Literature Courses

View Printable Version

 

Fall 2012 Literature and Culture Courses 

 

ITAL V3333x Introduction to Italian Literature I

Instructor: Paola Castagna

Monday, Wednesday 11:40-12:55, 316 Hamilton

Forms a sequence with ITAL W3334y that is the basic course in Italian Literature. Authors and works from the duecento to the cinquecento. In Italian.

 

ITAL W4502   Italian Cultural Studies I

Nelson Moe

Tuesday, Thursday 1:10-2:25

An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society in the years between Unification in 1860 and the outbreak of World War I. Drawing on novels, historical analyses, and other sources including film and political cartoons, the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian.

 

 

Italian W4520: See Naples and Die

Nelson Moe

Tuesday, Thursday 10:10-11:25

Explores the cultural history of Naples and the Neapolitans over the past two centuries in diverse areas including literature, film, theatre, and music. Works will include texts by Serao, Croce, Benjamin, Gramsci, De Filippo, and Ortese; films by Rossellini, Rosi, and Pasolini.

ITAL W4091 Dante's Divina Commedia I

Teodolinda Barolini

Tuesday, Thursday 04:10-06:00,  516 Hamilton

*ITALIAN MAJORS AND ITALIAN DEPT GRADUATE STUDENTS MUST REGISTER FOR SECTION 001*  A year-long course in which the "Commedia" is read over two consecutive semesters; students can register for one or both semesters. This course offers a thorough grounding in the entire text and an introduction to the complexities of its exegetical history. Attention not only to historical and theological issues, but also to Dante's mimesis, his construction of an authorial voice that generations of readers have perceived as "true," and the critical problems that emerge when the virtual reality created in language has religious and theological pretensions. Lectures in English, examinations in Italian; students who can follow lectures with the help of translations but who cannot manage the Italian should register for section 002 (with instructor permission). The examinations in section 002 are in English.

 

ITAL G4100 Narratives of Modernity

Elizabeth Leake

Thursday, 2:10-4:00,  501 Hamilton

In revisiting two major authors of the Italian modern novel, the course investigates the relation between fiction and the "conditions of modernity" (personal risk, anxiety and lack of control on reality, secularization, to name a few). Special attention will be paid to the response of the novelistic discourse to modernity, and to Italy's peculiarly peripheral position in the modern world. Primary texts will be read in Italian, while theoretical references will be in English.

 

ITAL G4140 Fictionalizing History: Fascism in Literature and Film

Elizabeth Leake 

Wednesday 2:10-4:00, 501 Hamilton 

The course aims at providing students with a broad knowledge of the political and cultural issues affecting Italy in the crucial, dramatic years between 1922 and 1945. Against the backdrop of Mussolinï's politics, our investigation examines the complex, multifaceted ways the dictatorship has been portrayed in fiction and cinema. Our research will require the evaluation of written texts and films produced both during this period and after it. We will analyze some fundamentals of the fascist doctrine and the most prominent strategies through which Fascism succeeded in creating a popular consensus (i.e., social projects and sophisticated techniques of propaganda). Then we will proceed alternating the analysis of historical documents with literary and cinematic works authored by Moravia, Vittorini, and Fellini, among others.

 

ITAL G4091 Macchiavelli

Jo Ann Cavallo

Monday, 2:10-4:00, 408 Hamilton 

Focus on the principal works of Machiavelli in an effort to understand the various facets of his complex and at times seemingly contradictory literary personality. His role as political scientist, historian, comic playwright, and short story writer. In English.

 

Spring 2013 Italian Literature Courses (tentative schedule)

 

ITAL V3334y Introduction to Italian Literature II

Paola Castagna

Monday, Wednesday 11:40-12:55, Location TBA 

Forms a sequence with ITAL W3333x that is the basic course in Italian Literature. Covers authors and works from the seventeenth century to the present. In Italian.

 

ITAL W4502   Italian Cultural Studies II

Nelson Moe

Tuesday, Thursday 1:10-2:25

An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society from World War II to the present. Drawing on novels, historical analyses, and other sources including film and political cartoons, the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian.

 

 

ITAL W4057 Anthropology of Italian Food, Fashion, and Design

 

Barbara Faedda

Tuesday, 2:10-4:00, Location TBA

This course examines the many meanings of food, fashion, design, trends, and style, especially in Italian culture and tradition; how values and peculiarities are transmitted, preserved, reinvented and rethought through a lens that is internationally known as “Made in Italy”; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production, and consumption of goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, the course will study how fashion, food, and design can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary Italian society, in relation to the European context and a globalized world.

  

ITAL W4091 Dante's Divina Commedia II

Teodolinda Barolini

Tuesday, Thursday 4:10-6:00, Location TBA

*ITALIAN MAJORS AND ITALIAN DEPT GRADUATE STUDENTS MUST REGISTER FOR SECTION 001*  A year-long course in which the "Commedia" is read over two consecutive semesters; students can register for one or both semesters. This course offers a thorough grounding in the entire text and an introduction to the complexities of its exegetical history. Attention not only to historical and theological issues, but also to Dante's mimesis, his construction of an authorial voice that generations of readers have perceived as "true," and the critical problems that emerge when the virtual reality created in language has religious and theological pretensions. Lectures in English, examinations in Italian; students who can follow lectures with the help of translations but who cannot manage the Italian should register for section 002 (with instructor permission). The examinations in section 002 are in English.

 

ITAL G4220 Introduction to the History and Theory of Literary Interpretation

Elizabeth Leake

Wednesday, 2:10-4:00, Location TBA

What is Interpretation? How does it work? What are the major Theories of Criticism in Italy? What is the difference between aesthetics, poetics, critique and the work of art in itself? What is their relationship to other aspects of culture? These and other questions will be addressed in this course,We will begin with a sketch of the Italian tradition from Humanism to the late nineteenth century, then focus on Idealism and its pervasiveness in most realms of culture from the beginning of the twentieth century through the post-WWII period. Subsequently, discussions will be dedicated to a broad variety of critical methods and their relevance as and for interpretive strategies.  

 

ITAL G4420 The Window On the World: Reassessing Italian Neorealism

Elizabeth Leake

Thursday, 2:10-4:00, Location TBA

Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and other Italian filmmakers challenged modes of film production in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, both in theoretical and practical terms. This course will analyze both the feature films and the theoretical writings of such directors as those mentioned and others, in order to investigate the modes of representation of reality in the immediate postwar years, their relation to the identity of the newborn Italian Republic, and their significance in post-WWII filmmaking. All readings and lectures in English; Films in Italian or French, with English subtitles.