Prerequisite: ITA 3420. A continuation of ITA 3420 with greater stress of theme-writing skills.

This course offers a discussion and analysis of English translations of novels, short stories, and plays by a variety of Italian authors from the past to the present.

This course will examine the cultural developments and socio-political changes in modern Italy: from the Risorgimento to the formation of a nation and the question of national identity; Fascism’s influence on the national culture; the Italian miracle of the post-war period; the North/South question; religion and education; the “Made in Italy” label in fashion and design; and the social phenomenon of immigration into Italy of people coming from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Due chiacchiere ed un caffè: letteratura, storia e costume del Sette-Ottocento italiano nella cultura del salotto

What was the role of Italian women in the culture of the Illuminismo and Romanticismo? Why are they cited in anthologies of Italian literature almost exclusively as devoted wives or inspiring muses of illustrious men of letters? How did they contribute to the literary and political debate of the time? Did they have a ‘Risorgimento’ of their own? These are some of the questions we will address by exploring the culture of the period through the society of the salotto letterario. The importance for the Italian Settecento and Ottocento of the caffè letterario, a public male space, has long been known, but recent scholarship has unearthed the cultural and political relevance of the salotto letterario or salotto di cultura, a private space opened to a selected group where a female figure reigns. The model was imported from the French salon and flourished in the main Italian cities around strong and educated women such as Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, Clara Maffei, Cristina Belgioioso Trivulzio and Olimpia Rossi Savio. The salotto’s formative and legitimizing functions manifest themselves in the way it fostered debate and exchange of opinions, educated, and provided a network of connections for literates, artists and politicians.

This course will evolve around and develop the following three elements:

1) The history of the most relevant italian salotti letterari and of the lives and literary production of the women who animated them.
2) The works (literary, artistic, musical) that defined that culture and spurred conversation and debates in the salotti. We will read major authors such as Vico, Goldoni, Metastasio, Alfieri, Foscolo and Manzoni as well as lesser known ones like Casanova, Chiari and Berchet. We will address the visual arts through the works of Rosalba Carriera, Longhi, Tiepolo, Canova and explore Opera through Rossini and Verdi.
3) Contemporary novels that aim at reconstructing the story of the exceptional women involved in this culture, such as Andrea di Robilant’s A Venetian Affair, Daniela Pizzagalli’s L’amica, and Enzo Striano’s Il resto di niente with the film rendition by Antonietta de Lillo.

The Renaissance is a period of profound reconsideration of the place of the human being in its surrounding society. In an intense and fascinating convergence of Christian and Classical traditions, the Renaissance humanists and poets sought to define a new kind of individual, which is traditionally associated with our idea of ‘modernity’ (hence « early modern » as an alternative name for this period), but which is really a complex product of old and new. At the same time, in its questioning of moral, socio-political, literary and religious issues, Renaissance humanism also rejected dogmatism and felt the need to cover the complexities of human society in a variety of voices in debate. The humanist dialogues, literary texts which stage several interlocutors debating issues of the time, and other ‘open’ forms such as novella and poetry collections, are therefore crucial for our understanding of the humanist way of thinking and will be our main focus in this course. In this period, the Italian-French axis cannot be emphazised enough. Although is traditionally considered the cradle of the Renaissance, the movement of European humanism is profoundly indebted to Franco-Italian cultural interactions. In this sense, this course will also explore the ‘dialogue’ between the Italian and French Renaissance.In texts by humanists and poets such as Petrarch, Bruni, Alberti, Castiglione, Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre, Du Bellay, Labé and Montaigne, we will study the way in which these authors imitate and emulate Classical authors in rhetoric and poetry, and analyze in depth the central questions of their ‘civic humanism’ : the humanist concern with the individual in its surrounding socio-political, literary and religious universe (the city-republic, the court, the academy, the family, marital life, etc.). This course will also focus on the place of woman and, to a lesser extent, the role of female authors, in this early modern humanism. The main objectives of the course will be : 1) to convey a sense of the originality and the innovative thought of the humanist debates, 2) to understand how these texts both reinterpret the past and form the basis of a 'modern' way of thinking, and 3) to gain a better understanding of the role of literary form in the shaping of early modern thought, e.g. the power of (vernacular) language, the interplay between rhetoric and poetry, the dynamics of dialogue, and the ‘poetics’ of the Renaissance novella.

This course will be thematic in nature, so that in each session we will combine and discuss texts from both the Italian and French Renaissance.

Taught in English, all readings in English translation, though texts will be available as much as possible in the Italian and French originals. All student work, such as midterm and final papers and weekly e-mailed reader responses, must be written in the student’s ‘target language’ (i.e. French or Italian). All meetings with the professor will be conducted in the student's target language as well

For Dante Alighieri, writing in the 1300s, the notion that politics has little or nothing to do with literature would have struck him as a strange idea indeed! To be ignorant of Dante’s own political transformation from committed Guelf, or supporter of papal and ecclesiastical prerogatives to, later, an equally passionate supporter of Ghibelline or imperial and secular prerogatives in conflict with papal claims, is to ignore the crucial political, as well as spiritual, commentary that Dante assumes in his Letter to Can Grande that he offers as the key to reading and interpreting the Divine Comedy. Certainly the Monty Python group in their pursuit of the Holy Grail was in their movie also engaged in political commentary from the very beginning of the film. The movie in its early frames dwells in almost sadistic delight upon the general social and economic squalor of the masses of medieval society, but uses farce to make its critique.

To ignore the importance of gender impoverishes our own understanding of the different voice and different symbolic gestures and strategies that women poets such as Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, and Veronica Franco are already employing during the Renaissance. These women poets mark off a gendered space in amorous and erotic poems radically different from that of Petrarca, Ronsard or Shakespeare and the traditional male sonneteers, and they counter the notion of woman as passive object of men’s desire with an active, aggressive and transgressive voice of their own that, nevertheless, never seems to entirely escape what Cixous calls “the language of men and their grammar.”
When Richard Wright continues the African–American literary tradition of writing autobiography at the beginning rather than at the end of one’s life, or when Toni Morrison ‘s Sethe in Beloved makes the choice to destroy her child, Beloved, before the slave-catchers can, then we are confronted with the difference that ‘race’ makes in not merely understanding those particular ethical dilemmas of life and art, but we are impressed with the concomitant difficulty of seeing clearly into Sethe’s own unique, non-white, non-bourgeois historical reality. Beloved, with its readerly and writerly challenges offers us the articulation of moral and ethical issues that in and of themselves come to be seen as shaped and formed by ‘race,’ a concept largely invented by white intellectuals of the Enlightenment, but largely abandoned in recent times when the dominant class no longer finds it meaningful or useful for its own priorities.

How then do considerations of the conditions and contexts of literary production, specifically gender, politics, ‘race,’ and class, shape the artistic work and our evaluation of that work? In short, how do such considerations allow us to understand the aesthetic judgments that thinkers such as Kant and Hannah Arendt saw as relative and which for the past two hundred years literary culture embraced as “timeless” or “universal”? Do approaches to art that foreground these differences make it more difficult to achieve cultural and aesthetic cohesion and consensus? These are some of the issues we will explore in the works of such writers as Dante, Boccaccio, Ronsard, Louise Labé, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Mary Shelley, Rosalía de Castro, Heinrich von Kleist, Thomas Mann, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and others.
Our course together will attempt to read texts, familiar and unfamiliar, with an expanding awareness of the complexity of the relationship between literature and society, an awareness of the difference that gender, politics and ‘race’ can make in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of literary texts.

The following books are required for the class:
H. von Kleist - The Marquise of ‘O’ and Other Stories
G. Boccaccio – The Decameron(trans. G.H. Mc William)
Penguin Book of Women Poets (ed. Cosman, et al.)
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein (Bantam Classic)
Thomas Mann– Death in Venice and Other Stories(trans. David Luke)
Alice Walker – The Color Purple Pocket Books
Toni Morrison – Beloved (Plume)

Students majoring in Italian, German, French, or Spanish will be asked to read the works in the original language whenever possible.

Presents structure of Italian Language and vocabulary to prepare students majoring in other disciplines to read learned journals, books and monographs written in italian. S/U grade only.