ITAL322

ITAL322

Italian for Reading Knowledge

ITAL322 is a course for beginner and lower-intermediate students of Italian, or students with proficiency in any Romance language, including Latin. It is addressed to students who also want to develop their language skills and build their competences in order to understand the intersection of language, meaning-making and culture. It is perfect to develop reading skills of primary sources in Italian.

The course develops and builds on reading knowledge. It focuses on the essential elements of grammar, syntax and word formation, drawing on similarities and differences between other Romance languages.

The course is built around a series of reading activities which will progressively expose the student to different types of written texts and communicative intentions, and introduces Italian grammar and vocabulary naturally, as part of each text.

Required readings:

  • C.M. Piatti, M. Mattei, Letture in Gioco, Alma Edizioni, 2015
  • S. Nocchi, New Italian Grammar in Practice, Alma Edizioni, 2017

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisite: Proficiency in another Romance language or Latin, or successful completion of ITAL 102.

(Pro)creación. Escritura y maternidad en la España contemporánea

2022 | Olga Albarran Caselles

Publisher: Ediciones Libertarias

Full description:

If all literature is born from a conflict, the works that arise from maternal ambivalence have all the necessary ingredients to be considered universal literature, despite the fact that they have not yet found their place in the canon. (Pro)creación explores the literature of gestation and, from literary criticism, investigates how different authors from contemporary Spain have captured their relationship with procreation in artistic language. In dialogue with theories on the writing of the self, feminist criticism and recent studies on reproduction, this volume starts from the present to examine the procreative process in the autobiographical novel, the epistolary diary and the personal chronicle, taking as reference three representative works: Who wants to be a mother, by Silvia Nanclares (2017); Waiting Time , by Carme Riera (1998); and nine moons, by Gabriela Wiener (2004).

In these pages it is shown that textualizing, from the point of view of the pregnant subject, a traditionally silenced event makes it possible to reclaim the social and political aspects of reproduction, as well as maternal agency in a process that is both creative and reproductive. By linking reproduction and writing, the analyzed authors open up new expressive possibilities that challenge the androcentric conception of the subject, vindicating the affective aspects of the relationality that is established during the search for conception and gestation.

In this way, the expression of affection —bodily emotion— problematizes the binary of Western thought, making visible the insoluble union of the mind and the body that creates and procreates. Despite the fact that procreation has been confined to literary silence, this does not imply a vacuum: it is, on the contrary, an elastic and dynamic silence that has been filled with critical questions to give rise to a debate that cannot be postponed. This book tries to keep that conversation active so that it does not remain, as has traditionally happened with matters related to the maternal world, in a mere whisper.

Bilingual Legacies: Father Figures in Self-Writing from Barcelona

2022 | Anna Casas Aguilar

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Full description:

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions.

Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal “father of the nation” and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe

2019 | By Katharina Piechoki

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Full description:

What is “Europe,” and when did it come to be? In the Renaissance, the term “Europe” circulated widely. But as Katharina N. Piechocki argues in this compelling book, the continent itself was only in the making in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Cartographic Humanism sheds new light on how humanists negotiated and defined Europe’s boundaries at a momentous shift in the continent’s formation: when a new imagining of Europe was driven by the rise of cartography. As Piechocki shows, this tool of geography, philosophy, and philology was used not only to represent but, more importantly, also to shape and promote an image of Europe quite unparalleled in previous centuries. Engaging with poets, historians, and mapmakers, Piechocki resists an easy categorization of the continent, scrutinizing Europe as an unexamined category that demands a much more careful and nuanced investigation than scholars of early modernity have hitherto undertaken. Unprecedented in its geographic scope, Cartographic Humanism is the first book to chart new itineraries across Europe as it brings France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Portugal into a lively, interdisciplinary dialogue.

Combinatoires ludiques : littérature, contrainte et mathématique

2020 | By Caroline Lebrec

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Full description:

Au sein des études ludiques, les théoriciens insistent davantage sur l’aspect social du jeu (Caillois, Huizinga), faisant un peu vite de la littérature ludique un acte gratuit ou encore une simple forme de divertissement (Genette). Le jeu dont il est question ici est de l’ordre du construit et de la configuration, dans la lignée de l’approche philosophique de Jacques Henriot et dans la plus grande tradition mathématique. Notre corpus est constitué de deux textes combinatoires fondateurs de l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, Cent mille milliards de poèmes de Raymond Queneau et Le château des destins croisés d’Italo Calvino. Leur nature combinatoire, dont l’absence de linéarité demande au lecteur de faire des choix et des hypothèses, est un défi au labyrinthe, qui est ici analysé selon le potentiel reconfigurateur du sonnet sur les modes de l’interaction physique du lecteur avec le texte et du texte avec l’objet-livre pour le texte quenien, et selon le potentiel interprétatif du lecteur sur les modes de l’embranchement et de la réécriture pour le texte calvinien. Le champ des littératures à contraintes est constitué majoritairement de modèles de lecture cryptanalytique qui privilégient les textes avec une modalité implicite (Wagner) de métatextualisation de la contrainte. Au contraire, cette étude s’intéresse à la modalité ergodique empruntée à la cybernétique (Aarseth), qui met en place une rhétorique de la contrainte (Reggiani, Thomas) servant un projet plus vaste de lisibilité du texte combinatoire.

Waitlist Sign-Up: Film Screening of “La guerra del Salento (The Great Salento War)”

Complete the form below to be added to the Waitlist of the Film Screening of “La guerra del Salento (The Great Salento War)”.

If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Elena Zampieri (elena.zampieri@ubc.ca).

RMST452

Great Masters of Italian Cinema After the Neorealist Age

Cross-listed with ITAL430

Fellini INTERVISTA (1987) locandina official playbill

This course aims at familiarizing students from diverse backgrounds with master- pieces by some of the most acclaimed Italian film directors from the 1950s to our day.

The films studied are classic works which explore and critically delve into (the industry would probably say “showcase”) major historical, political, or ethical themes in the three major cultural periods of the contemporary age: (a) the conflicts, the difficulty, and the downsides intrinsic to the process of modernization; (b), the discontents of modernism proper; and (c), the imbalances most recently brought about by postmodernity and/or globalization.

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

Learning Outcomes:

In successfully completing this course on great masters of Italian cinema after – and in the wake of – the Neorealist age, students come to feel at home in one of the greatest traditions of film-making in the world: a tradition that contributes to shaping the global narrative by critically delving, in a broad diversity of styles, into historical, political, ethical, or philosophical topics that are of crucial importance to understand – and attempt to improve – the world we live in.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisite: No prerequisites

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of ITAL 430 or ITST 432 or RMST 452

Grading Breakdown

  • Midterm exam (30%)
  • Final exam (55%)
  • Participation (15%, which covers both attendance and its quality)

Readings

  • Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2013 (© 2009), ISBN 13: 978-1-4411-6069-0.
    • There is also a posthumous edition of this item: Bondanella, Peter, ed. by Federico Pacchioni (N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2017), ISBN 10: 1501307630 and ISBN 13: 978-1501307638.

RMST453

Within the Universe/The Universe Within — Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: A Visionary Journey into Medieval Eco-Cosmology

Cross-listed with ITAL403

Dante con in mano la Divina Commedia by Domenico di Michelino (1465)

Undoubtedly the best-known of all poems written in the Italian language during the last seven hundred years, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy takes us on a most unusual journey. We begin our travels quivering with the wayfarer at the outskirts of a ghastly dark forest, and we end them basking in the blissful light of a cosmic embrace. What makes such a change of perspective possible? The journey itself, Dante maintains, having been taught by his teachers, Virgil and Beatrice, how fearlessly to approach the abysses of the human psyche during his visionary explorations of the “beyond.”

From exile to ecstasy, from wretchedness to reintegration, this is the story of a process of inner transmutation, whose liberating power has touched countless readers over the ages and across cultures. More than ever today Dante’s poem shows us how progressively to uncover the vastness that lies hidden within every single atom of our own self, and of the universe that surrounds us.

In the words of Pope Francis (2014), Dante is «a prophet of hope, herald of the possibility of redemption, liberation and the profound transformation of every man and woman, of all humanity». As such, he «still has much to say and to offer through his immortal works to those who wish to follow the route of true knowledge and authentic discovery of the self, the world and the profound and transcendent meaning of existence». In order to do this, Dante walks a very thin line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the path taken by visionaries of all times and spiritual traditions.

Dante’s cosmic perspective is powerfully inspiring to this day, witness the exemplary role his journey played in shaping the worldview of C. G. Jung, the father of analytical psychology, at the beginning of the 20th century, and at the other end of that same century, the “wild sacred” ecological visions of Thomas Berry, the father of ecophilosophy. It is indeed as a “wounded healer,” as a “modern shaman,” and even more compellingly perhaps as an ante litteram ecologist and activist of the world-soul that Dante asks to be understood today — beyond the boundaries of society’s self-serving needs for canonicity and legitimization.

This course offers a close reading of Dante’s masterpiece through a large selection of excerpts from all of the canticas (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), along with a reading of Dante’s earlier work Vita Nuova (The New Life) in its entirety.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of RMST 453, ITST 413 or ITAL 403

Grading Breakdown

35% 5 reading responses
25% Midterm
30% Final
10% Attendance and participation
100% Total

Readings

Required readings

Dante Alighieri, Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, tr. Virginia Jewiss. Penguin, 2022. (ISBN 978-0143106203) Please buy this book.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, tr. R. Kirkpatrick. Penguin Classics 2006-07, 3 vols. (ISBN Inferno: 978-01404489; Purgatorio: 978-0140448962; Paradiso: 978-0140448979

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, tr. Steve Ellis. Vintage Classics 2019. (ISBN 978-1784871987) Please buy this book.

Recommended readings

Guy P. Raffa, The Complete Dante Worlds. A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy. Chicago UP, 2009. (ISBN 978-0226702704)

SPAN504B

América Latina Errante: Displacement, Globalization, Melancholy in Latin American Cinema

Instructor: Alessandra Santos
Language of instruction: Spanish

This seminar aims to examine contemporary Latin American cinema under the lens of displacements. We will study the geographical, cultural and subjective dislocations that occur due to economic and political globalization after 1990, migration, (im)mobility, tensions and conflicts that arise from these processes. Topics to be examined: diasporas; wandering (literal and metaphorical); consumption; ubiquitous presence of media, impact of cyber technological developments; violence; dissolution and construction of borders; new subjectivities; gender, sexuality and body; melancholy and humour. We will discuss a variety of films in their social, economic and political contexts and complexities. We will study how diverse films confront multiple discourses surrounding displacements in the hemisphere.

List of required films (available streaming through Koerner’s Library):

  • The Couple in the Cage (1993). Paula Heredia and Coco Fusco
  • Bolivia (1999). Israel Adrián Caetano
  • Amores Perros (2000). Alejandro G. Iñárritu
  • Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007). Ricardo Domínguez
  • La mujer sin cabeza (2008). Lucrecia Martel
  • Sleep Dealer (2008). Alex Rivera
  • Sin Nombre (2009). Cary Joji Fukunaga
  • The Famous and the Dead (2009). Esmir Filho
  • La Playa DC (2012). Juan Andrés Arango
  • Il Futuro (2013). Alicia Scherson
  • Futuro Beach (2014). Karim Aïnouz
  • X500 (2016). Juan Andrés Arango

List of required and suggested critical texts:

  • Bishnupriya Ghosh. “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics” (1995)
  • Néstor García Canclini. La globalización imaginada (1999) (selection)
  • Aníbal Quijano. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America” (2000)
  • John Urry. Mobilities (2007) (selections)
  • Fernando Aínsa “Palabras nómadas: los nuevos centros de la periferia” (2010)
  • Daniel Quirós “La época está en desorden”: reflexiones sobre la temporalidad en Bolivia de Adrián Caetano y La mujer sin cabeza de Lucrecia Martel” (2010)
  • Cecilia Sosa. “A Counter-narrative of Argentine Mourning: The Headless Woman (2008), directed by Lucrecia Martel” (2010)
  • Jean Philippe Clot y Heidi Elizabeth Aguilar Pérez. “Una mirada a las representaciones cinematográficas de las regiones fronterizas en México” (2012)
  • Carlos Fino. “La Playa DC: intersecciones cartográficas de la ciudad invisible” (2013)
  • Markus Heide. “Cosmopolitics in Border Film: Amores Perros (2000) and Sleep Dealer (2008)” (2013)
  • Mimi Sheller. “Mobilities and Displacement” (2020)
  • Peter Adey, et al. The Handbook of Displacement (2020) (short selections)

RMST372

Topics in Hispanic Literature

Cross-listed with SPAN 312C

Explore Spain and Latin America’s contributions to global culture through popular Hispanic literature in translation.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Language of instruction: English