The Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the Portuguese-Speaking World
About the Program
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese offers a minor in The Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the Portuguese-Speaking World. For further information on minor requirements, please see the Minor Requirements tab on this page.
After completion of at least one upper-division course you can email the Undergraduate Advisor to declare the Portuguese Minor. Please include your name, SID, and which minor you intend to complete. Your intended minor will then appear on your CalCentral dashboard below your major. For further information on declaring and confirming completion of the minor, please see the department website.
Students who have a strong interest in an area of study outside their major often decide to complete a minor program. These programs have set requirements.
General Guidelines
All minors must be declared before the first day of classes in your Expected Graduation Term (EGT). For summer graduates, minors must be declared prior to the first day of Summer Session A.
All upper-division courses must be taken for a letter grade.
A minimum of three of the upper-division courses taken to fulfill the minor requirements must be completed at UC Berkeley.
A minimum grade point average (GPA) of 2.0 is required in the upper-division courses to fulfill the minor requirements.
Courses used to fulfill the minor requirements may be applied toward the Seven-Course Breadth requirement, for Letters & Science students.
No more than one upper division course may be used to simultaneously fulfill requirements for a student's major and minor programs.
All minor requirements must be completed prior to the last day of finals during the semester in which the student plans to graduate. If students cannot finish all courses required for the minor by that time, they should see a College of Letters & Science adviser.
All minor requirements must be completed within the unit ceiling. (For further information regarding the unit ceiling, please see the College Requirements tab.)
Select five upper division courses in Portuguese/Brazilian language, linguistics, literature, or culture, selected from the offerings of the department
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
5317 Dwinelle Hall #2590
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-2590
Courses
Portuguese
Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Freshman Seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1 hour of seminar per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Offered for pass/not pass grade only. Final Exam To be decided by the instructor when the class is offered.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021
This course offers an overview of contemporary Portuguese-Speaking Cultures and Literatures. The time frame covered is from the sixties--years of rupture and experimentalism in artistic and cultural production—to the present. Students will study the concrete poetry of the Portuguese author Ana Hatherly, the visual (“Concrete”) poems of the Brazilian author Haroldo de Campos, and the drawings of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Maria Schendel. The course content will include the multi-layered music of the Angolan duet Ouro Negro and the political essays of Cape Verdean academic Amílcar Cabral. Themes such as colonization, decolonization, freedom, will be among the larger, decidedly compelling group of subjects on which the course will touch. Introduction to Portugal, Brazil, and other Portuguese-Speaking Cultures (in English): Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
An intensive course for students who have no previous study of Portuguese designed to introduce the basics of the language. This offering prepares the student for upper division course work in Portuguese. Intensive Portuguese for Spanish Speakers: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Credit of 16-20 units or equivalent of Spanish language, or consent of instructor
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 4 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam required.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
The main objective of this course is to provide ample opportunities for students to improve their oral fluency in Portuguese, through daily conversations on a variety of topics relating to the Lusophone world. Students will also direct and guide two discussions (conversations) during the semester, on topics of their choosing. For these presentations, they will prepare a list of vocabulary as well as discussion questions to stimulate class participation and conversation. Consequently, students will expand their vocabulary and use of idiomatic expressions, review certain grammar structures, and garner a deeper understanding of the differences between colloquial and formal Brazilian Portuguese. Conversations in Portuguese: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portuguese 50 or equivalent
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
In exploring the persistence of a history of conquest and exchange in Brazil, this course investigates the interconnections and cross-fertilizations that have endured to diversify this country’s distinctly original national cultures. In so doing, it uses the impacts of European colonialism in the Americas and Africa as a springboard for understanding Brazil’s regional specificity. While there will be moments that recall a distant past, others will shed light on a present that both resembles and stands apart from much of Spanish America in the present. Throughout the course, the literature that we will be examining will find echoes in the country’s rich history. Brazil in the World: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portuguese 103
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2020
This course is a survey of modern and contemporary literature and culture from the Portuguese-speaking world. Drawing on fiction, poetry, film, and visual art, we will explore cultural production throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will study and discuss some of the most relevant issues explored in Lusophone literature, such as empire, memory, modernity, and social and economic justice, as well as consider a wide array of artistic production and aesthetic movements, including modernismo, social realism, the avant-garde and postmodernism. The course also offers students a chance to improve their Portuguese reading, writing and speaking skills. Introduction to Portuguese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portug 103 or equivalent
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Spotlight on diverse media (film, radio photography, music, etc.) and selected texts as a way into the history and culture of Brazil. May include early experiments with photography, political uses of radio to reach the masses, the birth of the nation’s film industry and the rise of popular music as they invite readings together with literature. The course allows students to watch, listen and read these materials as a way of exploring emerging social movements, counter-cultural currents and historical paradigm shifts. Students will learn about the major Brazilian cultural and literary movements while becoming familiar with ways of reading cultural materials across different media. Brazilian Culture Through and Across the Arts and Media: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2020
This course offers a panoramic view of Brazilian culture and history through lyric traditions and counter-traditions. Our focus will be Brazilian poems (including song lyrics) from the 19th century to the present, but we will also examine colonial and baroque texts and how they resonate with modern, mid-century and post-dictatorship literary materials. Moving through key poetic movements from simbolismo to Poesia Marginal, we will examine why the lyric has been a chosen medium for authors to conceptualize identity, difference, ethics, politics and aesthetics. Course conducted in Portuguese. No previous background in poetry or Brazilian literature required. The Brazilian Lyric: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portuguese 103
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Summer 2022 First 6 Week Session
This course provides a panoramic view of Portuguese Literature and Azorean literature and Culture via the study of emblematic works of Portuguese ana Azorean literature and culture. Readings, lectures, and discussion will be conducted in English. Students may opt to write their papers in either Portuguese or English. Portuguese Majors and Minors, must submit their work in Portuguese. Survey of Portuguese and Azorean Literature and Culture: Read More [+]
Hours & Format
Summer: 8 weeks - 12 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
Reflects on some of the leading writers, artists, and thinkers from the Republic (1889) to the present and the social and political transformations of modern and contemporary Brazil that shaped literary and artistic production. In providing students with an introduction to major literary movements (modernism, regionalism, concretism, marginal literature, urban literature, etc), the course problematizes the idea of a literary canon while exploring lesser-known works and newer voices. Histories of Brazil’s social transformations, as well as theoretical reflections on the politics of world literature and translation, form part of this course’s offerings. Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Literature: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portuguese 103
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
Study of literature and cultural texts representative of classical literary genres: narrative prose, plays and poetry. Studies in Luso-Brazilian Literature: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Portuguese 102 or permission of instructor
Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes. Students may enroll in multiple sections of this course within the same semester.
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Alternative to final exam.
Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Directed study centering on the preparation/completion of an honors thesis (see Honors Program, Option B, above). Portuguese Honors Course: Read More [+]
Rules & Requirements
Prerequisites: Twenty units or equivalent of Portuguese or another Romance language
Hours & Format
Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0 hours of independent study per week
Additional Details
Subject/Course Level: Portuguese/Undergraduate
Grading/Final exam status: Letter grade. Final exam not required.
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