In this section, Prof. Garrels shares how Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film courses were developed at MIT and notes that 21G.735 The Films of Luis Buñuel was the first of these courses to be offered. She also discusses how the development of the Internet and the international celebration of the centenary of Buñuel’s birth in 2000 shaped the fourteen-year history of the course.
A Liberal Arts Program within an Institute Focused on Engineering, Science, and Technology
From its inception in the early 1970s, MIT’s Foreign Languages and Literatures (FL&L) department, re-conceptualized as Global Studies and Languages (GSL) in 2014, has been defined by its special status as a liberal arts program geared toward undergraduates at a high-pressured, elite school famous for preparing leaders in the fields of engineering, science, and technology. As a consequence, the language major has historically been an exception. All MIT undergraduates are required to complete eight full-semester subjects in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts before graduation. As there is no second-language requirement, students can graduate without ever taking a single subject taught in a language other than English. Second-language study is nonetheless very popular at MIT, but those students who elect it tend to take at most two to three subjects during their undergraduate careers due to the heavy curricular demands of Institute requirements and their majors. However, once the undergraduate HASS Minor was established in 1989, we have regularly graduated a handful of undergraduate Minors each year, and we have always had the occasional Major.
Development of the Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film Courses
Because native or bi-lingual Spanish skills are relatively well represented within the undergraduate student body, and because Spanish is widely taught in U.S. secondary schools, many students gravitate toward Spanish, which they begin at MIT at a level appropriate to their skills. Global Studies and Languages, has historically had more lecturers in Spanish, since their teaching responsibilities are clustered at the beginning and intermediate levels, than faculty, whose teaching responsibilities tend to cluster mostly at the advanced level. Up until the fall of 2015, when their teaching load changed to three subjects per year, faculty had a load of two subjects per semester, and they were encouraged to design a core of six to eight subjects so that most subjects could be offered on a two-year rotation. However, the principle of a rotation of fixed core subjects eventually proved to be a drag on pedagogical innovation. It also restricted the number of different subjects available to students who were going to be on campus for only four years. This explains the initiation of the Advanced Topics in Hispanic Literature and Film course offerings, which were inaugurated with the topic “The Films of Luis Buñuel” in 1999. Since that year, I taught the topic six additional times (in 2001, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013).
"The fourteen-year history of this topic is intimately linked to the development of the Internet, which has increasingly been the source of numerous instructional materials."
Significant Events Shaping the History of the Coure: The Rise of the Internet and the Centenary of Buñuel’s Birth
The fourteen-year history of this topic is intimately linked to the development of the Internet, which has increasingly been the source of numerous instructional materials; indeed, the launching of YouTube in 2005 significantly expanded the availability of relevant film clips and feature films. The course was also profoundly shaped by the technological transitions from video to CD-ROM to Internet streaming as industry-favored forms of film reproduction. The development of digital media in general, their multiple applications to language learning, and the rise of the academic field of digital humanities also greatly impacted the various iterations of this course.
Lastly, a further historical determinant factored heavily in this topic’s evolution. With the international celebration of the centenary of Buñuel’s birth in 2000, the amount of scholarly interest in the filmmaker increased dramatically. Scholarly publications about the director and his films went from being limited and often mediocre in quality, to being abundant and increasingly sophisticated. Buñuel, now definitely canonized, had also caught the attention of the Ministries of Culture of both Spain and Mexico, generating funds for retrospectives, conferences, etc. In the new millennium, he was attracting a fast-expanding international body of academic film professors with an equally expanding toolkit of applicable theoretical perspectives. In the last decade, Buñuel, and Spanish-language film in general, has become a staple of academic Spanish programs both in the U.S. and abroad.
