Italian Graduate Courses
Note: Not all courses listed are offered every semester Students should check the current class schedule for current offerings
ITA 518 The Works of Pirandello (3)
A reading of some of Pirandello's short stories, two of his novels, and some six plays: an analysis of their social and psychological questions, and their metaphysical and mythical quests; their artistic achievements; and Pirandello's contribution to the theater. Taught in Italian LEC
ITA 519 Twentieth-Century Italian Literature (3)
This course will focus on the Italian Novel of the 20th Century, covering the half-century span from the end of World War I to the eighties. It will provide a general overview of the evolution of literary and philosophical movements, criticism, prose and poetry through the two World Wars, the rise and fall of the Fascist regime and the post-war reconstruction of a neo-capitalistic society. Readings will include quintessential novels representative of this evolution: the Unification of Italy (The Leopard), bourgeois life in the twenties (Zeno's Confessions) and the lives of peasants and intellectuals under Fascism (The Moon and the Bonfire). In Family Sayings, the problems of the War of Liberation, the northern countryside, and the domestic world of the novel's protagonist, Natalia (who recounts her-story and Italy's macro-history in the first person), are all intertwined in the best tradition of autobiographical narrative. We will also explore, through Women at War, issues of Italian national identity as they are focused in the definition of Italian female subjectivity. N.B.: The readings and the course will be in English. LEC
ITA 524 20th Century Italian Theatre (3)
This course will examine the theatrical production of some of the playwrights of 20th century Italian theater. Our exploration will take as its point of departure Luiji Pirandello's meta-theater. Our analysis will continue by focusing upon the abstract experimentations of Avant-Garde theater, in order to arrive finally to the post-Artaud theater of cruelty. The readings will include relevant theater pieces by: Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Savinio, Dario Fo, Franca Rame and Dacia Maraini. Our methodological approach to the course readings will be interdisciplinary and theoretical. Indeed, we will read some theoretical-philosophical writings about theater, such as Antonin Artaud's The Theater and its Double, Bertold Brecht's Brecht On Theater (Excerpts) and Friedrich Nietzshe's The Birth of Tragedy which will guide and inform our interpretations of the required texts. The course and the readings will be in English.
ITA 525 Italian Novella (3)
The objective of this course is to study the short story, the Italian genre par excellence, through seven centuries of representative examples (from Boccaccio to Calvino). LEC Class is taught in Italian.
ITA 529 Italian Cinema (LEC) (3)
ITA 529 Italian Cinema (LAB) (1)
A study of various important directors from the post-war period to the present. We shall start from the achievement of Neo-Realism of "making the stone 'stony'" (V. Shklowvsky, A Bazin) through subject matter and camera work and then proceed to view its fantastic and surreal dimention in De Sica; its political urge in Rossellini and De Santis; its psychological interest in Fellini; and its operatic, melodramatic color in Visconti. We continue with a discussion of the artist's effort to grasp an unstable reality in Antonioni's Blow Up; of the philosophical and ethical compromise in Bertolucci's The Spider Stratagem; and of the pessimistic worldview in Pasolini's The Decameron. We shall conclude with the comicity and intertextuality (uni- and inter-mediality) of Nichetti's wonderful pastiche The Icicle Thief.
Films will be shown on Wednesdays (Lab) and analyzed on Mondays (Lecture). Attendance is required. Students are also required to keep a journal of their own reactions to each film. The final grade will be based on the journal, a midterm, and a last exam.
Graduate students are required also to write a 15-page essay or two 8-page essays.
ITA 530 Italian Cinema II: Directors (Lab/Lec) (4)
A study of Visconti's transition from neorealism to melodramatic (operatic) passion and to his interpretation of history through the dialectics of present reality and nostalgic past. Also, a study oh how Antonioni's work is "tied to truth rather than logic," and how through rythm rather than narration he presents an "attempt to adhere to a definite reality--spiritual, internal, and even moral"; which is his definition of "modern cinema".
Films will be shown on Thursdays and analyzed on Tuesdays. Attendance is required. Students are also required to keep a journal of their own reactions for each film. The final grade will be based on the journal, a midterm, and a last exam. Taught in English.
ITA 533 European Women Film Directors (3)
Women's cinematic eye. For over a century with their intelligence and creativity women have been contributing to the moving image. In 1896 the French, Alice Guy, directed the first film made by a woman, La fee aux choux. In this seminar we will explore the cinematic production of some of the major European women filmmakers of all times. We will engage Agnes Varda's Nouvelle Vague innovations, Liliana Cavani's crucial output, the exquisite contemporary comedies of Fina Torres and Josiane Balasko, and many others. Through the reading and discussion of filmic and theoretical texts we shall engage some fundamental questions concerning subjectivity and language, body and culture. We will examine constructions of sexual difference and (re)presentations of female and male gender in various European contexts. The theoretical framework will be provided by the philosophical writings of film theorist and filmmakers such as Gilles Deleuze, Andre Bazin, Marguerite Duras, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Butler, among others. The course and the readings will be in English. The films will be in Italian, French and Spanish with English subtitles. SEM
ITA 534 Special Topics: Italian and French Spatial Modernities (3)
This seminar will focus on exchanges and intersections between French and Italian spaces of mode rnity in 19th to 21st century literature. We will study how space has been reconfigured in modernity and how literature has participated in, interacted with and responded to the many resulting changes. Reading a wide-ranging selection of texts at the crossroads of literature, culture, and history, we will follow their spatial aspects, asking how they interrelate and alter each other. The textual and real spaces we will analyze lie at the intersection of the sensual and the intellectual, the lived and the imagined, the exterior and the interior, the constructed and the natural, the ordinary and the exceptional, the national and the transnational. Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry will be our point of departure for the seminar; we will then consider the forms of spatiality that are staged in Italian and French Decadence (Huysmans and D’Annunzio), in Italian and French avant-garde literatures (especially Futurism and Surrealism), and in modernist and post-modern writing (Duras, Calvino, Morante, Pasolini, Proust, Perec), including some recent francophone and italophone texts. A selection of critical texts and visual materials on issues of space will accompany the weekly reading. This is an interdisciplinary seminar, and students will be encouraged to develop areas of research that connect to their specific interests. Course assignments include oral presentations and a final essay. The course is taught in English but students are welcome to read the texts in the original.
ITA 535 Twentieth-Century Italian Poets (3)
This seminar will explore the poetry of four major Italian poets of the twentieth century: Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, Salvatore Quasimondo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, as well as the work of such twentieth-century Italian women poets as Rosanna Ombres, Maria Luisa Spaziani and patrizia Cavalli, among others.
The course will give students the opportunity to examine the evolution of Italian poetry in the twentieth century, and will, at the same time, introduce them to the hermeneutics of poetry. The following questions will be addressed: What is poetry? What is the relation of poetry to thought and of poetry to politics? The connections between poetry and philosophy, language and aesthetics will be explored as well. Gianni Vattimo's work on poetics, philosophy, and aesthetics will provide the theoretical frame for our investigations. The course and the readings are in English. LEC
ITA 556 Comparative Romance Linguistics (3)
The similarities and differences between the three major Romance languages will be examined from several standpoints, including their linguistic development from Latin and the historic or social factors that encouraged (and inhibited) their development.
The course will take up issues such as "natural" vs. "directed" language change, the construction of national linguistic norms, and the effects of institutions such as education and the media. "Sister" languages, such as Catalan and Occitan will also be presented. An introduction to the resources available in the library will prepare students to do their own brief comparisons of selected lexical items in the three languages. This course will be taught in English. LEC