Italian (ITAL-GA)

This course is designed to give you the skills necessary to conduct research in Italian. It will focus on reading knowledge of the language only. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Classes will be conducted in English and the readings will be tailored toward individual student research needs.

This course combines elements of a substantive course and of professionalization and training in research and scholarly writing. It takes as its object of study a particular text or artwork; and it engages students in a structured manner in the processes of research, analysis, writing, and revision necessary to produce a publishable research paper on the subject. The first half of the course is taken up with the research process, conducted collectively by the students under the guidance of the instructor. In the second half of the course, the class will collectively write and revise an 8,000-word article suitable for publication as a journal article. In this iteration, the object of study chosen is a late sixteenth-century poetic manuscript containing a copy of a vernacular translation of the seven penitential psalms, by the Benedictine monk, Agostino Cesari, or Cesareo.

The course explores the foundations of Cultural Diplomacy concentrating on its development since the 20th century, especially on the contemporary geopolitical scene. It also provides a hands-on approach aimed at preparing students for a career in Cultural Diplomacy both in traditional, nation-based contexts (e.g. embassies, consulates, state-run agencies) and in the more innovative and ever changing world of private centers, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. Students will be expected to engage in a variety of capacities in programs that will allow them to develop skills and abilities useful for these extra-academic professions. These will range from co-curating film series and coordinating jurors for film festivals, to assisting in the conception, development, and promotion of conferences, concert series, historical/documentary and art exhibits. During the semester, the course will evolve from a) a more traditional lecture-based format (Weeks 1-7) b) a student-driven seminar (Weeks 8-11) c) an interactive format that will see the students both engage with NYC-based protagonists of Cultural Diplomacy and possibly take an active role in a project organized by an institution of their choice (Weeks 12-15).

A class devoted to the 'heart' of the Renaissance, the city of Florence, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with virtual excursions to Siena, Venice, and Rome. We will focus on studying the interface between historical and religious movements, on the one hand, and cultural manifestations on the other.

Late Renaissance Italy witnessed the emergence of new forms of historical writing. Scholars have long seen writers such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini as among the first to employ modern techniques of historical reading and writing. This course will examine how and why sixteenth-century Italian writers--including Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Botero--broke from both ancient models such as Livy and Thucidides, as well a from the robust medieval and Renaissance chronicle tradition, to create a new literary form aimed at creating a usable past. The course will emphasize close readings of key texts in historical context.

Examines the transformation of literary narrative into cinematic discourse. Films by Visconti, Bertolucci, Pasolini, De Sica, and Scola; literary texts by D?Annunzio, Lampedusa, Verga, Moravia, Boccaccio, Bassani, Tarchetti, and others.

Examines the neorealist movement in literature and cinema that swept Italian culture after World War II. Emphasis is on the varieties of neorealist styles, the movement?s role in projects for the revival of Italian national culture, and its relation to other cultural forms and traditions in Italy and abroad.

Variable content course. Recent topics: social and cultural studies (Forgacs); Nietzsche in Italy and France (Merjian); diversity and otherness in contemporary Italy (Forgacs); Pasolini and a politics of art (Merjian); film and urban space in Italy (Forgacs); Florentine Culture, 1250-1600 (Cox); Language and Politics in Italy from the Renaissance to Berlusconi (Cox and Ben-Ghiat); War and Cinema (Ben-Ghiat); Old things, New materialisms (Falkoff); Canon-formation in the early Italian Tradition (Cornish); Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Falkoff); Film and Urban Space in Italy (Forgacs); Visual Languages of the Renaissance: Emblems, Dreams, Hieroglyphs (Cipani); politics of history in the Renaissance (Appuhn); Cinemas of Poetry, Cinemas of Painting: Antonioni, Pasolini, Parajanov (Merjian)

Interdisciplinary study of the politics, culture, and social policies of the Italian dictatorship from the 1922 March on Rome through World War II. Secondary source readings are supplemented with films and texts from the period (speeches, novels, the fascist press). Topics covered include the relationship of fascism and modernity, resistance and collusion, racism and colonialism, fascist masculinity and femininity, and the project of refashioning Italians.

This course looks at Italian commercial cinema made during the fascist dictatorship. We examine the tensions between nationalist ambitions for that cinema and the internationalist influences and transnational realities of the interwar film industry; the challenge film professionals faced of reconciling profit and propaganda mandates, auteurist impulses with political pressures. A main subtheme of the course is gender, and how different genres articulate the tensions surrounding different models of manhood and womanhood. Finally, we will study the intertextual relationships of these commercial films with fascist documentaries and newreels.

Italy from 1940 to 1945, with a focus on cultural and political responses to war and on how the war has been represented in memory. The course is thematic rather than chronological in nature; our sources include reportage, novels, archival documents, memoirs, and non-fiction and feature film as our sources. Ongoing themes will include the meanings of resistance and collaboration; the problematics of testimony, witnessing, and memory; the impact of war on gender roles and identities; and the representation of violence.

Non-fiction films have been made in Italy since the beginnings of cinema, yet they are less well known than those made in France, Britain or North and South America, despite the cult status of a few Italian documentarists, such as De Seta and Grifi, and the fact that many Italian directors of features, from Antonioni and Bertolucci to Pasolini and Visconti, also made non-fictions. The course has three main aims: (1) to familiarize students with a sample of Italian non-fiction films of different types: instructional, industrial, newsreel, propaganda, ethnographic, social, memoir, found footage; (2) to equip them to engage critically with these films through close analysis and reading of key texts on documentary; (3) to help them produce high-level critical writing about Italian documentary, paying particular attention to film style. The course consists of weekly readings, viewings and seminars and is graded on class participation, regular assignments and a final paper of 15-20 pages. A few non-Italian films will be viewed, either whole or in part, for comparison and context. Students will be invited to make by the end of the course a visual project, not formally graded, to complement their written paper. A knowledge of Italian will be an asset, but all prescribed films will either have English subtitles or an accompanying written translation or summary and all required readings will be in English.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics range from sociology of immigration to anthropology of ethnic identity, and from Italian American fiction to the contribution of Italian Americans to the visual and performing arts.

This course aims to provide graduate students and with a foundation in theoretical approaches to Italian literary studies.

Recent topics: pastoral and peasants in Italian culture (Tylus); gender and writing in Renaissance Italy (Cox); love and magic, words and images in Orlando Furioso and 16th-century culture (Bolzoni); Dante’s Lyric Poetry (Ardizzone); Dante and his World (Ardizzone); literature and machines (Falkoff and Cipani); Dante as public intellectual (Ardizzone); Ariadne’s Echo: Reception and Intertextuality Across Artistic Media (Refini).

In this seminar we will explore temporality as the backbone of history, but not in the traditional, chronological way. Instead, we will examine the possibilities of a temporality that is not linear but moves in different directions, starting from the present. During the four weeks we will closely read selected chapters from three novels, in view of their potential for transmediation into visual, or audio-visual texts: -Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 1856 -Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (part 1) 1605 -Domnica Radulescu, Train to Trieste 2008 Each novel lends itself to reading with a contemporary slant that we will take as primary in view of making a “pre-posterous” connection between present and past. Each has been or will be audio-visualized: the first one into a feature film, alternatively shown with photographs as installations; the second consists of installations only, and the third will be a feature film only. For the latter we will be able to read the script based on the novel, written by someone else (not connected to my own projects). The question of time will be studied in view of order (sequence, chronology, preposterousness); duration; and rhythm. This 2-credit course will be conducted in English.

The course is conceived as a re-reading of Dante’s Inferno. We will start with a general introduction to Dante’s Commedia in order to orient the students to an understanding of Dante’s masterpiece and the Inferno as part of it. Inferno is the first cantica of the Divine Comedy, a very long poem traditionally judged to be one of the most important in Western culture. At the center of the poem is the human being, his condition in the afterlife and his punishment or reward. Taken literally, the theme is the state of the souls after the death. But allegorically, the true subject is moral life and thus the torments of the sins themselves or the enjoyment of a happy and saintly life. In the Inferno Dante represents the passions and vices of the human beings and the punishment that God’s justice inflicts upon the sinners. Hell is the place of eternal damnation. The course will provide a fresh approach to the Inferno with a focus on the problem of evil as represented in the Commedia. We will investigate Dante’s dramatization of the ontology of human beings and their inclination to materiality and materialism, which the poet considers the source of evil. The course includes an introduction to Dante’s first work, the Vita Nuova, and a reading of sections of his treatises: On Vernacular Speech and Convivio. The requirements of the course are as follows: active class participation, 3 response papers (3 pages), a mid-semester and final oral presentation, and a final paper 20 to 25 pages in length. All readings will be available as photocopies. French or Latin texts will be translated.

Purgatorio is the second section of the Divine Comedy, a very long poem traditionally judged to be one of the most important in Western culture. At the center of the poem is the human being, his condition in the afterlife and his punishment or reward. Taken literally, the theme is the state of the souls after the death. But allegorically, the true subject is moral life and thus the torments of the sins themselves or the enjoyment of a happy and saintly life. In the Inferno, Dante represents evil and the punishment that God’s justice inflicts upon the sinners. Hell is the place of eternal damnation. Purgatory, by contrast, is the place in which human beings are purged of their sins and become pure, thereby able to enter Paradise, which the Comedy describes as the place of eternal happiness. The course considers Purgatorio not just as the place of pain and expiation but also as the place of rebirth. Purgatory introduces a new epic which sings of the human soul’s regeneration as a natural power activated by contrition and conversion. Love, here conceived as the seed of every virtue and of every vice, is the moving force of the ascent toward the happiness of the Earthly Paradise. The way in which such a regenerative process takes place will be addressed and discussed during the semester. Course conducted in English.

The final third of the Divine Comedy is its least user-friendly. T. S. Eliot charged this up to a certain modern prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry, since “our sweetest songs are those which sing of saddest thought.” Far less seductive than the Inferno and more abstract than the brightly-colored Purgatorio, the Paradiso has a reputation for being formidable, verbose and somehow irrelevant. All the more reason to study it together. It is simultaneously the most “medieval” part of Dante’s masterpiece, being rooted in historical and political upheavals of the moment and the most au courant philosophical debates coming out of Paris, as well as the most “modern,” radical and daring. Grounded in the necessity of happiness and the reality of evil, it is a reflection on the foundational ideals of a culture in constant tension with the world as it is. For this reason it can and has been studied from the perspectives of history, politics, philosophy, psychology, literature and art. The course will follow the trajectory of the Paradiso, delving into the questions it poses and the history it presupposes. Students are encouraged to investigate connections between Dante and their own research interests.

Dante?s minor works and, in particular, Vita Nova, Convivio, and De Vvulgari eloquentia, read in light of the philosophical-theological debate of the time. Focus is on intellectual history, medieval theory of knowledge, intelligence, and speculation from the Pseudo-Dyonisius to Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure.

The course is devoted to exploring vernacular lyric poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Beginning with Provençal poets influential on the Italian lyrical tradition, we will start our focus on poets of the Sicilian school (Giacomo da Lentini, Guido delle Colonne, Pier delle Vigne and others), move to the Tuscan Guittone D’Arezzo and poets of the so-called Stile Nuovo (Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, Cino da Pistoia, Compiuta Donzella and others) to Dante’s immediate successors, Petrarch and Boccaccio. We will evaluate the role of Greek -Arabic and Hebrew culture in the development of that tradition, in particular the impact of new translations of texts from Arabic intermediaries. We will also examine the curricular reform taking place in European universities at the same time, the relevance of new ideas of learning and its organization, focusing on the notions of poetry, imagination, rhetoric and politics. The interaction between old learning and new learning will be one of the major concerns of the course. The course will be conducted in English. Reading knowledge of Italian is not required.

An in-depth look at the lyric poetry of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) and its influence within Italian literary culture in the 15th and 16th centuries. The thematic focuses of the course include gender, the relation between poetry and the visual arts, and the impact of printing on patterns of literary production and consumption.

This course offers an overview of the development of lyric poetry in Italy from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, beginning with Petrarch’s refashioning of lyric style in his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and ending with the emergence of the Baroque as a literary movement. Stylistic developments over this period will be related to the differing historical contexts of production and consumption of lyric poetry, with a major thematic focus being the impact of print culture on the sixteenth-century lyric tradition, and another the influence on this tradition of the great religious reform movements of the sixteenth century. Other issues explored in the course are the gendering of the lyric voice in amatory and religious lyric; the emergence of the figure of the female poet in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the relationship between lyric poetry and social history; and the relationship between lyric poetry and the visual arts. The aim of the course is provide a secure grasp of the history of lyric poetry in this period as conventionally told and an acquaintance with its canonical authors (Petrarch, Bembo, Della Casa, Tasso, Marino), while, at the same time, allowing for exploration within new areas of research that have opened up especially in the past decade or so, notably the history of women’s engagement with lyric as readers and writers, and the development of religious lyric through the Counter- Reformation and into the Baroque.

Inquiry into Western monasticism and into the practices of asceticism. From the Fathers of the Desert to the life in the convents. Readings from St. Francis and Italian religious literature of the 13th and 14th centuries. Mysticism and the mystic experience of women such as Umiliana de? Cerchi, Angela da Foligno, and Margherita da Cortona.

This graduate seminar is dedicated to the pivotal role Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) had in the cultural transition between Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe. Selections from his masterpiece, the Decameron, and his other works, originally written in both Latin and Italian, will be considered both in the social, cultural, and literary context of the 14th century as well as in view of the impact they had well beyond Italy.

Variable content course. Recent topics: bodies, passion, and knowledge; Stilnovisti: poetry and intellectual history; politics, poetics, and imagination in 13th-century poetry: from the Sicilian School to Cino da Pistoia; Dante, the Prose Works as an Intellectual Autobiography; Il Novecento racconta il Novecento (Van Straten)

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to recent exciting developments in Comparative Literature, in which the discipline is harnessing the energies of Area Studies (Middle Eastern Studies, African Studies, and so forth) in order to extend its scope geographically, and deepen its learning, for example through the study of languages and literatures beyond those European tongues that, traditionally, have formed the core of Comp Lit. At the same time, because of the way in which nomenclature relating to “Areas” is evolving, an allied aim is to introduce students to the idea of the “Global South,” a successor to “Third World” and “Developing World” in its broader contemporary use, which Comparative Literature scholars, in their anti- Eurocentric endeavor, are increasingly finding compelling. We shall pursue these aims through a careful reading of relevant theoretical texts, as well as works constituting specific African and Middle Eastern case studies.

This course offers the opportunity to study some of the key works of latemedieval and Renaissance Florentine literary, intellectual and artistic culture in their social and political contexts, and hence to engage diachronically with the broader theoretical question of the ways in which elite culture is inflected by socioeconomic and political developments. The choice of texts to be studied has been calculated to provide both a sense of the diversity of Florentine culture and its continuities. Besides texts that conventionally fall under the rubric of literature, such as lyric poetry, verse narrative, and drama, the syllabus encompasses chronicles, sermons, and works of political, rhetorical, social, and aesthetic theory. Thematic focuses include civic and family identity; gender and sexuality; and the relationship between language and political power.

Reading of Gerusalemme Liberata as a text connecting the Renaissance and modernity, with discussion of the historical, ethical, and cultural background of the Counter-Reformation.

Recent scholarship in medieval and early modern culture has increasingly stressed the centrality of the study of rhetoric in these periods and the range of its influence, not simply on literature but on everything from art, music, and architecture to political thought. This course serves as an introduction to medieval and early modern rhetoric in Italy, conceived of broadly as a global art of persuasive discourse, spannRecent scholarship in medieval and early modern culture has increasingly stressed the centrality of the study of rhetoric in these periods and the range of its influence, not simply on literature but on everything from art, music, and architecture to political thought. This course serves as an introduction to medieval and early modern rhetoric in Italy, conceived of broadly as a global art of persuasive discourse, spanning both verbal and nonverbal uses.

Variable content course. Recent topics: The Italian Lyric Tradition from Petrarch to Marino (Cox); art and literature, poetry and portrait in Italian Renaissance (Bolzoni); the literature of pilgrimage in early modern Italy (Tylus).

Examines the figure of the so-called cortigiana onesta within 16th- to 17th-century Italian culture, with a particular focus on the role courtesans played within the literary culture of the period, both as authors and as the subject of literary works. Also pays some attention to representations of courtesans within the visual arts and to their role within the musical culture of the time and in the early history of Italian theatre.

This course approaches the Mediterranean as a multicultural site that lends itself to questions concerning cultural encounters and crossovers, as well as to the issue of historical memory. The Mediterranean emerges in our investigation as the substance of, and the backdrop for a reevaluation of the various narratives of European modernity; for an examination of the centrality of colonialism in that modernization process; and finally, for an encounter with the realities of southern and eastern immigration into Europe

The main aim of the course is to develop in students a critical awareness of how various ‘others’ have been described and depicted in Italy since 1945 and how demarcation lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have been produced, both in scholarly discourse and popular media. The ‘others’ include poor inhabitants of cities and the rural South, people with disabilities and those classified as mentally ill, people of color, people with non-heteronormative sexual identifications, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, Roma. The course asks how processes of definition and classification work, what forms of power back them up, and to what extent the dominant definitions may be resisted, challenged or reversed. Materials for study include written texts, photographs, documentary films and television programs. Most of the verbal materials, including spoken words, are in Italian and advanced competence in Italian is required for the course.

Topics vary by semester.

Topics vary by semester.

Reading of the Canti and their relationship to contemporary romanticism as theory and practice.

Topics vary by semester.

This is an opportunity for a student to explore a topic in further depth, a topic not offered by our course schedule, or to work with a faculty member who is a specialist on a particular topic. This is for Italian Studies graduate students only and you must contact the department administrator for permission to register for the course. *Requires Department Consent to register.

This graduate-level course investigates the relationship between the media and technologies of film and video, on the one hand, and city space on the other, with particular reference to Italian cities. What happens when the static or mobile camera meets the built environment, when it moves in, around or above buildings, when editing cuts and splices the city into “views”, when the flat rectangular screen frames three-dimensional space? How do films harness urban space to their narrative projects? How do they draw on and reorganize the pre-existing historical and social meanings of urban places? How are different elements of the urban environment photographed and manipulated? How does sound interact with images in films and video about urban space? In what ways can film and video serve as documents of urban space or act as agents of change in debates about uses of the city? Analysis of the films will be supported by reading on space in cinema and on Italian cities. As well as looking at physical space we will pay attention to social space (e.g. centre versus periphery, commercial versus residential districts, space constructed by individuals through movement and activity) and to historical stratifications and changes within filmed cities (traces of the past, rebuilding, new developments).

This course is dedicated to a close reading of the two major novels of Carlo Emilio Gadda, the great neurotic polymath often referred to as “the Italian James Joyce”: La cognizione del dolore (serialized between 1938-1941 in Letteratura, then published by Einaudi in 1963) and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de’ via Merulana (serialized in Letteratura between 1944-1946, then published by Garzanti in 1957). Our study of these novels will be supplemented by discussions of theoretical approaches elicited by his writing—particularly new materialism, science studies, and psychoanalysis. We will conclude with a study of the “Nipotini dell’Ingegnere”—those named by Alberto Arbasino in his influential essay of that title (Abarsino, Testori, and Pasolini); as well as writers of the Neo-Avant-Garde who sought to continue Gadda’s legacy by emulating his famously “baroque” style marked by wild digressions and the extensive use of regional dialects. Reading knowledge of Italian is required. Class discussion will be conducted in English; Readings will be in English and Italian.

Explores Italian colonialism from the late 19th century through decolonization. Through readings of colonial travel literature, novels, films, diaries, memoirs, and other texts, students address the meaning of colonialism within Italian history and culture, the specificities of the Italian colonial case within broader trends of European imperialism, and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary Italy.

Reading and analysis of major poetic texts of the century until contemporary poetry. Principal authors: D?Annunzio, Pascoli, Luzi, Montale, Saba, Sereni,Ungaretti, Zanzotto. Focus is on movements such as symbolism, decadentism, ermetism, as well as the discourse of the avant-garde.

Topics vary by semester.

Examines the poetics and politics of the futurist movement with special attention to the works of F. T. Marinetti and the movement?s female writers.

The transformation of Italian society, culture, and identity through the narratives of the best young novelists and directors of today.

The goal of the course is for students, under the supervision of at least two faculty members, to prepare to write a 25- page Qualifying Essay grounded in a thorough knowledge of Italian Studies and connected with the student’s intended dissertation research. More generally, the course aims to prepare students at other stages of the PhD program to write an original research paper or develop a more complex research topic

This course is designed to introduce students in the PhD program to independent research in preparation for their concentrated work on the dissertation. It is a required course for students in their last semester of course work.

Individual research projects carried out under the supervision of the faculty