PORT201

The assessment for this course is gently distributed and in a balanced way, with diverse activities throughout the term. There are no scary, long, stressing and tedious midterms or final exams for you in this course.

Assignments and Evaluations Breakdown:
Active Participation, oral proficiency in class, and preparation 10%
Video assignment 10%
MyLab Portuguese Activities 15%
Chapter check-ins (1 online quiz at home, 1 short tests in class, 10% each) 20%
Listening comprehension challenges (2 x 5% each) 10%
Oral interview 15%
Reading comprehension challenge 5%
Written end-of-term assessment 15%
Total = 100%

Pkg Ponto De Encontro: Portguese As A World Language 2/E W /
Author: JOUET-PASTRE
ISBN 9780133557138 or 9780205981120

PORT110

Elementary Portuguese for Romance Language Speakers

PORT 110 is offered for students who already have a heritage background in Portuguese or who have a native or excellent command of another Romance language and who wish to acquire a basic knowledge of Portuguese in an efficient time frame. Students who do not have the appropriate knowledge of a Romance language should register in PORT101. The course offers development of comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing skills, and offers to meet special needs of beginning and advanced undergraduate as well as graduate students. The course also provides students with knowledge of the life and culture of the Portuguese-speaking countries, with emphasis on Brazil.

Upon successful completion of PORT 110, students will be able to sustain basic communication about everyday life situations in oral and written form, and will be prepared to study intermediate Portuguese.

Required Text:
Clémence de Jouët-Pastré, Anna Klobucka, et al.: Ponto de Encontro: Portuguese as a World Language package, 2nd Edition, Pearson Canada, 2013. (Ponto de Encontro package includes: Ponto de Encontro textbook [Brazilian Portuguese] and MyPortugueseLab [24 months access].)

Recommended text:
Alexandre da Prista, Essential Portuguese Grammar, Dover.

Prerequisite:
Heritage background in Portuguese or native/excellent command of another Romance language

Language of Instruction: Portuguese

PORT102

Beginners’ Portuguese II

PORT 102 is an interactive course that builds upon the basics you learned in PORT 101, following a culture-oriented, interactive approach to learning a foreign language. The material used in class incorporates cultural aspects of Brazil and Portugal, designed for the Portuguese 102 level of linguistic comprehension. The activities include role-play, group tasks, writing texts, reading and talking about simple articles on topics of interest, watching and talking about movies, short clips, and music videos. The principal objective of this course is to deepen students’ skills for communicating in Portuguese by providing extensive opportunities to use the language as a vehicle for information interchange and for developing cross-cultural awareness, as well as strengthening listening, reading, writing and grammatical skills.

Upon successful completion of the course, you will be able to sustain basic communication about everyday life situations, such as expressing personal interests and hobbies, talking about routines, clothing, sports, special dates, asking for information, ordering food, etc., and be able to apply new communicative skills such as talking about the future and narrating events in the past.

Language of instruction: Portuguese

Recommended prerequisite: PORT 101

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of PORT 102 or PORT 110

Expand all

Collapse all

Midterm = 15%
Listening Activity = 10%
Composition = 10%
Oral Interview = 15%
Final Exam = 25%
MyLab Portuguese (online exercises) = 10%
Active Participation, Attendance, Oral Proficiency, Preparation = 15%
Total = 100%

Pkg Ponto De Encontro: Portguese As A World Language 2/E W /
Author: JOUET-PASTRE
ISBN 9780133557138 or 9780205981120

ITAL420H

[Cross-listed with Italian Studies 421H]

Cultural Crossings Between Italy and China

Over the centuries, crossings between Italy and China have produced the most sustained, and arguably the most influential, strand of cultural texts on East-West borrowings. France and Britain also contributed significantly to European understandings and imagination of modern China. This course examines the evolution of Italian perspectives on China through significant literary, cinematic, and media texts of Italians’ real and fantastical travels in China and of Chinese immigration to Italy. French and British sources will also be studied mainly for comparative purposes.

The aim of the course is to analyze the contexts, ways, and reasons for which specific knowledge about China was produced, interpreted, and negotiated in Italy. Central themes we consider include the notions of the other and the self, the center and the border, boundary space, hybrid cultural identities, ethnic essentialism, and intercultural communication. To this end, we journey through four thematic clusters, including “Marco Polo and His Legacy in Italy,” “The Cultural Revolution in Italian and French Representations,” “Chinese, Italian, British, and American Cinematic Exchanges,” and “Chinese Immigration to Italy.” Theories about mobility (e.g., James Clifford, Michel De Certeau, and Edward Said) accompany specific primary texts.

This course will appeal to students who are interested in the fields of Italian, transnationalism, globalization, and intercultural studies. Ultimately, they will learn to put Italian and European interpretations of contemporary China as a rising superpower in perspective.

Primary texts include excerpts from the following list:
Marco Polo, Il Milione (1298-99)
Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (1972)
Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Adami, and Renato Simoni, Turandot (1924)
Bernardo Bertolucci, L’ultimo imperatore (1987)
Michelangelo Antonioni, Chung Kuo Cina (1972)
Alberto Moravia, La rivoluzione culturale in Cina (1967)
Julia Kristeva, Des Chinoises (1977)
Vittorio De Sica, Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Wang Xiaoshuai, Shi Qi Sui de Danche/Beijing Bicycle (2001)
Charles Brabin, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
Mario Caiano, Il mio nome è Shangai Joe (1972)
Roberto Saviano, Gomorra (2006)
Matteo Garrone, Gomorra (2008)
Sergio Basso, Giallo a Milano: Made in Chinatown (2008)
Andrea Segre, Io sono Li (2011)
Edoardo Nesi, Storia della mia gente (2010)
Yang Xiaping, Come due farfalle in volo sulla Grande Muraglia (2011)

Prerequisite: ITAL 302

Note:
Precludes credit for ITST 421H and vice versa.
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.
ITAL 420 may be taken twice, with different content, for a total of 6 credits.

Language of instruction: English

View article about this course

RMST420C

[Cross-listed with Italian 404 and Italian Studies 414]

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.

View article about this course

ITAL404

Cross-listed with RMST 454

Eros Unbound: The Ecology of Love at the Edge of Modernity

Orpheus and Eurydice, © Emily Balivet 2012

Is there such a thing as an “ecology of love”? The short answer is: “yes”; the long answer is: “we may have forgotten almost all about it.” Can we retrieve the memory of that ecology, and thus free love from its fetters, so as to reclaim truer bonds: bonds that make us free, rather than imprison us?

The stories of Eros and Psyche; Echo and Narcissus; Orpheus and Eurydice; Persephone, Demeter and Hades are myths that have guided the Western mind through the millennia in its renewed attempts to grapple with the mysteries of love, life, death. These stories informed the poetics of countless verbal and visual expressions of union and separation, particularly at the time when European societies were transitioning into “modernity” – ‘modernity’ being perhaps the most separative experiment ever undertaken by humanity in its yearning for freedom from ‘the environment,’ and from all bonds. How do these myths address the bonding of relationship and its severing? How did these myths get inflected over time, in order to warn, or disguise, or negate that tragic severing of the erotic, nurturing bond between feminine and masculine, the living earth and its human inhabitants, between psyche (soul)-body, and mind?

This course will retrace both the endorsed and the rejected reading of these myths, which have been central to the formation (and loss) of an “ecology of love” in the ancient, pre-modern and modern worlds. We will explore how these primordial images of eros have contributed to shaping our understanding of the relationship between the human psyche and its environment. We will take an especially close look at the poetics of desire and the dynamics of power in the cultures of the pre-modern Mediterranean and Romance cultures, and of Renaissance Italy.

These narratives that teach us of the cosmic power of eros are as alive, and worthy of attention, today, as they were in past ages, hence we will complement our rediscovery of their ancient, medieval and early modern re-creations with contemporary literature that probes their meaning for our times, at the intersection of psychology, ecology, and the arts.

Required readings:

Bedier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseut. Hackett 2013. 978-1603849005
The Romance of the Rose (excerpts in pdf)
Dante Alighieri, The New Life, tr. S. Applebaum. Dover 2006. 978-0486453491
Other texts will be provided in pdf via Canvas.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of RMST 454, ITST 414 or ITAL 404.

Course Registration

ITST414

[Cross-listed with Italian 404 and Romance Studies 420]

Think Like a Forest: A Dialogue Between Pre-Modern Worldviews, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Knowledge

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.

ITAL402

Advanced Studies in Italian Language and Style II

Designed as the natural continuation of ITAL401, this course is for those students who wish to enhance their communicative competence in Italian. From the starting point of nonfictional texts, students will examine and discuss contemporary issues in their social and cultural context. The focus will be on the language we use to communicate in daily life and in the media. We will pay particular attention to Italian TV, radio broadcasts and commercials, together with lyrics of hit songs and news.

Objectives:

To recognize the close link between economic development and social and cultural growth, both in its general rules and local variations;
to consider cultural differences both diachronically and synchronically;
to recognize the interference between different codex and languages in popular culture;
to analyze commonplaces/clichés and national stereotypes in the age of globalization;
to enhance general critical skills.

Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the course, students will be able to:

use extensive and intensive reading as effective elements of their autonomous learning;
go from text to context and find references to events and descriptions;
motivate their choices;
discuss and express opinions on different social and cultural topics (from family, to education, to social issues and administration, to customs);
collocate in time and space the most important events of Italian contemporary history and culture;
understand native speakers; distinguish varieties/registers of language; choose the right way to interact.

Language of instruction: Italian

Recommended prerequisites: Second-year standing or higher and ITAL 401.

Expand all

Collapse all

Coming soon

Coming soon

Determine your entry level

Find out which course level to start at given your previous experience with Italian.

ITAL401

Upper-Intermediate Italian I

L’obiettivo principale di questo corso è di consolidare la competenza linguistica ed interculturale degli studenti. Le strutture e le funzioni comunicative di questo corso sono basate sul livello B2 [1] o “independent language learner and user”, come definito nel Common European Framework (CEFR) e prevede i seguenti obbiettivi generali:

comprendere i punti principali di argomenti astratti o concreti con letture, articoli e notiziari in giornali, siti, radio
interagire spontaneamente in diverse situazioni
esprimere la propria opinione su cinema, letteratura e società
scrivere email, brevi articoli e recensioni
pronunciare la lingua correttamente
usare il registro formale e informale per comunicare in italiano.

Il corso ITAL 401 è MOLTO interattivo e richiede la partecipazione attiva e regolare ed attività individuali e di gruppo, utili a promuovere lo sviluppo autonomo e la fiducia nelle proprie abilità degli studenti, lo sviluppo della fluidità nel recepire e produrre la lingua o in altri casi, ad scrivere e parlare accuratamente. La maggior parte delle lezioni sono sincrone con qualche occasionale, lezione asincrona per vedere dei video, ascoltare dei podcast, fare dei quiz di comprensione e leggere brani di letteratura

Obiettivi Comunicativi e Interculturali

Leggere, Scrivere, Ascoltare e Parlare di temi culturali italiani quali economia e lavoro, scelte di vita, ambiente, feste e tradizioni, problemi sociali
Leggere brani di Letteratura italiana e parlare dei tempi culturali che ne emergono
Fare paragoni con la vostra esperienza personale
Esprimere opinioni, preferenze e stati d’animo
Raccontare esperienze passate
Fare ipotesi
Riflettere su come impariamo una lingua straniera e Usare le strategie più utili

[1] Per informazioni su CEFR: https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=090000168045bb5d

Language of instruction: Italian

Recommended prerequisites: Second-year standing or higher and ITAL 302 or successful completion of CEFR level B1.

Expand all

Collapse all

20% Preparation
25% Participation
15% Quizzes (3)
15% Oral Assignments
25% Final Written Exam

2% Extra credits*

Required texts: The course instructor will provide the students with a code to access the digital copy of the textbook Al Dente 4, Casa delle Lingue [Autore/i: M. Birello, S. Bonafaccia, F. Bosc, D. Donati, G. Licastro, A. Vilagrasa] - ISBN: 9788416943739

Determine your entry level

Find out which course level to start at given your previous experience with Italian.

ITST385

From Rossellini to Fellini: Neorealism and its Legacy in Italian Cinema

In the rubble-strewn world of the immediate post-Second World War period, the films by Rossellini, Visconti, De Santis and De Sica (and the scripts by Zavattini) amounted to a landmark event and established Italian Neorealism as a worldwide cause célèbre.

This artistic movement, exemplary both in aesthetic achievements and ethical commitment, proved to reverberate durably in time. It influenced successive waves of younger Italian filmmakers who later became great auteurs in their own right; and it travelled widely in space, with an enormous impact on filmmakers the world over.

The topics covered are the following. Before the midterm: General intro to the class; Italian cinema under Fascism; Rossellini: Rome Open City (1945); Rossellini: Paisan (1946); Visconti: The Earth Trembles (1948); Rossellini: Stromboli (1949). After the midterm: De Sica: Bicycle Thieves (1948); De Santis: Bitter Rice (1949); De Sica: Umberto D. (1952); Lattuada: The Overcoat (1952); Fellini: The Nights of Cabiria (1957); Visconti: Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Last meeting: Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) and final wrap-up.

All films are subtitled in English. The viewings will be introduced and/or followed by presentations and discussion.

Textbooks (REQUIRED)
Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2011 (copyright 2009).

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English