Spanish Culture I

The course aims at perfecting and refining skills acquired during the bachelor, providing a wide and solid knowledge concerning Spanish contemporary culture, examining in depth its historical and cultural roots and the long-lasting phenomena that have influenced the evolution of the country. The main political, social, economical and cultural changes in Spain will be analyzed through the circumstantial examination of some historical moments and correlated cultural productions. The relationships among culture, discursive strategies, social phenomena, mass communication, production and consumption of cultural products (especially pertaining literary, visual and musical disciplines) will be studied using a humanities approach and an interdisciplinary angle. To reach this goal and facilitate the understanding of topics presented during the course, appropriate semiotic and linguistic tools will be provided.

The course aims at further perfecting, compared to the bachelor, the ability to understand the most significant cultural changes that have characterized contemporary Spain, taking also into account its relationship with the past, whose reading and interpretation allows to understand the present and contributes at entering critically and projectually into the future. Students will acquire the necessary tools to deal with the topic under study from an interdisciplinary perspective. Moreover, they will be able to communicate with command, linguistically and content-wise, the knowledge they acquired during the course. Finally, students will gain a particular methodological expertise concerning cultural studies; they will be able to gather, analyze and use the best critical bibliography and, if needed, perform research on the subject.