Italian Undergraduate Courses

Note: Not all courses listed are offered every semester Students should check the current class schedule for current offerings

ITA 101-102 Elementary Italian 1st-2nd semester (5-5)

ITA101 prerequisite: none

ITA102 prerequisite: ITA101 or permission of instructor

Basic structure and vocabulary emphasizing the language as spoken and heard, and developing skills of reading and writing. LEC

ITA 106 Italian for Spanish Speakers (3)

Italian for Spanish Speakers is an innovative course that seeks to teach the Italian language to speakers of Spanish, a Romance language that shares with Italian similar grammatical and syntactical structures. The goal of this course is to enable Spanish native speakers, or advanced students of Spanish, to acquire an elementary-level mastery of the following four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This one-semester course is equivalent to Italian 101 and 102 combined. A communicative approach to the study of Italian, along with a contrastive analysis of the two languages, will enable Spanish-speaking students to gain elementary-level knowledge of the language equivalent to that acquired through the Italian courses designated 101 and 102. Using Italian as the only medium of instruction, the course will expose students to the language as it is used in real, everyday conversation and will employ a variety of media. Along with the textbook, Internet resources will provide students access to the language of newspapers, advertisements, cinema and songs. Because of the nature of the course, the pace will be fast and will require dedication and daily preparation.

Only native/heritage speakers of Spanish or native English speakers with proven near-native speaker knowledge of Spanish will be allowed to enroll. The course is, furthermore, closed both to Italian native speakers and to students who have already completed Italian 101 and/or 102. LEC

ITA 151 Intermediate Italian 1st Semester (3)

Prerequisite: ITA 102, or three or more years of high school Italian, or by placement

Grammar and pronunciation centered on conversation, vocabulary expansion through literary and nonliterary readings. This course used to be numbered ITA 203. LEC

ITA 152 Intermediate Italian 2nd Semester (3)

Prerequisite: ITA 151 or permission of instructor

For students who wish to enter the Italian major program; intermediate-level Italian; grammatical and critical readings. This course used to be numbered ITA 206. LEC

ITA 321 Italian Conversation and Civilization (3)

This course is intended to improve students’ skills in writing and speaking. We will review some crucial grammar points while reading different genres of writing (newspapers, letters, short stories, and a novel) and watching several films and other audiovisual materials. Students will experiment with different styles of writing (letters, short essays, creative writing), and they will have many opportunities to enhance their speaking skills in class. The materials presented will introduce the students to a series of topics on contemporary Italian culture.

ITA 321 prerequisite: ITA 206, or three or more years of high school Italian, or permission of instructor

322 Italian Conversation and Civilization (3)

ITA 322 prerequisite: ITA 321 or permission of instructor

 

ITA 382 Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Theory (3)

In this course we will examine what contemporary research has to say about second language acquisition, how it differs from first language acquisition and what factors facilitate it or impede it. Since the course is not language-specific, all readings are in English. Course format will be flexible combination of lecturing, small-group discussion, and student presentations. There will be one objective test taken in class without notes or materials and several take-home tests emphasizing problem solving and critical thinking. You will also have to write a short paper on your experiences as a second language learner. There will be no final exam.

ITA 401-402 Directed Reading (V)

Prerequisite: permission of instructor

TUT

ITA 403-404 The Works of Dante (3-3)

ITA 403 prerequisite: ITA206, or three or more years of high school Italian

ITA 404 prerequisite: ITA 403 or permission of instructor

Medieval literature in Provence and France; works of Dante, beginning with Vita Nuova through the Divine Comedy; main personalities and works representing Italian civilization. LEC

ITA 405 Twentieth-Century Italian Literature (3)

Landscapes enter in the Italian literary and filmic imaginary as a background as well as a character. We will consider exemplary texts and films from the 1940s to the present so as to understand how the Italian landscape changes in time and how it is lived, narrated and cinematically interpreted. Texts will include modern classics such as Italo Calvino’s short stories, Roberto Rosellini’s film Viaggio in Italia, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry, Anna Maria Ortese’s short stories about Naples, Francesco Rosi’s filmic rendering of building speculation in the ‘60s in Mani sulla città, Elsa Morante’s enchanting literary spaces in L’isola d’Arturo, Antonioni’s L’avventura, as well as recent texts whose narratives bring together youth culture and politics, such Vittorio Tondelli’s short stories and Niccolò Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura (along with the film adaptation by Gabriele Salvatores). Some critical readings will accompany our primary texts. The course is taught in Italian.

ITA 409 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 410 Special Topics: Italian Modern and Contemporary Culture (3)

Modern Italian Studies. Italian Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde

In 1909 Italian Futurism entered the public scene with the launch of its Founding Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. Futurism, the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, which had crucial effects on the other international avant-gardes, will be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. We will consider the different genres and mediums among which Futurism experimented (poetry, manifestos, prose, theater, scenography, painting and architecture), while pointing at Futurism’s relations to politics and aesthetics. In the second part of the semester we will consider the Italian neo-avant-gardes, looking at the interdisciplinary ways in which they operated in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Both movements will be considered also in the tension with other literary and cultural trends contemporary to them.

 

ITA 411 Petrarch and Boccaccio (3)

Selected readings of the masterworks of Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca, with attention to the authors who influenced their work and authors who were subsequently influenced by these two crowns of Italian literature. SEM

ITA 412 Literature of the Trecento and Renaissance (3)

Selected readings and analyses, from Petrarch and early Italian poets, from Boccaccio and early Italian novelists. The spirit of the Renaissance: poetry, epic, prose, and pastoral romance versus the social writings of Machiavelli, Castiglione, and Guicciardini. LEC

ITA 413 Italian Theatre (3)

History of Italian theatre: Machiavelli, Commedia dell' Arte, Goldoni, Alfieri, D'Annunzio, Pirandello, others. LEC

ITA 415 Modern Novel from Manzoni to the Present (3)

A study of Manzoni's masterpiece and subsequent monuments of Italian fiction. The course will survey famous novels dealing with industrialization, alienation, and experimentalism. LEC

ITA 417 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 418 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 421 Survey of Italian Literature (3)

This course is a study of Italian literature from the 16th century to the present: Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Neorealism, and metafiction. We will read, analyze, and enjoy selected pages by such major authors as Boiardo, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Tasso, Marino, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, D'Annunzio, Verga, Pavese, Calvino, and others if time allows. We will focus on the works as aesthetic creations and also consider them as products and producers of the historical moments they represent. LEC

ITA 422 Modern Italian Literature (3)

This course is a survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian Studies seen through the multiple perspectives of women writers and film directors. With an emphasis on the way women writers and directors have filtered aesthetic, political, and social terms, the course will be an introduction to critical aspects of Italian Studies. Authors and directors may include: Neera, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Matilde Serao, Anna Maria Ortese, Lina Wertmuller, Liliana Cavani, Giulia Niccolai, Simona Vinci, Melania Mazzucco. In addition to literature and films, we will study recent criticism that opens up new territory in the fields of literature, history and philosophy. The course is taught in Italian.

LEC

ITA 423 Dante and the Middle Ages (3)

Works of Dante in terms of cultural, philosophical, and political upheavals of the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. Taught in English. LEC

ITA 424 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 425 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 426 Masterpieces of Early Italian Literature (3)

Provincial and early Italian lyric poetry: Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as on Italian prose selections of the same period. LEC

ITA 427 Masterpieces of Modern Italian Literature (3)

Italian literature from Ariosto to Calvino. LEC

ITA 429 Italian Cinema I (3/1)

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. LAB/LEC

ITA 430 Italian Cinema II: Directors (Lec/Lab) (3/1)

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 444 Italian Renaissance Drama (3)

Explores the social, political, and aesthetic role played by the theatre of the Italian Renaissance with attention to the role of comedy, the influence of Humanism, the development of secular drama, the reawakening of classic texts, and the ways in which drama reflected and influenced Renaissance society. Attention is also paid to the influence of the Italian Renaissance drama on world theatre, with particular attention to the roots of Italian theatre within the evolution of the works of William Shakespeare. SEM

ITA 492 The Literatures of the Italian American Experience (3)

History, folklore, sociology, politics, and artistic achievements as expressed by its most representative writers; in English; no previous knowledge of Italian necessary. LEC

ITA 499 Independent Study (var)

TUT