ITA 3420 – Grammar and Composition – Dr. W. Leparulo
This course presents a review and further study of grammar and idiomatic constructions. Composition practice augments the skills developed.
ITT 3430 – Masterpieces of Italian Literature in Translation – Dr. M. Pietralunga
This course will introduce the students to a selection of major works of Italian literature from the Middle Ages to post World War II. Students will read from the poems, short stories, plays, and novels of such writers as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Leopardi, Verga, Pirandello, Vittorini, Pavese, and Primo Levi. Lectures will examine the works within a cultural, social, and historical context. The question of identity will be a guiding theme of the course.
ITW 3100 - Survey of Italian Literature: Dante to Leopardi – Dr. Ray Fleming
ITW 3100 is the first semester of a two-semester sequence that starts with fourteenth century Italian literature and ends with ITW 3101, nineteenth through twenty-first century Italian literature. This first semester course focuses upon the end of the Middle Ages, and ends with what is now known as the “long eighteenth century,” i.e., the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is an introduction to Italian literature, and as such does not assume that students are necessarily already familiar with the Italian authors who will receive our attention in this course. One of the primary goals of this course is to introduce students to some of the major figures of Italian literature whose achievements include dramatic and amorous poetry (Dante and Petrarca), short stories or novelle (Boccaccio), politics (Machiavelli), and comedy (Goldoni), and Romantic lyric poetry (Leopardi and Foscolo). Our investigations will seek to understand Italian culture and society through literature and also to illuminate Italian literature by placing it into the contexts of culture and history. Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli may help us to appreciate the continuing prestige and influence of Medieval and Renaissance traditions centuries later in such writers as Leopardi and Foscolo. We will seek to situate Leopardi’s Romantic Classicism within the larger cultural context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European Romanticism. We will, if time permits, also read a selected novella from a major modern Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, in connection with Boccaccio, so as to better comprehend the continuities and discontinuities in the development of the Italian novella from the fourteenth century to the twentieth century. In placing literary works in their larger historical, social, and cultural contexts, we will also observe what happens to Giovanni Verga’s novella, Cavalleria rusticana, when transformed into the famous eponymous one-act opera by Pietro Mascagni. We will also have the opportunity to hear selections from the original texts of Dante’s Inferno and Goldoni’s La Locandiera read by professional Italian actors. At the end of this course I would expect that you will be able to explore and to articulate connections between literature and society, between art and life that illuminate some aspects of the human condition.
Students wishing to take this course should have a good reading knowledge of Italian.
Required readings:
- Balboni and Cardona: Storia e Testi di letteratura italiana
- Carlo Goldoni: La Locandiera
- Giacomo Leopardi: Canti
ITA 4410 – Advanced Italian Conversation – Dr. W. Leparulo
The goal of this course is to help students achieve fluency in conversation skills at the fourth level by means of extensive vocabulary building and practice. The fluency desired is in the spontaneous use of correct colloquial Italian using prompts focusing on films, Italian Television, narration or story-telling, group discussion or short dialogues with native speakers. A certain amount of oral-written assignments will be required as well. One of the more enjoyable and challenging highlights of this course is that students will be participating in a murder mystery conducted via e-mail and the internet, requiring frequent e-mail contact in Italian with classmates followed by small group discussions in class. Students are asked to help monitor class progress by participating in periodic surveys for which they will receive points. There will be a final oral or written project relating to the murder mystery solved during the course of the semester.
ITW 4481/5486 - Readings in Twentieth Century Italian Literature: Literature and Culture during the 'Miracle' Years – Dr. M. Pietralunga
This course examines, through the selection of representative literary works and figures, the relationship between the Italian intellectuals and the industrial and technological changes in Italy during the so-called economic miracle in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is during this time that Italian society begins to exhibit many of the general characteristics of a modern Western industrial society. Consumerism becomes a prominent subject in these years. Within this context, we will discuss the effects of mass culture on "high" culture. We will explore how literature and film penetrate the reality of "industry" and how to redefine the human project in the face of the proliferation of "industrial" objectives. Finally, we will consider such questions as the changing role of the city, the effects of emigration on society and culture, the impact of technology and industry on language, and the "Americanization" of Italian culture.
Ita 4930/5900 - The Novel: Italian Modernity - Dr. S. Valisa
This seminar examines four Italian novels (and one film) from the 1840s to the first part of the 20th century. The aim of the course is to explore the literature and culture of Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by specifically focusing on the narrative form of the novel. What is a novel? How do novels convey, or upset, the social and material context within which they exist? Why do certain novels become "canonical" and others don't? How can we, readers of the twenty-first century, relate to each of these texts, and what can these texts tell us about literature as an artistic and political endeavor?
We will explore together different theoretical and critical approaches and test them on each novel, so that by the end of the semester every student will be familiar not only with a portion of Italian culture, but also with a few of the many ways in which texts - and the world around us - can be "read."
"The Novel: Italian Modernity" is a combined upper division and graduate seminar. It is conducted in Italian, and active participation in class is essential. Each student will bring to the class her/his unique perception of these works, and it is this input that will turn the course into an exciting experience for everyone.
Required readings:
- A. Manzoni, I promessi sposi
- I. U. Tarchetti, Fosca
- Marchesa Colombi, In risaia
- L. Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal
- Course reader available the first week of classes
FOL 5934 - European Romanticism: Poetry, Prose, and the Arts of the Romantic Movement – Dr. R. Fleming
This graduate course will focus upon European Romanticism as a broad cultural movement. We will examine some of its national manifestations in literature, painting, and music in Germany, Italy, France, England, and Spain.
In a very real sense, as has been often suggested, we are all children of the Romantics, direct cultural heirs of a rich, complex, and at times confusing and contradictory inheritance. The Romantic period is often seen as the age of revolution, in both politics and the arts, but also as the age of extreme reaction in politics following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the age of a strange new classicism, a Romantic Classicism different from that of ancient Greece and Rome, and very different even from eighteenth century Neo-Classicism in style, affirmations, and values. Romantics are termed neurotic dreamers, moonstruck and detached from the harsh realties of life, and yet condemned for being politically involved in their writings and in their lives, championing such causes as the rights of man and the abolition of slavery.
Romanticism is often associated with an all but superhuman energy and the celebration of life and beauty, yet it is also a movement equally associated with the cult of death, decadence, and eroticism. My intentions in this course are to explore the complexity of this cultural movement known as Romanticism in its various and striking manifestations in German, Italian, French, Spanish and English literatures and in art, and to examine its extraordinarily rich paradoxes and contradictions and how these unresolved tensions of Romantic culture reverberate throughout our own contemporary culture and impact our times in areas as seemingly diverse as modern political discourse to N.B.A. basketball, to the construction of the contemporary anti-hero. I would contend that canonical writers of the twentieth century such as Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, Thomas Mann, and Toni Morrison, not to speak of movies such as Frankenstein, The Hollow Man, The Terminator, and Clueless, become more suggestive as cultural and ideological products when examined against the tradition of European Romanticism as a whole. This is a tradition that many modern writers and works variously affirm, reject, or critique, but what they are often affirming, rejecting, or critiquing, in the final analysis, are often aspects of Romantic ideology that inform the very notion of what we call the modern “subject” or “individual.”
Our readings in Romanticism will range from Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Wordsworth to Nerval, Leopardi, Bécquer, Rosalía De Castro and Mary Shelley, but we will also seek to examine Romantic culture in its manifestations in painting (Turner and Friedrich) and in music (Wagner, Wolf, and Verdi).
I will provide dual texts (original and English translations) in order to make the course accessible to students with concentrations in German, Italian, Spanish, or French.
Required readings:
- Heinrich vonKleist : The Marquise of O and Other Stories
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
- Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments
- The Portable Romantic Poets (ed. W.H. Auden)
- Course Packet from Target Copy
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