Think Like a Forest: A Dialogue Between Pre-Modern Worldviews, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Knowledge
How do we think? Are we aware of the kind of thinking we entertain? What kind of world do our individual and collective, conscious or unconscious thought-processes generate? Do we even have a choice in the orientation of our thinking patterns, and if we do, does it matter to know we can choose how to think?
Recent scientific research on plants and forests has shown that plants are dynamic, ever-evolving creatures that know how simultaneously to respond to their own inner pattern while remaining adaptive to the environment; that know how to grow in resilience and flexibility by developing a vast web of relations, both visible and invisible. In becoming who they are, plants also generate and foster complex ecosystems around them: they support communities of deeply interconnected yet also wildly diverse living species, including our own. In other words: plants know how to give to life infinitely more than they take from it. Without plants and their way of living/thinking, we humans would simply not exist.
Somewhat like an old-growth forest, pre-modern Europe produced a vast corpus of texts and images that mirror and teach an organic way of thinking and of becoming. In this course we will deepen our understanding of these expressions of ecologically-oriented, transformative worldviews. Our approach will be complemented and supported by select readings in contemporary environmental humanities, and in North-American Indigenous perspectives on education as the human path to wholeness.
We will discuss:
- The Romance of the Rose (excerpts); Tristan and Isolde; The Grail Legend (excerpts);
- Lady Philosophy and/as Mother Nature embodying feminine wisdom from Antiquity to the Middle Ages;
- St Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante Alighieri;
- Botticelli’s mythological paintings; Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and other paintings;
- Montaigne’s education of the mind through rootedness in the body and the heart.
Required Texts:
All texts for this course will be made available through Canvas and/or UBC library.
Language of instruction: English
Note:
Students who plan to minor in Italian must take this course as ITAL and will be expected to do part of their reading and assignments in the Italian language.
Course Registration
Race, Ethnicity and Language
Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard
Language of instruction: French
This course is based on the fundamental idea that discourse practices are an important indicator of wider social and cultural structures. Language has a key role to play in the racial and ethnic boundary-making processes, as it is a vehicle for the ideologies that get attached to racialized and ethnicized subjects. It is through language that racial and ethnic ideologies are produced and reproduced, perpetuated and resisted.
This course takes interest in the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic boundaries through the use of language. This course is built around two main questions:
- If race and ethnicity are ways of categorizing identity (rather than being inherited essences of identity), then how and why are race and ethnicity so powerful in shaping social life and experience?
- If race, ethnicity, and language are social constructs, how can we (as citizens, students, and scholars) represent and discuss these concepts without reifying them?
We will read a range of ethnographies and articles that seek to overcome these dilemmas.
Recommended readings: Most readings will be available on Canvas.
Études postcoloniales : quels défis ? Quel horizon ?
Instructor: Farid Laroussi
Language of instruction: French
Les études postcoloniales appartiennent désormais de plain-pied au champ de la recherche universitaire, ainsi qu’à des disciplines aussi différentes que le cinéma ou les sciences politiques. Mais qu’en sait-on vraiment ? Plus de quarante ans après leur avènement, les études postcoloniales continuent de nous proposer une sorte d’urgence à connaître et à penser le sujet. Notre séminaire s’attachera à appréhender des discours de la postcolonialité, notamment autour de la théorie et aussi du roman dit francophone. On abordera le contexte socio-historique, ainsi que des questions d’ordre pragmatique avec par exemple celles de la mémoire, de l´énonciation, ou de la migration. Cette pluralité des approches vous donnera l’occasion de choisir et d’analyser les sujets qui peuvent vous tenir à cœur ou capter votre attention critique, bref, d’établir votre propre rapport au savoir. Outre un exposé, une bibliographie raisonnée, il y aura aussi un travail de recherche soutenu et argumenté qui, idéalement, devrait vous initier à la publication d’un article.
Objectifs :
- Acquérir une vision d’ensemble des courants et approches autour de la théorie postcoloniale
- Analyser la viabilité et la richesse du discours minoritaire/natif/exilé
- Apprendre à utiliser l’analyse postcoloniale dans le roman, francophone notamment
- Développer les outils de la méthodologie comparative
- Établir et comprendre les liens entre les études subalternes, les féminismes, l’oralité, l’orientalisme, la mondialisation vs le cosmopolitisme, etc.
Ouvrages de cours :
Kaouther Adimi. Nos richesses (2017)
Alain Mabanckou. Verre cassé (2005)
Gisèle Pineau. La grande drive des esprits (1993)
Des articles critiques et de théorie seront distribués
Liste non-exhaustive d’ouvrages critiques autour de la thématique postcoloniale :
Deepika Bahri. Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (2003)
Aimé Césaire. Discours sur le colonialisme (1950)
Patrick Chamoiseau. Écrire en pays dominé (1997)
Yves Clavaron. Poétique du roman postcolonial (2011)
Dominique Combe. Littératures francophones : questions, débats, et polémiques (2019)
David Damrosch. What is World Literature? (2003)
Zillah Eisenstein. Against Empire Feminisms, Racism, and the West (2004)
Frantz Fanon. Peau noire, masques blancs (1952)
Charles Forsdick (ed.). Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World (2009)
Simon Gikandi. Reading the African Novel (1987)
Sandra Harding (ed.). The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (2011)
Abdelkébir Khatibi. Du bilinguisme (1985)
Farid Laroussi. Postcolonial Counterpoint. Orientalism, France and the Maghreb (2016)
Achille Mbembe. De la postcolonie, essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (2000)
Albert Memmi. Portrait du colonisé (1957)
Walter Mignolo. On Decoloniality. Concept, Analytics, Praxis (2018)
Jean-Marc Moura. Littérature francophone et théorie postcoloniale (1999)
Edward Said. Orientalism (1978)
Ella Shoat. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspective (1997)
Marie-Claude Smouts (dir.) La situation postcoloniale: les postcolonial studies dans le débat français (2007)
Gayatri Spivak. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999)
Michael Syrotinski. Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (2007)
Gillian Whitlock. Postcolonial Life-Narrative (2015)
Redefining Courtliness
Cod. Pal. germ. 208, f° 82v
Courtliness has been one of the most fundamental concepts in the study of medieval literature for almost 150 years. When he described “amour courtois” in 1883, Gaston Paris might not have imagined the perennial critical success that the term would have, as well as its lexical productivity, leading to cognate notions such as courtoisie/courtliness, courtly culture, courtly politics, grand chant courtois and, of course, courtly literature.
But what exactly is courtliness? Is it a social phenomenon? An aesthetic? An ideology? A way to regulate human relations within feudal courts? A narrative and poetic framework that organizes writing about adventures and love? A fantasy concocted by troubadours and trouvères, but never realized as such or, on the contrary, an authentic way of life that dominated the Occitan- and French-speaking courts of the 12th century and beyond?
New critical perspectives of recent decades have profoundly transformed the ways in which we might envisage courtliness. Gender studies and queer studies shed new light on courtly heteronormativity, while feminist approaches help us better understand the dialectics of emancipation and objectification that structure courtly writing. The global medieval perspective helps us better comprehend how courtliness anchors itself within a series of concentric geopolitical and geocultural circles that stretch from Al-Andalus to the Holy Land. Material philology and new codicology shed light on the networks of production and reception, located at the intersection of courts and cities, that allow the dissemination of courtly phenomena.
Required readings:
- Poésie des troubadours. Henri Gougaud (ed.)., René Laveau & René Nelli (trans.). Paris: Points, 2009
- Marie de France, Lais. Philippe Walter (trans.). Paris: Folio Gallimard, 2020
- Tristan et Iseut. Les Poèmes français, la saga norroise. Philippe Walter (trans.). Paris: Lettres gothiques, 1989
- Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette. Alfred Foulet & Karl Uitti (ed. & trans.). Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020
- Heldris de Cornouaille, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (ed. & trans.). East Lansing (Mich.): Michigan State University Press, 1999
- Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose. Jean Dufournet (ed. & trans.). Paris: GF Flammarion, 1999
NOTE: Item 5 (Heldris de Cornouaille, Silence) is available online through UBC Library.
Language of instruction: French
Canons of Fantasy: Lands of High Adventure by Patrick Moran has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. It is part of their new series titled “Elements in Publishing and Book Culture.”
Description:
Despite publishing endeavours such as the “Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series” in the 1970s and “Fantasy Masterworks” in the early 2000s, the canon of modern fantasy is still very much in flux.
This Element examines four key questions raised by the prospect of a fantasy canon:
- the way in which canon and genre influence each other;
- the overwhelming presence of Tolkien in any discussion of the classics of fantasy;
- the multi-media and transmedia nature of the field;
- and the push for a more inclusive and diverse canon.
Access:
Author:
Dr. Patrick Moran is a fantasy novelist in addition to being a medieval scholar. He is an Assistant Professor of Medieval French Literature at UBC since 2018, after teaching at various French and Canadian universities (Université Paris-Sorbonne, Université Lyon 2, Université Montpellier 3, McMaster University, University of Ottawa, Université Laval). He holds a PhD from the Université Paris-Sorbonne and is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure. His research focuses on Medieval narrative genres of the 12th and 13th centuries, primarily Arthurian romance and chanson de geste. His work explores the intersection between literary theory (especially reader-response, narrative theory and cognitive poetics) and material philology. He has also published a fantasy novel and a handful of science fiction and fantasy short stories.
This collection of essays is the first English-language study to present the latest research on Italy’s cultural relationships with China and Japan across the centuries. It explores topics ranging from travel writing to creative arts, from translation to religious accommodation, and from Cold War politics to Chinese American cuisine.
The volume draws on the expertise of an interdisciplinary group of scholars trained and working in Europe, East Asia, and North America who re-assess research foci and frames, showcase transcultural and theoretically-informed research, and help to strengthen this field of study.
Gaoheng Zhang is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a leading cultural critic of Chinese migration to Italy, and is the author of the book Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992-2012 (2019).
Mario Mignone founded the Center for Italian Studies at Stony Brook University, USA, and was its Director until his death in 2019. During his career, he served as the editor of Forum Italicum and authored around 50 scholarly articles and seven books. In recognition of his extraordinary professional service and scholarly work, he was bestowed with the “Cavaliere Ufficiale al merito della Repubblica”, awarded by the President of the Italian Republic.
This courses introduces you to the French language and Francophone cultures, and opens up your understanding in a worldwide context. With an approach that is communicative and collaborative, and inductive and interactive, the course develops comprehension and the mobilization of knowledge as savoir-faire.
French grammatical structures studied include: common verbs in the present tense, subject pronouns and adjectives for descriptions, prepositions for talking about places, simple negation, and asking questions. Improve your listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills in French.
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