The Portuguese and Brazilian Studies program would greatly appreciate your passing along information about an exciting new course on the Brazilian Telenovela (taught in English).  It would be of particular value for students interested in gender, sexuality, media, Latin America, anthropology, communications.  The professor is our new Assistant Professor of Portuguese, John Karam, so it promises to be a really exciting and worthwhile experience.

Here is the course description:

PORT 404 U3/G4: The Telenovela

MW 10:00-11:20

 

Telenovelas are prime-time television serial melodramas broadcast six days a week for up to ten months. Frequently compared to soap operas in North America, telenovelas (often called novelas) are common across Latin America and possess a striking cultural and political valence in Brazil specifically. Since the 1970s, they have been exported to hundreds of countries around the world as well. Using interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, communications, media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, this course explores how Brazilian telenovelas have reflected and shaped the class, race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and modernity. The key point is to grasp the power relations portrayed in the telenovela and the ways that telenovela viewers reproduce, endure, and/or circumvent such hierarchies.

 

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Glen S. Goodman, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics