Introduction to Literatures and Cultures of the Romance World I: Medieval to Modern
In this course, we will be reading literary texts across a variety of genres—prose, poetry, and drama—originally written in French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Many are by authors you may have heard of, and they include some of the most famous and influential classics of world literature: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote; Dante’s Inferno; Voltaire’s Candide; and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Others are more obscure, but each has been judged noteworthy or important. That does not mean you will always enjoy them, but they will be worth reading.
Each text provides food for thought and analysis, and so helps us meet this course’s first and minimal goal: to engage with a series of interesting and challenging texts, figure out strategies to read them well, and expand our horizons through this survey of new texts, new readings. If we achieve nothing else, I will be happy, and you should be, too.
A second and more ambitious goal is to seek patterns of commonality and difference between our readings. What, if anything, binds these particular texts together? What concerns do they share? Alternatively, what makes each one different and distinct? Can we see tendencies or changes over time or according to the various (historical, geographical, social) contexts in which they were written? We are covering over five hundred years of literary history, from Europe to the Americas. Can any similarities or resonances be any more than happenstance?
Yet we will see that there are indeed some common preoccupations that repeat over time and space. Issues of travel, mobility, and the encounter with otherness, for instance, traverse what could broadly be described as an “age of exploration.” Questions of gender consistently resurface, as do concerns with representation and reality, reason and madness, the good life, enlightenment and despair, fiction and the stories we tell each other and ourselves to make sense of the world and our place in it.
Above all, in a course that is about the trajectory towards modernity, there is the question of progress and what it means to be modern. What is the relationship between modernity and the classics? Can or should we moderns seek to measure ourselves by or even to surpass classic models, such as the texts we will be reading here. Are we modern yet? Have we ever been modern? Our attempt to answer the question of what it means to be modern, of whether human history is a story of progress and development or simply the endless return of the same, or even a fall from past grace, is the third and most fundamental of this course’s goals. We may well fail to achieve it, which is fine (and even appropriate), but this is the challenge we are set.
In the end, to fail at the challenges we set ourselves is also, surely, a human trait, and from Columbus onwards this course will also trace the history of such failures, noble or otherwise. For every step forward, there is often a step or two back.
This is, therefore, also a course about ambition and the desire to test ourselves and to be the best that we can be, or (like Don Quixote) to pursue a dream however foolish it may appear to others. You will be assessed via “contract grading,” which means that you will pick your grade at the outset of the course. With your final assessment assured, I hope that you will make this your age of exploration! Push the envelope of your capacities and expectations, and feel free to take risks in an environment in which it is safe to leave your comfort zone.
Language of instruction: English
Instructor: Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Course website: https://rmst201.arts.ubc.ca/