PORT102

PORT102

First-Year 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

Grading Breakdown

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%

Readings

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

Course Registration

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.

Course Registration

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.

ITST414

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

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

 

 

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.

Grading Breakdown

Coming soon

Readings

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

  1. Leggere, Scrivere, Ascoltare e Parlare di temi culturali italiani quali economia e lavoro, scelte di vita, ambiente, feste e tradizioni, problemi sociali
  2. Leggere brani di Letteratura italiana e parlare dei tempi culturali che ne emergono
  3. Fare paragoni con la vostra esperienza personale
  4. Esprimere opinioni, preferenze e stati d’animo
  5. Raccontare esperienze passate
  6. Fare ipotesi
  7. 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.

Grading Breakdown

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

2% Extra credits*

Readings

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

Course Registration

SPAN590A

Listening to Extractivism: Sound and the Capitalocene in 20th- and 21st-century Latin American Literature and Culture

Latin America has a rich and complex tradition of orality, both aural and textual. This course considers 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture in relation to that tradition, considering how recent works build on and, perhaps more importantly, diverge from, oral practices that have been the ground of storytelling, memory making, and political interventions in the region. Throughout the semester, we will attend closely to how Latin American literary and cultural expression wields sound and aurality to portray, comprehend, and challenge the impacts and effects of advanced capitalism. Grounded by Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” which proposes a capacious understanding of the effects of resource extraction and capitalist reason, the seminar brings a sound studies lens to Nixon’s theory to meditate on topics like gendered violence, genocide and epistemicide, increased forced migration to North America, environmental degradation and ecological disasters, and the impacts of ableism and anthropocentrism on human and more-than-human worlds. In particular, our conversations will inquire into how literature and culture invoke or represent sound, listening, and silence—both thematically and through literary devices and formal structure—as a means of indexing, critiquing, and deconstructing structures of power. Together, we will consider how aurality is deployed in aesthetics as a means of perceiving alternative epistemologies and responding to precarity, inequality, and violence of the Capitalocene.

Discussion of primary works will occur in Spanish and will be informed by critical readings from philosophy, literary theory, media studies, and other related disciplines. As the semester progresses, we will acquire a critical vocabulary (e.g., orality, aurality, orality-literacy binary, intermediality, audile technique, audiovisual litany, acousmatic sound, etc.) for analyzing and discussing sound and sonorities in literary and cultural texts.

CONTENT NOTE: This course will cover sensitive, mature, and charged material, including scenes of sexual and physical violence. You may find some readings and other content difficult.

Language of instruction: Spanish

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Grading Breakdown

In addition to careful preparation of materials and informed participation in class discussion; students will lead one class session; prepare semi-regular reflections on materials; and compose midterm essay (midterm may be substituted with aural alternative, such as podcast episode or sonic essay); and compose scaffolded final essay (abstract, annotated bib, essay) reflecting on course topic/materials. Assessment load/expectations will vary slightly for MA and PhD students.

Readings

Literary readings (provisional) & Topics

Oralidad/Testimonio

  • “Prólogo”, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), Rigoberta Menchú Tum
  • Insensatez (2004), Horacio Castellanos Moya

Intermedialidad/La narrativa musicalizada

  • “Sonatina para los tambores” (1973), Carlos Arturo Truque
  • Managua, Salsa City (2000), Franz Galich

Auralidad y migración

  • Noche de fuego (2021), dir. Tatiana Huezo
  • Las tierras arrasadas (2015), Emiliano Monge

Silencio y/en el Cono Sur

  • El Sueño del Sonido (2023), Soraya Maicoño en colaboración con Dani Zelko
  • Inclúyanme afuera (2013), María Sonia Cristoff

La risa como poder decolonial

  • Desnudo riendo, Xandra Ibarra (2014-2019)
  • Resiliencia Tlacuache (2016), de Naomi Rincón Gallardo (16 minutes)

Auscultando la violencia de género en la narrativa

  • “Con los ojos abiertos” (2009), Amparo Dávila
  • La hija única (2020), Guadalupe Nettel

El agua presa de la energía verde

  • Resurrección (2018, dir. Eugenio Polgovsky)
  • Nosotras (2019), Suzette Celaya Aguilar

Critical readings (selections, provisional), Sound & Environmental Studies

PDFs available at provided link, as eBook at UBC Library, or as PDF on Canvas

ITST345

[Cross-listed with RMST 222]

Types and Archetypes of Fascism in the Age of the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

This course aims at offering students with diverse backgrounds some foundational knowledge about the phenomenon of “xxx-ism” as, in successive incarnations, it arose and ran its course in the context of neo-Latin societies and cultures. Since the phenomenon originated in Italy, our primary focus will be the Italian peninsula.

We will read Neville and make references to Bosworth, Mack Smith, Martin Clark, Procacci and other contemporary historians and sociologists. We will analyze works of theory, politics, fiction and memoirs from that age (by Marinetti, Moravia, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Carlo Levi); examine the architecture and fine arts of Mussolini’s regime; and watch clips from films belonging to the genres of telefoni bianchi comedy (Camerini’s Il Signor Max), war propaganda (Balbo’s transatlantic flights, Rossellini’s The White Ship) and historical “peplum” kolossals (Gallone’s Scipio the African).

Ultimately, the goal of this Italy-based extended case study is to provide students with the analytical tools indispensable not only to condemn, in facile, dogmatic (and thus ultimately misplaced) self-assurance, the fascism(s) of yesteryear, but, more importantly, to condemn and — so it is hoped — oppose effectively the many forms of xxx-ism facing us today.

Textbooks
LIT (REQUIRED)
A reader containing excerpts from works of theory, politics, essays and literary texts will be available from Copiesmart in the UBC Village.

HIST AND CIV (REQUIRED)
Peter Neville, Mussolini, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2014.

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English

Course Registration