Combinatoires ludiques : littérature, contrainte et mathématique

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

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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

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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: Literature as Politics and Protest

What are the social and political implications of writing and reading literature? How do literary texts contribute to social change and what is our role, as readers of literature, in that endeavour? How might we read literature as a form of political praxis or activism? What is the relationship between power and culture? These are some of the questions we will tackle together in our consideration of Latin American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through four main topics—Interventionism, Detective Fiction, Gendered Violence, Diaspora—the course focuses on the fundamental elements and techniques of poetry and prose, as well as critical reading strategies, in order to reflect on artistic trends, socio-political movements, and intellectual debates.

Primary texts will include selections (essay, narrative fiction, poetry, performance) from both renowned and lesser-known authors, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Valeria Luiselli, Amparo Dávila, Humberto Ak’abal, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Cristina Rivera Garza. Students are able to select among research paper, critical-creative piece, or group project for final assignment.

Readings and course conducted in English.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Tamara Mitchell

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

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Grading Breakdown

Coming soon

Readings

Coming soon

RMST343

Pinocchio & Everything Else

Cross-listed with ITAL 333

Pinocchio’s statue in the town of Collodi

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

In this course we re-visit Pinocchio, the original educational story for children (the would-be Bildungsroman, if one will) authored in Italian by the Florentine Carlo Collodi (1881 and 1882-83), seeing it in the light of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s critical dictum «It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society». Along with it we also study a panoply of other modern classics from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits which also – very diversely – examine the issue of how the individual and society can be (mis)aligned with each other.

The course is articulated in two parts. The first is devoted to reading and interpreting Collodi’s Pinocchio; the other, to everything else. However, to aim for a better synergy between the two components, we do not tackle the two concepts sequentially but in parallel.

Each week, a first item includes relevant topics or texts to be presented & discussed from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits. These may range from the birth of the picaresque novel in Spain to the 19th-century French “novel of ambition”; or from the issue of compassion in Parzival to selfishness and/or happenstance in U.S. “rags-to-riches” narratives; or from Don Quixote’s “visionary” archetype to Oblomov’s multi-layered social superfluousness … This, with tweaks that may depend on students’ preferences based on their own spheres of interest and specialization.

Also each week, a second item follows pretty closely the Italian context – and, of course, text – of Collodi’s Pinocchio: nationalism in Italian history and cultural history, the birth (and nature) of modern Italian literature and identity, and more in this vein.

Italy’s nation-building blueprint since the early 1800s is here considered an exemplary small-scale case of one of today’s most burning issues on the global stage: How previously scattered and colonized peoples may successfully coalesce into a single-identity country in consequence of a deliberate political program, with all the positive and the problematic sides therein implied.

Learning Outcomes:

Our desired learning outcome is to develop the factual knowledge + the critical skills necessary to question, in a well-informed, articulate manner, the mainstream current approach (concept/precept) of adapting-fitting-bending individual behaviour to dominant standards of “social success” that are often destructive, and/or unethical, and/or alienating (commodifying), and/or – tragicomically – a lot more childish than the very child they purport to “train.”

Assignments and Evaluation:

  • Draft of ideas for Midterm composition (10%)
  • Midterm composition (20%)
  • 2 x Drafts of ideas for Final composition (2 x 10% = 20%)
  • Final composition (35%)
  • Participation (15%, which covers both attendance and its quality)

Required readings:

  • Giuseppe “Pinocchio” Collodi. I, Pinocchio, The True and Only One: Confessions of a Puppet Who Converterd from Matter to Soul. Vancouver: Finisterrae, 2022. Available on Amazon.ca in the Kindle Store (USD 5.oo). This text is presented and commented in class.
  • Any edition of Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio: Adventures of a Puppet – any English translation (there are many), or any Italian edition of the 1883 text. (There are free web versions of both, as discussed in class).
  • Further readings of literary classics (primary literature, secondary literature) involve texts available in the public domain – in practice, on the web – and are to be established as the need arises, in consequence of the discussion in class.

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English

FREN341

Évolutions littéraires : du romantisme au roman social

Notre cours porte sur les mouvements intellectuels et artistiques en France du XIXème siècle à aujourd’hui, et ce à travers une étude de textes littéraires. Nous nous intéresserons à la construction de l’objet littéraire (roman par exemple) dans la société française. Quels sont les grands débats d’idées, les expressions artistiques qui ont constitué ce que l’on désigne comme “le récit national” ? Comment des notions telles que nation ou citoyenneté sont apparues et ont défini la France, en particulier dans le domaine artistique ? Nous nous concentrerons sur différentes approches qui peuvent aller de la Révolution française jusqu’à notre postmodernité. Notre réflexion partira du roman et des questions qu’il engendre comme genre et miroir social. Chaque étude de roman est précédée d’une session thématique. Il y aura aussi des questions préparatoires à des passages.

Language of instruction: French

Instructor: Dr. Farid Laroussi

Prerequisite: One of FREN 311, FREN 321 and one of FREN 224, FREN 401.

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Grading Breakdown

Barème
Participation (+ activités en groupes) 20%
Compte rendu (600-800 mots) ou un exposé (20 minutes) 20%
Composition créative (600-700 mots) ; individuel ou en paires 20%
Devoir (1000-1300 mots) 40%

Readings

Ouvrages du cours, par ordre d’étude

  • René (1802). René de Chateaubriand
  • Le chef d’œuvre inconnu (1837).  Honoré de Balzac
  • Thérèse Raquin (1867). Émile Zola
  • Capitale de la douleur (1936), extraits. Paul Éluard
  • L’étranger (1942). Albert Camus
  • La place (1983). Annie Ernaux

FREN418

African and Caribbean Francophone Literatures

Ce cours invite les étudiants à découvrir les littératures antillaise et africaine d’expression française. Notre itinéraire transocéanique nous amène en Afrique de l’Ouest, en Haïti et en Algérie. La première partie du cours sera consacrée à une épopée africaine du Moyen Âge et sa représentation de la fondation de l’Empire du Mali. Ensuite, nous étudierons un roman qui se veut autant une critique du régime des Duvalier (1957-1986) que du colorisme en Haïti. La dernière partie du cours porte sur une nouvelle dont le fil conducteur est la guerre d’Algérie (1954-62). Quoique les œuvres littéraires se distinguent par leur genre littéraire, leur contexte historique et origine géographique, elles nous permettront d’explorer plusieurs thèmes récurrents parmi lesquels figurent la nation, le colonialisme, la religion, l’altérité, le racisme, le patriarcat et le langage. L’analyse du corpus éclairera également la question de la transposition d’un texte oral à l’écrit, les différents types de narration, les marqueurs génériques tout en présentant aux étudiants les concepts-clé de la théorie postcoloniale. Afin de mieux appréhender la littérature et les sociétés dont elle émane, le cours propose de convier d’autres artéfacts culturels tels que les documentaires, la peinture et la musique.

Prerequisites: One of FREN 321, FREN 328, FREN 329 and one of FREN 225, FREN 402.

Language of instruction: French

FREN357

Translation

Focusing on the main challenges involved in intercultural communication, this course will teach the foundations, principles, practical strategies, and methods of translation from French to English and English to French for a variety of professional, literary, and creative purposes. We will explore the strategies and tools that translators use when faced with challenging linguistic and cultural differences. We will also look at the artistic, ethical, and political implications of different approaches to translation. A wide variety of topics such as: fluency and transparency, register and tone, the author–translator–reader triangle, translating humorous verses, puns, and wordplays, what is lost and found in translation, and how translation shapes our lives and transforms the world will be examined and discussed through a list of selected exercises and readings to provide a foundational understanding of the crucial role that translation plays in so many facets of our lives.

We will work on:

  • Recognizing different linguistic paradigms and stylistic features in French and English for translation of a variety of literary and non-literary texts
  • Developing translation strategies to tackle different text types and at different textual and discourse levels in English and French
  • Building awareness of cultural, ethical, and epistemological aspects of translation

Required readings:

  • Christophe Gagne, Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde, English-French Translation: A Practical Manual. 1st Edition. Routledge, 2021.
  • Michele H. Jones, The Beginning Translator’s Workbook, or the ABCs of French to English Translation. Revised edition. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014.

Prerequisites: FREN 353 and one of FREN 225, FREN 402

Language of instruction: French and English