Rayanos y Dominicanyorks: la dominicanidad del siglo XXI

Rayanos y Dominicanyorks: la dominicanidad del siglo XXI

2014 | By Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martinez 

Publisher: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana

Through close readings of various texts that deal with issues of border, identity and the relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic as well as with the flow of immigrants between Dominican Republic and the United States, this study introduces the trope of the “rayano” (the one that was born, lives or comes from the border) as an apt metaphor to explain the identity of Dominicans in the twenty-first century — an identity that should be viewed as one born out of movements, translations and interstices. The primary texts that this study will focus on will cover the Haitian-Dominican and Dominican-American experiences. In terms of the former, El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973) by Freddy Prestol Castillo and The Farming of Bones (1998) by Edwidge Danticat are useful for analyzing the defining moment of the relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic in the twentieth century: the 1937 border massacre of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo.

In the case of the Dominican-American relationship, Dominicanish (2000) by Josefina Báez, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz will be the texts through which it will be analyzed the Dominican diaspora and its relationship with the two defining spaces of Dominicanness in the twenty-first century: Santo Domingo and New York City. In addition to these texts, this study also engages the theoretical production regarding the triangular relationship between Dominican Republic, Haiti and the United States through an analysis of the different metaphors used by Lucía M. Suárez in The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory, Eugenio Matibag in Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, State and Race in Hispaniola, and Michele Wucker in Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.

RMST202

Introduction to Literatures and Cultures of the Romance World II: Modern to Post-Modern

Literature and Culture, Modernism to the Present

Learn to love to read again!

Course trailer:
Course user’s manual:
Course description:

In this course, we will be reading literary texts, mostly novels, originally written in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, or Romanian during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some are by authors you may have heard of, others are more obscure, but each has been judged noteworthy or influential. 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 exploration 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?

All these texts are presented under the rubric of “Romance Studies.” Though we are reading these books in English, none of them were written originally in that language; each was first written in a language that derives from Latin. The question is whether this distinction is arbitrary or significant. Do these texts have anything in common simply thanks to the fact that they share, to a greater or lesser extent, some common linguistic heritage? Are they different in any coherent way from texts written in other languages? What, in short, if anything, is distinctive and different about “Romance Studies”? Responding to this difficult question is the third and most fundamental of this course’s goals. We may well fail to achieve it, which is fine, but this is the challenge we are set.

The Romance languages are Latin’s bastard offspring, forged in the encounter with the Barbarian hordes that destroyed Rome and its so-called civilization. It is not tradition that they share, but their betrayal of that tradition. They are not founded on the classics; they are what usurped the classics and illegitimately took their place. Romance Studies emerges when tradition is infiltrated and overthrown by the demotic, by the everyday speech of a nameless multitude.

We add a further measure of betrayal by reading everything in translation. Translation, with its inevitable perfidy as well as reluctant homage, is a good image for what we are up to: remaking language, taking texts out of context, helping them travel and become new. It is also of a piece with the democratizing tendency of what we are out to invent. Here there are no native speakers, no native informants. Nobody speaks “Romance.” But we effortlessly speak “not-Latin.”

How does all this square with what we will be doing as this course unfolds? On one level, little, and it is quite possible that we never again utter the phrase “Romance Studies.” The point is not to get hung up on the rubric or the bureaucratic niceties. The project is to read, to think, to come up with new concepts, to open up horizons. This is what we will be doing week by week, rather than worrying too much whether we are following the program with sufficient fidelity.

On the other hand, these concepts of betrayal and escape, miscegenation and becoming, translation and misunderstanding, error and doubt, are at the core of many of the texts we are studying. These often concern memory and recollection, infidelity and the invention of new forms of community.

Whether it is Proust meditating on his narrator’s distance from a not-so-idyllic past in a place he calls “Combray,” Alberto Moravia’s anti-Oedipal non-Bildungsroman, Agostino, Joseph Zobel’s semi-autobiographical account of the dog days of Empire in Martinique, Clarice Lispector’s description of a becoming-animal in a Brazilian servant’s quarters, or Carlos Fuentes’s tale of an American drawn to death and love in the Mexican Revolution, all these authors and texts push at limits, question the past, and break free to construct something new. They make us think differently about issues of representation and power, writing and the real, authority and authorship.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Instructor: Jon Beasley-Murray

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Le Récit architecte : Cinq aspects de l’espace

2019 | By Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire

Space is at the heart of the story. Its invention is fundamentally linked to the evolution of time, characters, their bodies, knowledge. This new approach to the poetics of space offers, in contact with an open corpus, new tools for the analysis of narrative texts.

 

L’archive du réel : essais sur Claude Simon

2020 | By Ralph Sarkonak

This work, which represents the fruits of forty years of research on Claude Simon, alternates thematic studies and essays devoted to individual novels; particular attention is paid to the “almost unspoken” novels. The three main themes studied here are anglicity, androgyny and anti-Semitism; they are among the most important of the work both because of their ethical dimension and their multiple formal and intertextual resonances. The targeted novels, which correspond to the four periods of the work, are The Rite of Spring, History, Triptyque and L’Acacia, but Simon’s other books are discussed in the book’s seven essays. “The choice to close the book on a study of the Jewish theme […] is particularly justified in that it converges with the interest now proven for the relationship of Simonian novels with History and for their integration of social discourses and of ethical and political questions ”, we commented.

SPAN592

Graduate Proseminar II: Research Skills and Scholarly Practices

Cross-listed with FREN592

Credits: Janko Ferlič, 2016

What is academia? What is research? What can I expect from a graduate program and what does a graduate program expect from me? How do I prepare a grant application, a conference paper, or a journal article? What are the next two years of my MA, or the next four years of my PhD, going to look like? The Proseminar answers these questions and many more. Meet your fellow students from the incoming graduate cohort, discover the inner mechanisms of the FHIS graduate program, learn to develop your research project and share its results, and explore different theories and ways of thinking in this fortnightly course.

The Proseminar is mandatory for PhD students as well as MA students taking the thesis-based option. MA students who haven’t decided between the thesis-based and course-based options are strongly advised to follow the Proseminar.

The Proseminar spans two courses: Proseminar I (FREN/SPAN 591) in Winter Term 1 and Proseminar II (FREN/SPAN 592) in Winter Term 2. The two courses must be attended in order. Students who begin their program in September must enrol in Proseminar I immediately; students who begin their program in January must wait until the following September to enrol and cannot take Proseminar II before Proseminar I.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

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Grading Breakdown

The grading breakdown typically includes fortnightly assignments (approx. 40-50%), a short end-of-term paper in Term 1 (approx. 20%), a longer end-of-term work in Term 2 (approx. 30%) and active participation in both terms (approx. 30%).

Readings

Coming soon!

FREN592

Graduate Proseminar II: Research Skills and Scholarly Practices

Cross-listed with SPAN592

Credits: Janko Ferlič, 2016

What is academia? What is research? What can I expect from a graduate program and what does a graduate program expect from me? How do I prepare a grant application, a conference paper, or a journal article? What are the next two years of my MA, or the next four years of my PhD, going to look like? The Proseminar answers these questions and many more. Meet your fellow students from the incoming graduate cohort, discover the inner mechanisms of the FHIS graduate program, learn to develop your research project and share its results, and explore different theories and ways of thinking in this fortnightly course.

The Proseminar is mandatory for PhD students as well as MA students taking the thesis-based option. MA students who haven’t decided between the thesis-based and course-based options are strongly advised to follow the Proseminar.

The Proseminar spans two courses: Proseminar I (FREN/SPAN 591) in Winter Term 1 and Proseminar II (FREN/SPAN 592) in Winter Term 2. The two courses must be attended in order. Students who begin their program in September must enrol in Proseminar I immediately; students who begin their program in January must wait until the following September to enrol and cannot take Proseminar II before Proseminar I.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Expand all
|
Collapse all
Grading Breakdown

The grading breakdown typically includes fortnightly assignments (approx. 40-50%), a short end-of-term paper in Term 1 (approx. 20%), a longer end-of-term work in Term 2 (approx. 30%) and active participation in both terms (approx. 30%).

Readings

Coming soon!

SPAN591

Graduate Proseminar I: Research Skills and Scholarly Practices

Cross-listed with FREN591

Credits: Janko Ferlič, 2016

What is academia? What is research? What can I expect from a graduate program and what does a graduate program expect from me? How do I prepare a grant application, a conference paper, or a journal article? What are the next two years of my MA, or the next four years of my PhD, going to look like? The Proseminar answers these questions and many more. Meet your fellow students from the incoming graduate cohort, discover the inner mechanisms of the FHIS graduate program, learn to develop your research project and share its results, and explore different theories and ways of thinking in this fortnightly course.

The Proseminar is mandatory for PhD students as well as MA students taking the thesis-based option. MA students who haven’t decided between the thesis-based and course-based options are strongly advised to follow the Proseminar.

The Proseminar spans two courses: Proseminar I (FREN/SPAN 591) in Winter Term 1 and Proseminar II (FREN/SPAN 592) in Winter Term 2. The two courses must be attended in order. Students who begin their program in September must enrol in Proseminar I immediately; students who begin their program in January must wait until the following September to enrol and cannot take Proseminar II before Proseminar I.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Expand all
|
Collapse all
Grading Breakdown

The grading breakdown typically includes fortnightly assignments (approx. 40-50%), a short end-of-term paper in Term 1 (approx. 20%), a longer end-of-term work in Term 2 (approx. 30%) and active participation in both terms (approx. 30%).

Readings

Coming soon!

FREN591

Graduate Proseminar I: Research Skills and Scholarly Practices

Cross-listed with SPAN591

Credits: Janko Ferlič, 2016

What is academia? What is research? What can I expect from a graduate program and what does a graduate program expect from me? How do I prepare a grant application, a conference paper, or a journal article? What are the next two years of my MA, or the next four years of my PhD, going to look like? The Proseminar answers these questions and many more. Meet your fellow students from the incoming graduate cohort, discover the inner mechanisms of the FHIS graduate program, learn to develop your research project and share its results, and explore different theories and ways of thinking in this fortnightly course.

The Proseminar is mandatory for PhD students as well as MA students taking the thesis-based option. MA students who haven’t decided between the thesis-based and course-based options are strongly advised to follow the Proseminar.

The Proseminar spans two courses: Proseminar I (FREN/SPAN 591) in Winter Term 1 and Proseminar II (FREN/SPAN 592) in Winter Term 2. The two courses must be attended in order. Students who begin their program in September must enrol in Proseminar I immediately; students who begin their program in January must wait until the following September to enrol and cannot take Proseminar II before Proseminar I.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Expand all
|
Collapse all
Grading Breakdown

The grading breakdown typically includes fortnightly assignments (approx. 40-50%), a short end-of-term paper in Term 1 (approx. 20%), a longer end-of-term work in Term 2 (approx. 30%) and active participation in both terms (approx. 30%).

Readings

Coming soon!

La Mort le roi Artu (Modern French Translation)

2021 | Translated by Patrick Moran

This is a new Modern French translation by Dr. Patrick Moran of the early 13th-century Old French romance La Mort le roi Artu, which contains an introduction and notes. It is published by La Librairie Droz (Geneva, Switzerland) and is based on the classic 1936 edition by Jean Frappier.

La Mort le roi Artu offers one of the most famous medieval accounts of the death of King Arthur and the fall of the Round Table. Written anonymously in Northern or Eastern France c. 1210-1220, it inspired European literature throughout the Middle Ages and was a huge influence on English retellings (particularly Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur).

Full description:

La Mort le Roi Artu depicts an Arthurian world on the edge of the precipice, where envy and resentment jeopardize traditional chivalrous values, where the forbidden love of Queen Guinevere and Lancelot du Lac risks being revealed at any time and destroying the fragile balance of the court. The last part of the Lancelot-Graal cycle, copied endlessly until the 15th century before being printed many times during the Renaissance, this anonymous novel constitutes the richest and most complex version of the fall of Arthur’s kingdom, through a choral story where the heroes of yesteryear fall prey to their own desires and the whims of Fortune. Here we find the critical Lachmannian edition of Jean Frappier, with a new and very successful translation by Patrick Moran.