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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Over the past few decades, the notion of reception has gained significant momentum across the humanities. Deep-rooted in theoretical approaches such as those of Gadamer, Iser, Jauss and Fish, which stressed the active role of the reader in the construction of textual meaning, the field of reception studies has been powerfully nourished by concurrent developments in the cognate area of classical reception. In particular, the gradual transition from the framework known as “classical tradition” to that of “classical reception” has allowed for more dynamic explorations of the ways in which ancient texts live through time and space via various forms of reading, rewriting, remaking, re-enactment. Alongside offering a theoretical introduction to reception studies (including reception theory and its roots in ancient rhetoric and poetics), this seminar concentrates on the place of performance and performativity in the workings of reception itself. Adopting a broad notion of textuality, the seminar considers reception across media giving special attention to the interdisciplinary potential of the field. The theoretical introduction is followed by a major case study, which changes every year. Towards the end of the semester, students will hold seminar-style presentations preparatory to their final papers. Topics will be assigned so as to meet the students’ specific interests and disciplinary background. If possible, seminar work will be implemented by attendance at live performances.

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).

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.

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.

This module introduces students to specific features of conducting research in Florence. It includes reading materials to be studied and discussed in seminar-style gatherings, with a focus on research methods and relevant best practices. The module is also meant to expose students to key venues for research in Florence, including local libraries, archives, museums, and other historical institutions.