FREN502

FREN502

Masculinités, féminités et questions d’identité à la Renaissance

Cross-listed with FREN495

Maître François de Rohan, Marguerite de Navarre donne son ouvrage à Anne de Pisseleu, duchesse d'Etampes. Miniature tirée d'un manuscrit de La Coche ou débat d'amour (vers 1542): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Coche_ou_d%C3%A9bat_d%27amour_-_Mus%C3%A9e_Cond%C3%A9_Ms522_f43v_%28Marguerite_de_Navarre_et_Anne_de_Pisseleu%29.jpg

Le masculin et le féminin sont souvent remis en question depuis l’émergence des études sur le genre (gender studies). Cependant, même si les voies d’approche récentes à la sexualité ou à l’altérité nous permettent d’analyser quelques-uns de ces concepts sous un nouveau jour, nous constaterons que certaines problématiques existaient déjà dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance. Dans ce séminaire, nous lirons donc divers textes – médicaux, philosophiques, iconographiques et littéraires – dits d’Ancien Régime, qui nous permettront d’examiner les débats (voire les angoisses) vis-à-vis des concepts de masculinité et de féminité, qui sont si souvent liés aux questions identitaires, y compris les constructions d’identités linguistiques, régionales ou nationales, entre autres.

Nous examinerons donc diverses représentations d’hommes et de femmes dans un choix de textes attribués à des auteurs masculins et féminins, ainsi que les images (parfois idéalisantes) d’hermaphrodites et d’androgynes qui prolifèrent dans l’iconographie renaissante. Nous aurons aussi lieu de nous demander s’il pouvait exister une écriture masculine ou féminine, non seulement à l’instar de certains critiques plus ou moins récents, mais de textes du seizième siècle où il s’agit (comme chez Montaigne) de mettre en valeur la vigueur d’une écriture virile, tout en dépréciant la « mollesse » de styles, de langues et de comportements décrits comme efféminés – liant ainsi éthique, rhétorique et esthétique.

Language of instruction: French

Instructor: Nancy Frelick

Grading Breakdown

Participation (discussions en classe et sur Canvas, 2 x 10%): 20%
Présentations en classe: 20%
Dissertations (2 x 30%): 60%
Total: 100%

Readings

Lectures obligatoires :

Une sélection de textes en prose (Marie de Gournay, Marguerite de Navarre, Michel de Montaigne et Etienne de la Boétie, François Rabelais…) et en poésie (Philippe Desportes, les Dames des Roches, Joachim Du Bellay, Pernette du Guillet, Nicole Estienne, Louise Labé, Clément Marot, Estienne Pasquier, Pierre de Ronsard, Maurice Scève…), ainsi que quelques emblèmes (de Gilles Corrozet et Guillaume La Perrière).

Un choix de textes primaires et d’ouvrages critiques sera disponible via Canvas.

Quelques pistes bibliographiques :

Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. Les Femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance. Genève: Droz, 1990.

---. Un corps, un destin. La Femme dans la médecine de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1993.

Clément, Michèle et Janine Incardona, eds. L’Émergence littéraire des femmes à Lyon à la Renaissance, 1520-1560. Saint-Étienne: PU Sainte-Étienne, 2008.

Closson, Mariane, ed. L’Hermaphrodite de la Renaissance aux Lumières. Paris: Garnier, 2013.

Cottrell, Robert D. Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne’s Essais: Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1981.

Ferguson, Gary, ed. L’Homme en tous genres: Masculinités, textes et contextes. Paris L’Harmattan, 2009.

---. Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance. Homosexuality, Gender, Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Frelick, Nancy M., and Edith Benkov, eds. Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France. Toronto: Iter Press, 2024.

Gray, Floyd. Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Hampton, Timothy. Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.

Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Keller, Marcus. Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650). Newark: U of Delaware P, 2011.

Kritzman, Lawrence D. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

LaGuardia, David. Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Aldershot: Ashgate 2008.

Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Larsen, Anne R. et Colette H. Winn, eds. Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994.

Long, Kathleen P. Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

---, ed. High Anxiety : Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France. Kirksville: Truman State UP, 2002.

Poirier, Guy. L'Homosexualité dans l'imaginaire de la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 1996.

Reeser, Todd W. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2006.

---. Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.

Rothstein, Marian. The Androgyne in Early Modern France: Contextualizing the Power of Gender. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Siefert, Lewis C. and Rebecca M. Wilkin, eds. Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Warner, Lyndan. The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Winn, Colette, H. Teaching French Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. New York: MLA, 2011.

Yandell, Cathy M. Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000

SPAN322

Latino/Chicano Literature

This course will survey the literatures and cultures of Latino/as and Chicano/as in the United States and Canada. We will read authors such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Carmen Rodríguez. The settings will range from nineteenth-century California to twentieth-century Spanish Harlem and South Side Chicago, as well as glitzy Miami and multicultural Vancouver today. The themes to be discussed include identity, racism, memory, shame, pride, crime, exile, and international geopolitics, plus the usual literary topics of sex, death, and tortured adolescence. Students will edit Wikipedia articles as one of their assignments.

Instructor: Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray

Prerequisite: One of SPAN 202, SPAN 207. Or successful completion of a language placement exam or an assessment interview.

Language of Instruction: Spanish

Course registration

SPAN404A

From World to Screen: Topics in Hispanic Cinema

El curso es un acercamiento al cine español de finales del siglo XX y el siglo XXI.  Se estudiarán algunas de las películas más representativas y que, además, por su evidente calidad, han despertado el interés del público y de la crítica.  Las películas seleccionadas son representativas de alguno de los géneros más frecuentes: drama histórico, la comedia, el thriller, el film de horror y el drama realista y social. Los films serán el punto de partida para abordar cuestiones esenciales de la vida de España en este período: por ejemplo, cuestiones sobre la memoria, la identidad nacional o regional; o asuntos relativos al individuo y la sociedad española en el contexto global.

En el curso se plantearán preguntas como: ¿Por qué resucitar el pasado visualmente? ¿Cómo se filma la historia? ¿Tiene el cine de los nuevos directores un alcance nacional o un alcance universal? Es decir, ¿es una manifestación de un cine nacional o un producto más, genérico e indiferenciado, dentro del mercado global sin alcance o proyección internacional? ¿Se puede hablar de esencia identitaria y cultural española, vasca, catalana o gallega en el contexto global? ¿Es posible vislumbrar en el nuevo cine la presencia y construcción de nuevos modelos de masculinidad y feminidad? ¿Cómo construyen las directoras de cine la imagen de la mujer en la pantalla? ¿Cómo se aborda la temática de la violencia machista? ¿Qué grupos de la sociedad urbana quedan al margen del progreso económico neoliberal en el marco de una España internacional y global? ¿Qué implica la presencia de la cultura popular en el cine actual?

Language of instruction: Spanish

Prerequisite: SPAN 221; and SPAN 301 or equivalent expertise in written and spoken Spanish

Grading Breakdown

Coming soon

Readings

Coming soon

FREN420A

Le roman de l’extrême contemporain

Une des caractéristiques du roman français aujourd’hui réside dans l’absence de frontières génériques (romanesque, autobiographie, essai, polar, science-fiction) accompagnée d’une surenchère de mouvements ou courants (académique, nouveau roman, avant-gardiste, historique, féministe, minimaliste, etc.). Force est de se demander : qu’est-ce qui se joue dans le roman de la fin du XXème et du XXIème siècle ? Existe-t-il une nouvelle pensée du contemporain qui émerge de l’effervescence ou de la radicalisation littéraire et critique ? En quoi le nouveau et l’esthétique sont-ils transformés dans la production littéraire ? Comment l’auteur se situe-t-il entre l’engagement et une voix individualiste ? Ce sont ici quelques pistes que nous aurons à emprunter dans nos lectures. Il s’agira aussi dans ce cours d’analyser les textes au plus près.

Required readings:

Olivier Rolin. Port-Soudan (1994)

Jean Echenoz. Les grandes blondes (1995)

Delphine de Vigan. No et moi (2007)

Camille Laurens. Fille (2020)

Prerequisite: French 328, 329, or 330

Language of instruction: French

Course Registration

SPAN490C

Peoples and Nations: Topics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Spanish-American Culture

The Hispanic Caribbean is the most populous region in the Caribbean and the one with the greatest diversity in political and social terms. In this course, and through a careful reading of short stories from Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and their diasporas, we will analyze and discuss various aspects of Caribbean life in the 20th and 21st centuries, amongst them: migration, urbanism, rurality, gender, sexuality, the Cuban Revolution, its impact and aftermath.

Required readings: Readings will be provided by the instructor.

Prerequisite: SPAN 221
Corequisite: SPAN 302

Language of instruction: Spanish

FREN416B

Shades of Truth and Fiction in Contemporary French Literature

Contemporary literature is not easily grasped. It is constantly unfolding, leaving us, its readers, little time to map the field and little distance to judge what will become the emblematic works of our era. While this uncertainty may seem daunting, contemporary literature offers us unique opportunities to gain a complex understanding of present-day events, perspectives, taboos, and obsessions.

One notion that has come to define our times is that of truth. We are tasked, urgently, to seize what it may be and how it can be ascertained. Paradoxically, literature may contribute some of the most crucial reflections on the boundaries of truth. Indeed, writers of fiction have an intimate grasp on all shades of the real and of its representation. This appears remarkably salient in contemporary French literature, as it plays endlessly with nuances of the self, of testimony, of objectivity. In this class, we will discover how a variety of authors interprets historical reconstitution, gaslighting, confession, verisimilitude, autofiction, and more.

Required texts:

Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
Emmanuel Carrère, La moustache
Hervé Guibert, Cytomégalovirus
Annie Ernaux, L’événement
Edouard Levé, Autoportrait
Christine Angot, Les Petits
Gaël Faye, Petit pays
Maylis De Kerangal, À ce stade de la nuit                     

Instructor: Dr. Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire

Prerequisite: One of FREN 320, FREN 321, FREN 328, FREN 329, FREN 330

Language of Instruction: French

Course Registration

SPAN520A

Women Breaking/Bridging Borders: Intercultural Performance in Transatlantic Literature

Instructor: Elizabeth Lagresa-González
Language of instruction: Spanish

The course will include drama, poetry, prose fiction, biographical essays, historical and theoretical texts, as well as visual materials, to help us think through the following questions: How are transatlantic and cross-cultural encounters represented artistically, linguistically, culturally and visually? How do they contest fixed identity categories of self and ‘other’? How do these representations participate in the production and re-envisioning of world views and build connections across the shores of the Atlantic?

Our course will highlight the transhistorical and transnational aspects of staging subaltern subjectivities, focusing primarily on the role women performed in both bridging and breaking borders. We will pay particular attention to representations of Indigenous women, Mestizas, Criollas, Blacks, Africans, and Ibero-Africans, as well as their instrumental contribution to the formation of national identities. Primary readings will include: autobiographical text by women that traveled to the new world as Catalina Bustamante (México) and Mari de Ledesma (Perú); plays, autos sacramentales and poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; dramas by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Lope de Vega; epic poetry by Pedro de Oña and Alonso de Ercilla, among other literary, theoretical and historical texts.

Required texts:

  • Provided as PDFs on Canvas.

Selected readings:

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2016.
  • Gómez-Lucena, Eloísa. Españolas del nuevo mundo: ensayos biográficos, siglos XVI-XVII. Madrid: Cátedra, 2013. ISBN 978-84-376-3202-5
  • Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. Pennsylvania: Penn State Univ Press, 2020.
  • Lux Martelo, Martha Elisa. Las mujeres de Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII: lo que hacían, les hacían y no hacían, y las curas que les… Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, Centro de Estudios Socioculturales e Internacionales Ediciones Uniandes, 2006. ISBN 958-695-237-1
  • Martín, Luis. Las hijas de los conquistadores: mujeres del virreinato de Perú. Barcelona: Casiopea, 2000. ISBN 84-95446-02-2
  • Maura, Juan Francisco. Españolas de Ultramar en la historia y en la literatura: aventureras, madres, soldados, virreinas, gobernadoras, adelantadas, prostitutas, empresarias, monjas, escritoras, criadas y esclavas en la expansión ibérica ultramarina (siglos XV a XVII). Valencia: Univ. De Valencia, 2005. ISBN 84-370-6245-4
  • Morant, Isabel y María Ángeles Querol, et al. Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005-2008. ISBN 84-376-2262-X
  • Piossek Prebisch, Teresa. Las conquistadoras: presencia de la mujer española en América durante el siglo XVI. Buenos Aires, 1990. ISBN 950-43-3228-6
  • Pita Moreda, María Teresa. Mujer, conflicto y vida cotidiana en la ciudad de México, a finales del periodo español. Alcala de Henares: Centro Asesor de la Mujer, 1999. ISBN 84-87914-35-7
  • Poska, Allyson M. Gendered crossings: women and migration in the Spanish empire. Albuquerque, Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8263-5643-7
  • Pumar Martínez, Carmen. Españolas en Indias: mujeres-soldado, adelantadas y gobernadoras. Madrid: Anaya, 1988. ISBN 84-207-3121-8

Historias de Montreal: “Miradas de Outremont”

Dr. María Adelaida Escobar-Trujillo’s short story titled “Miradas de Outremont” has been published in Historias de Montreal.

Aiming to showcase a narrative vision of the contemporary urban landscape, the project places the Spanish language at the heart of the Canadian multicultural experience. These tales bring together 25 Latino- and Spanish- Canadian writers who call this country home and who have crafted stories in which Montreal plays a role sometimes active, sometimes passive, but always present in the arc of narratives that showcase the literary potential of the project and writers alike.

Historias de Montreal (Montreal series,) is the second collection of short stories in a project that IMAGINA community of authors, began in 2016 with the anthology  Historias de Toronto (Toronto series). Writers Martha Bátiz, Juan Gavasa and José-Antonio Villalobos are the editors and coordinators of this literary project.

Book Launch of Historias de Montreal on Saturday, May 6th in Montreal during the Blue Metropolis Festival.

 

Escobar-Trujillo, María Adelaida. “Miradas de Outremont.” Historias de Montreal, edited by Martha Bátiz,Juan Gavasa, and José Antonio Villalobos, Lugar Común Editorial, 2019.

SPAN520

Cervantes: Don Quijote and Beyond

Instructor: Elizabeth Lagresa-González
Language of instruction: Spanish

This course examines Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece “El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha” (Part I, 1605) in relation to some of his lesser-known creations, the “Novelas ejemplares” (1613) and “Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados” (1615).

By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Cervantes’s works will be discussed in relation to the cultural context of renaissance and baroque Spain, drawing upon the visual arts, historical texts, education manuals, and various contemporary literary masterpieces, while deconstructing the different genres of fiction — pastoral poetry, picaresque prose, Moorish sentimental and Italian novellas, as well as romances of chivalry — that inhabit his novel, novellas and plays.

Attesting to his global reach, Cervantes has been influential to thinkers from Lukács to Foucault, Bakhtin and Girard, and to writers from Nabokov to Borges, Flaubert, García Márquez and beyond. His literary creations have served as inspiration for painters (Goya, Doré, Dalí, Picasso), musicians (Purcell, Telemann, Massenet, Strauss, Falla), cineastes (Pabst, Welles, Gutiérrez Aragón), and critics (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Marthe Robert) alike, helping shape not only Hispanic but also World literature and culture as a whole.

Required texts:

M. de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Tom Lathrop. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005. (ISBN 9781589771000)
M. de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares (vol. 1 and 2). Ed. Harry Sieber. Madrid: Cátedra, 2007. (ISBN 9788437602219)
M. de Cervantes, Teatro Completo. Ed. Florencio Sevilla Arroyo. Barcelona: Penguin Clásicos, 2016. (ISBN 9788491051558)
John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716, 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 2002. (ISBN 9780141007038)

SPAN312B

Islamic Medieval Spain in Literature, History and Cultural Memory

Cross-listed with HIST 390D

This student-directed seminar invites students to examine the nexus of identity, race and power in Medieval Spain as a marker of transition towards ‘modernity’ (711-present). Topics include:

  • The emergence of Islamic rule;
  • the reconquest of Spain and the Crusades;
  • Legal history of the Inquisition, conversion, and expulsion;
  • The intersection between the image of the “other” and the legacy of the “New World”;
  • Nationalism, European integration, and immigration;
  • Contemporary debates around interfaith relations in Al-Andalus;
  • The conflicting systems of power in primary and secondary textual evidence, such as film, propaganda, and poetry.

Required readings: TBA

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisite: No prerequisites. Open to undergraduate students in 3rd year or higher.

Note: This course fulfills the Literature Requirement for the Bachelor of Arts.

Application process

To register for this course, students must submit a mandatory 5-6 sentence application responding to the prompts provided through the course website.