Ascent and Decline: Topics in Golden-Age Peninsular Literature and Culture
Expect murder, romance, magic and mayhem as we read some of the most outstanding theatrical plays of the Golden Age. Much of today’s drama, from Broadway musicals to intellectual farces, descends from a rich Hispanic theatrical tradition dating back to the Renaissance. In this course students will build their knowledge of Golden Age drama and performance from Spain and Latin America, while paying particular attention to the representation of female characters, artistic objects and private/public spaces in four thematic sections: 1) dramas of honor, 2) comedies of “capa y espada,” 3) masculine women on stage and 4) female playwrights. The course will incorporate cinematic adaptations of plays, videos featuring memorable staged performances, readings of historical texts and behavior manuals, as well as varied visual arts with which the plays were in dialogue. We will also take note of early modern literary criticism to discern how dramatists interacted with the social, economic, political and artistic concerns of their time within in their work. Primary readings will include texts from Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Cervantes, Ana Caro de Mallén, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and María de Zayas among others.
Required readings:
Lope de Vega, El arte nuevo de hacer comedias. Ed. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Cátedra 2009.
Lope de Vega, El castigo sin venganza. Ed. Antonio Carreño. Madrid: Cátedra, 2009.
Lope de Vega, La dama boba. Ed. Diego Marín. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La dama duende. Ed. Jesús Pérez Magallón. Madrid: Cátedra, 2011.
Additional required readings will be posted as pdfs on Canvas.
Recommended readings:
Ignacio Arellano, Historia del teatro español del siglo XVII. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008.
Ignacio Arellano and José Antonio Rodríguez Garrido, El teatro en la Hispanoamérica colonial. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008.
Cervantes, Teatro Completo. Florencia Sevilla Arroyo. Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2016.
Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Historia del teatro español (desde sus orígenes hasta 1900). Madrid: Cátedra, 2011.
Malveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Teresa Scott Soufas, Dramas of Distinction: Plays by Golden Age Women. Lexington: The U of Kentucky P, 1997.
This autobiography course is designed for advanced students/majors in French, preferably, but not necessarily, who are engaged with contemporary literary studies. We will examine issues related to a literary genre and its manifold transformations in late 20th century, starting with the construction of the self. What are the interconnections between narrative voice, literary form, and subjectivity, for instance? Does autobiography fit in some happy realism (claiming to represent facts)? Is it an exercise in reshaping cultural imagination (French, bourgeois, gendered, social memory, etc.)? Is the impulse to self-narration universal? How does time inform narrative, or is it the other way round? We’ll also seek to examine what the impact of the theoretical discourse has been on writing autobiography.
Required readings:
Patrick Besson. Tour Jade (2003)
Marguerite Duras. L’Amant (1984
Marie Nimier. La Reine du silence (2004)
George Perec. W. ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975)
Prerequisite:
One of FREN 320, FREN 321, FREN 328, FREN 329, FREN 330.
This course is an introduction to sociolinguistics, with a focus on French-speaking societies. Throughout the semester, we will discuss basic concepts in sociolinguistics and address main topics in the field, including language variation, language contact and its possible outcomes, standardization, multilingualism, identity questions, and language attitudes and ideologies. This course aims to enable students to analyse, understand and discuss the links between language and society by providing students with the knowledge of sociolinguistic theory, research methods, main concepts and terminology along with developing the relevant application skills. All discussions and work submitted in this course will be in French.
Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:
Recognize the challenges of linguistic and sociocultural diversity in the French-speaking world.
Understand the main concepts and theories in sociolinguistics and apply them to the study of French and multilingual communities.
Discuss and explain the link between various social factors and language use.
Conduct their own sociolinguistics research in a French-speaking community.
Required readings:
Readings will be made available through the Canvas site.
Prerequisite: FREN 370
Corequisite: FREN 370 may be taken concurrently with the permission of the instructor of FREN 470.
While Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo inaugurate the midnight movie phenomenon, its success spawned The Holy Mountain. The film production was aided by the intervention of John Lennon and Allen Klein. However, after a scandalous release and a sixteen-month midnight career, The Holy Mountain was relegated to the underground world of fan bootlegs for over thirty years until its limited, restored release in 2007. Anchored in post-1968 critiques, this short study reveals how this poetic, hilarious, and anarchist cult film by an international auteur is in fact a time capsule of the counterculture movement, a subversion of mystical tenets, and one of the most mysterious films in the history of world cinema.
Alessandra Santos. The Holy Mountain. Wallflower Press Cultographies Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
ISBN: 9780231182317
This course introduces you to various theoretical approaches and techniques that facilitate the transplantation of texts from one language to another as well as from one culture to another. Designed to enhance bilingual competence and cross-cultural communication skills, this course will expand your glossary of professional terminology and will help you gain practical skills for translation. Particular emphasis will be placed on issues of cultural adaptation. The course is student-centered and task-based. Students will contribute to choosing and/or writing texts to translate that are in line with both their personal interests and the objectives of the course. We will be working on translation techniques in various fields (arts & literature, business, food & tourism, fashion & design) and/or in conjunction with literary creativity (graphic novels, short stories, film scripts, plays, and haikus).
Learning objectives
To master the key concepts, theories and terminology proper to translation
To gain an overall understanding of the translation process and of different translating strategies and techniques
To develop self-assessing and self-correcting techniques in order to monitor one’s own progress
To work individually and/or collaboratively on a translation project
To improve knowledge of Italian language & culture and become familiar with grammatical and structural overlaps (or divergences) between Italian and English
Prerequisite: ITAL 202 or permission of the department
Note: Transfer students or students with experience in Italy should contact the undergraduate adviser for a language competence assessment.
This book offers an innovative examination of the utopian impulse through performance as a proposition of practical engagement in the contemporary Americas. The volume compiles unique multidisciplinary and exploratory texts, applying diverse critical and artistic approaches. Its contributors reconceptualize utopia as a creative and theoretical method based on a commitment to sociopolitical transformation. Chapters are organized around notions of mapping utopias, indigenizing practices, political manifestations, and the construction of social identities.
Kim Beauchesne and Alessandra Santos: Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-137-56873-1
Redes globales: las conexiones textuales entre Hispanoamérica, España y Asia, del pasado al presente
Namban byobu de Kanō Naizen, atribuida a la época Azuchi-Momoyama (siglos XVI y XVII)
Instructor: Kim Beauchesne Language of instruction: Spanish
Este curso examinará los vínculos textuales que se han desarrollado desde la época colonial hasta nuestros días entre España, Hispanoamérica y Asia. De este modo, no sólo se prestará atención a un corpus que ha sido desatendido por la academia tradicional sino que también se ampliará el enfoque de los estudios transatlánticos para incluir los estudios transpacíficos. Se discutirán, entonces, las nociones de globalización, sincronía planetaria, colonialidad y orientalismo, entre otras, mediante el análisis de una selección de obras primarias y secundarias, tanto canónicas como menores. No cabe duda de que este curso será una contribución a la comprensión de la cultura colonial hispánica y su legado actual, ya que los contactos culturales que se produjeron durante siglos entre España, Hispanoamérica y Asia siguen siendo de gran importancia, como lo demuestran tanto la presencia española en las Filipinas y las Américas como las numerosas comunidades asiáticas de América Latina y España.
Obras primarias (fragmentos disponibles en Canvas):
Borges, Jorge Luis. “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” (complementado por los textos de Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda y Ariel Magnus)
Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón. Diario (complementado por los textos de Date Masamune, Luis Sotelo y Escipión Amati)
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Loas para los autos El Divino Narciso y El cetro de José
Díaz Lorenzo, Álvaro, dir. Los Japón
González de Mendoza, Juan. Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China
Japón, Juan Manuel. La katana perdida (complementada por los textos de Héctor Palacios y Endō Shūsaku)
López de Legazpi, Miguel. Cartas a Felipe II
Malaspina, Alejandro. Viaje político-científico alrededor del mundo
Moromisato, Doris. Diario de la mujer es ponja (complementado por los textos de José Watanabe y Siu Kam Wen)
Pigafetta, Antonio de. Primer viaje alrededor del globo
Rizal, José. Noli me tangere
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez
Vega, Lope de. El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón
Obras secundarias (fragmentos disponibles en Canvas):
Selección de textos de Rolena Adorno, Mike Featherstone, Juan Gil, Serge Gruzinski, Koichi Hagimoto, Héctor Hoyos, Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, Julia Kushigian, Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Ignacio López-Calvo, Walter Mignolo, José Koichi Oizumi, Julio Ortega, Beatriz Pastor, Catalina Quesada Gómez, etc.
Ce cours propose un survol du roman français contemporain (après 1945), avec notamment un choix d’oeuvres représentant une évolution littéraire, à travers les voix masculine et féminine. Nous découvrirons aussi les transformations narratives de ce qui constitue le roman contemporain français. Les textes seront abordés à la lumière de leur contexte culturel (identité française ?), politique (engagement ?), et théorique (discours sur la littérature ?). Le travail en cours portera sur l’analyse critique, notamment en abordant les compétences de réflexion et de composition littéraires.
Engaging with history, culture, politics and intellectual life in contemporary France, this course crafts visions to understand key aspects of French society. We seek out to examine radical transformations through three specific cultural clusters. The first one addresses the Algerian War and the massive political, institutional and cultural upheavals that it brought along. Then, we move to France’s integration into the European Union, and the many challenges, notably around identity, sovereignty, citizenship, and globalization. Lastly, the course focuses on the French brand of feminism, what defines and confronts it on political and cultural grounds. For example, rethinking gender, labor division, or laïcité. The course uses fiction works, films, and essais to explore the vast area of ideas that shape France’s modernity. Students are expected to develop skills in cultural analysis as well as criticl reading and composition. In French.
Required readings:
Laurens, Camille. Celle que vous croyez (2016)
Mauvignier, Laurent. Des Hommes (2009)
File of documents and essays related to the three clusters
Recommended readings:
Materials will be provided in class
Prerequisite:
One of FREN 220, FREN 221, FREN 223 or permission of the instructor
Amazonia is a vast and complex region in South America—the most bio-diverse on Earth—stretching over nine countries and it is home to 400 indigenous groups. This course will explore pressing environmental and cultural issues of our time through the study of the Amazon rainforest as it is represented in literature, films and media.
The course offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the Amazon, taking into consideration its history, as well as social and political aspects related to the region and its major global impact. The course will be organized around themes such as: environment, ecosystems and sustainability; exploration; anthropology; indigeneity, shamanism; literary, cinema, popular culture and media representations. Fulfills the Faculty of Arts Literature Requirement.
Required readings:
All texts for the course will be in English. Texts will be available on Canvas in PDF; films will be available streaming through the UBC Library.
Primary texts (selections from):
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami The Falling Sky (2013)
Daniel Munduruku Indigenous Tales from Brazil (2013)
Sônia Guajajara, Eliane Potiguara (interviews)
Euclides da Cunha The Amazon: Land without History (1909)
Candace Slater Entangled Edens (2003)
Wade Davis The Wayfinders (2009); One River (1997)
Milton Hatoum Orphans of Eldorado (2008)
Eduardo Kohn How Forests Think (2013)
Films:
Werner Herzog Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); Fitzcarraldo (1982)
John Boorman The Emerald Forest (1985)
Takumã Kuikuro Itão Kuẽgü – The Hyperwomen (2012)
Ciro Guerra Embrace of the Serpent (2015)
James Gray The Lost City of Z (2016)
Prerequisites: No prerequisites
Language of instruction: English
Note: This course fulfills the Faculty of Arts Literature Requirement.
