FREN357

French to English Translation

Focusing on the main challenges involved in intercultural communication, this course provides a basic introduction to foundations, principles, practical strategies, and methods of translation from French to English for a variety of literary, general, specialized, professional, and creative purposes. We will explore the strategies and tools translators use when faced with challenging linguistic and cultural differences as well as the artistic, ethical, and political implications of different approaches to translation. The course is divided into several parts, each part corresponding to a field of translation such as the translation of literary texts (prose, comic books), websites, legal, economic, commercial, technical, medical, and political texts, as well as subtitle translation. The course will culminate with a final project accompanied by an essay that introduces the chosen text, analyze some of its linguistic and/or literary features, situate it with respect to its cultural context and target audience, and explain translation choices.

Language of instruction: French and English

Instructor: Dr. Irem Ayan

Recommended prerequisites: This course is recommended for students who have taken FREN_V 352, and one of FREN_V 224, FREN_V 401. If your French is stronger than your English, please take FREN_V 457 before FREN_V 357.

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/ 

Le cinéma francophone

This course introduces students to some of the extensive and diverse production of Francophone cinema. Students will discover Francophone culture through the prism of cinema, a dynamic and sometimes intimate visual art form that permits a glimpse, through the eyes of the filmmaker, into the aspirations and transformations of the French-Speaking world. Special attention will be given to cinema as a form of social and political discourse in a postcolonial context. In addition, the course will deal with gender, indigeneity, cultural identity, and language. Students will develop their ability to analyze and communicate a critical discourse in French, while examining a range of films and readings in Film Studies. Class discussions as well as assignments will focus on both the aesthetics and the economy of film in specific areas of the French-speaking world. Students will learn how to approach Francophone cinema critically, how to analyze cinematographic objects, and how to communicate their analysis cogently and persuasively.

Language of instruction: French

Prerequisites: Either (a) all of FREN 311, FREN 321 or (b) all of FREN 328, FREN 329 and one of FREN 225, FREN 402

Pinocchio & Everything Else

Cross-listed with RMST 343

Pinocchio’s statue in the town of Collodi

In this course we re-visit Pinocchio, the original educational story for children (the would-be Bildungsroman, if one will) authored in Italian by the Florentine Carlo Collodi (1881 and 1882-83), seeing it in the light of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s critical dictum «It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society». Along with it we also study a panoply of other modern classics from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits which also – very diversely – examine the issue of how the individual and society can be (mis)aligned with each other.

The course is articulated in two parts. The first is devoted to reading and interpreting Collodi’s Pinocchio; the other, to everything else. However, to aim for a better synergy between the two components, we do not tackle the two concepts sequentially but in parallel.

Each week, a first item includes relevant topics or texts to be presented & discussed from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits. These may range from the birth of the picaresque novel in Spain to the 19th-century French “novel of ambition”; or from the issue of compassion in Parzival to selfishness and/or happenstance in U.S. “rags-to-riches” narratives; or from Don Quixote’s “visionary” archetype to Oblomov’s multi-layered social superfluousness … This, with tweaks that may depend on students’ preferences based on their own spheres of interest and specialization.

Also each week, a second item follows pretty closely the Italian context – and, of course, text – of Collodi’s Pinocchio: nationalism in Italian history and cultural history, the birth (and nature) of modern Italian literature and identity, and more in this vein.

Italy’s nation-building blueprint since the early 1800s is here considered an exemplary small-scale case of one of today’s most burning issues on the global stage: How previously scattered and colonized peoples may successfully coalesce into a single-identity country in consequence of a deliberate political program, with all the positive and the problematic sides therein implied.

Learning Outcomes:

Our desired learning outcome is to develop the factual knowledge + the critical skills necessary to question, in a well-informed, articulate manner, the mainstream current approach (concept/precept) of adapting-fitting-bending individual behaviour to dominant standards of “social success” that are often destructive, and/or unethical, and/or alienating (commodifying), and/or – tragicomically – a lot more childish than the very child they purport to “train.”

Assignments and Evaluation:

• Draft of ideas for Midterm composition (10%)
• Midterm composition (20%)
• 2 x Drafts of ideas for Final composition (2 x 10% = 20%)
• Final composition (35%)
• Participation (15%, which covers both attendance and its quality)

Required readings:

• Giuseppe “Pinocchio” Collodi. I, Pinocchio, The True and Only One: Confessions of a Puppet Who Converterd from Matter to Soul. Vancouver: Finisterrae, 2022. Available on Amazon.ca in the Kindle Store (USD 5.oo). This text is presented and commented in class.
• Any edition of Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio: Adventures of a Puppet – any English translation (there are many), or any Italian edition of the 1883 text. (There are free web versions of both, as discussed in class).
• Further readings of literary classics (primary literature, secondary literature) involve texts available in the public domain – in practice, on the web – and are to be established as the need arises, in consequence of the discussion in class.

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English