Uoregon - davidwacks.uoregon.edu - David A. Wacks
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Re-rethinking the Survey Course: back to the commercial textbook 23 Jul 2013 | 11:05 pm
Spanish 316 is a panoramic survey of Peninsular Spanish literature of the premodern period (1100-1600). It is a mainstay of my teaching practice; I usually teach it about 3 times per year. It is a req...
Teaching medieval literature to undergraduates in the original version: back to the philology seminar model 23 Jun 2013 | 12:08 pm
Libro del caballero Zifar, f32r.º del Manuscrito de París (ms. espagnol 36 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) Medievalists working in modern languages face a happy dilemma: we sometimes have the priv...
Translation in Diaspora: Historia de las Indias in Hebrew 1 Nov 2012 | 10:00 am
In two previous posts I wrote about the cultural context and actual translation of the Spanish chivalric novel Amadís de Gaula (Zaragoza, 1507) into Hebrew made by Sephardic physician and translator ...
Sephardic Literature after Las Navas de Tolosa: The Romance Turn in Jacob ben Elazar’s “Sahar and Kima” 11 May 2012 | 08:08 am
This is the paper that I would have given today at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalmazoo, Michigan, if the ticket from Eugene to Kalamazoo did not cost $900. Special thanks g...
Out of Diaspora: Sephardic Settlement in 16th-century Palestine 1 Feb 2012 | 09:20 am
Jews from Spain had been settling in the Ottoman Empire since at least the fourteenth century, and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 the populations of Sephardic Jews in the cities of the...
Translation in Diaspora: the Hebrew Amadís de Gaula 3 Jan 2012 | 09:27 am
In a previous entry, I discussed the literary and cultural contexts of Jacob Algaba’s 1541 Hebrew translation of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 1508 chivalric novel, Amadís de Gaula. Here I would like ...
Reading Amadís in Istanbul 30 Oct 2011 | 12:00 am
Summary It was 1541 in Constantinople when Sephardic physician Jacob Algaba published his Hebrew translation of the first book of Spanish runaway bestseller Amadís de Gaula (1508). His translation of ...
Ethnic Polemic in Medieval Spain: Arabiyya, Shu’ubiyya, and Ibraniyya 7 Oct 2011 | 10:51 am
Summary: In the Abbasid-era (800s-900s) authors writing in Arabic joined a debate between those who identified as ethnically Arab and those who identified as Persian. This debate was reproduced in al-...
Rethinking the survey course (Peninsular Spanish Literature 1100-1600) 21 Sep 2011 | 10:05 am
The survey course of literature was originally designed to give students an introduction to the major authors, genres, and works of a given time period. It is a performance of literary history. The id...
Narratology + Film adaptations = Introduction to Narrative (Spanish 333) 30 Aug 2011 | 06:18 am
Our undergraduate program in Spanish literature has three courses at the third year level focusing on the study of a given genre: poetry, narrative, drama. This summer I taught “Introduction to Narrat...
