LLC 410 - Spanish Drama in Translation

Course unit(s): 1
Meets requirement: W
Since the Spanish Renaissance, theater has been a mechanism for denunciation and no small amount of public controversy. Cervantes, in his Interludes, urges the public to re-think society using lenses of irony and laughter, while other mayor playwrights during the Golden Age such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, denounce a society blinded by its own honor code and deadly obsessions with purity of blood. Drawing upon this background as context, this course cultivates a global understanding of the literary and the socio-historical evolution of peninsular drama from the early XVI to the end of the XVII century. By deeply analyzing controversial Spanish dramatic masterpieces we will explore the problem of Spanish national identity through its emerging imperial processes of political and cultural exclusion.