages according to student interest and ability.

This course, CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH, examines literary works in various genres (novels, autobiography, short stories), and Brazilian films (Cinema Novo and after, including documentaries), that attempt to narrate the experience of poverty. We will discuss texts by Graciliano Ramos, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, and Patricia Melo and view films (Barren Lives, The Scavengers, The Hour of the Star, Pixote, Bus 174 and City of God, Babilônia 2000 and Black Orpheus), in light of key questions. How do these texts reflect on the nature of representation and on the investments of author and reader in images of deprivation? How do they present the connections of poverty with violence, stigmatization, and citizenship rights? How do they frame the ethical responsibilities of the writer or film-maker, as well as of readers and spectators? What are the patterns of consumption and circulation of these texts?

Spanning five continents and three oceans, filmmaking in Portuguese is among the most wide-spread in the world–but also the most difficult to watch, given the mutual remoteness of shooting locations and audiences, making for only a relatively small market share. Between East Timor, Mozambique, Brazil, Macau, and Portugal, no single, unified film culture exists but rather an archipelago of cinemas shot through with multiple Asian, African and Amerindian languages and cultures. And yet, film offers us an insight into this worldwide web of histories of colonization, revolution, migration and diaspora –themes that the Brazilian Cinema Novo of the 60s and 70s had already explored and that new African and Portuguese cinemas have revisited in recent years: racial and sexual difference, transnational migration, or the legacies of Empire and slavery, among others. Films studied include: Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Brazil 1971), Sambizanga(Sarah Maldoror, Angola 1973), Nhá Fala(My Voice, Flora Gomes, Guinea-Bissau/Cabo Verde 2002), O Herói (The Hero, Zézé Gamboa, Angola 2004), Virgem Margarida(Virgin Margarita, Licínio Azevedo, Mozambique 2012), Cavalo Dinheiro(Horse Money, Pedro Costa, Portugal 2014) and Bacurau(Kléber Mendonça Filho, Brazil 2019). The course will be taught in English but students and speakers of Portuguese will be offered additional critical readings in the language.