| ITA 3421 - Grammar and Composition – Dr. I. Zanini-Cordi
This is an advanced grammar and composition course designed for students who have completed the three semesters of Italian language instruction and taken ITA 3420, or possess the equivalent grammatical knowledge and vocabulary. Course Objectives 1) to offer students the tools to expand their vocabulary, improve their grammar and perfect their writing skills; 2) to help students overcome their fear of expressing themselves in the foreign language by exposing them to different types of language (formal, informal, literary, journalistic, personal, business etc.), 3) to strengthen students’ syntactical and grammatical knowledge through meaningful readings and targeted exercises; 4) to expose students to Italian culture and to elicit an exchange of views and opinions.
ITT 3520 - The Italian American Experience – Dr. M. Pietralunga
In this course students will analyze the experiences of Italian Americans from a historical, cultural and literary perspective. The course is designed to assist students in exploring ways in which Italian and American cultures have combined to form a distinctive ethnic culture. Students will examine the literary and cinematic contributions that Italian Americans have made during the past century. The questions to be addressed in the course include: How and why the media has stereotyped the Italian Americans? What it means to be raised in a ALittle Italy? What it is like to be Italian in our society? How the gender dictates of an ancient heritage have shaped the roles of family members? How does America, the land of opportunity and of infinite possibility, unravel the family bond? How Italian Americans struggle between assimilation and the preservation of one’s cultural birthright.
ITW 3101 - Survey of Italian Literature: 19th and 20th Centuries – Dr. Mark Pietralunga
This course is intended to provide a chronological survey of Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present. The course will explore the development of modern and contemporary Italy through the study of narrative, poetry, theatre, and cinema. Particular emphasis will be given to the literary and artistic life of the twentieth century. Lectures and class discussion will consider the works within a cultural, social, and historical context.
ITW 3391 - Italian Cinema – Dr. William Leparulo
The first half of the course will focus on the best and most acclaimed works of Italian Literature and Cinema. We will see and compare and contrast films such as Mediterraneo, The Decameron, Il postino, Kaos and others, to the literary works on which they are based.In the second part of the course we will examine films by Lina Wertmuller (Settebellezze, Swept Away, Ciao Professore) and Roberto Benigni (Gianni Stecchino, La Vita e’ Bella) for insight into specific elements displayed in their works, such as humor and Holocaust, elements which make their films popular and critically acclaimed as well as controversial.
ITA 4450 - Advanced Italian Composition and Style – Dr. William Leparulo
This is a content-based-instruction course in which you will increase and improve your knowledge ofItalian through film. This is based on the assumption that learning a language should be entertaining as well as meaningful and effective. Through an in-depth analysis of written and spoken Italian, the course will focus on the study of contemporary language with emphasis on idiomatic usage and styles of expression. In addition to the cinematic base content and our examination thereof, we will, as a class, work towards submitting an original work to an online laboratorio di scrittura where each student may compete for prizes or publication of his/her writing.
ITW 4440 / ITW 5445 - 18th and 19th Century Italian Literature: Fashioning the Italian Woman, Fashioning a Nation – Dr. Irene Zanini-Cordi
The eighteenth-century novelist and playwright Pietro Chiari defined his period “The century of Women” (Messbarger) to indicate the relevance of women in the public sphere, be it in physical presence or as topic of discussion. Illuminist culture debates the advantages and disadvantages of women’s education and tries to define their role while the booming of the print culture creates a space for female readership and grants them a voice. Female identity develops parallel and connected to the ideas and efforts that will materialize in the 19th century in the Italian Risorgimento. In the semi-public space of the salotto Italian women find fertile ground to foster their education, shape their identity and contribute in unique ways to the nation-building effort. From a literary perspective, this course aims at introducing students to both major and lesser known texts that portray the historical, cultural and social atmosphere of the period. From the point of view of material culture it considers the contribution of painting, architecture and fashion to issues of “woman” and “nation”. Finally, through the careful analysis of the salotto institution and its practices, students will draw the connections between the “construction” of female identity and of national identity. This course will develop around three major themes: 1) the 18th century debate over the education of women; 2) the political and ideological process of Italian nation-building (Cuoco, Mazzini, Pellico); 3) the literary and political role of 5 major Italian “salotti di cultura” of the 18th and 19th century and the ladies that animated them. (Elisabetta Caminer Turra, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, Cristina di Belgiojoso and Clara Maffei).
ITA 5060 - Graduate Reading Knowledge - Dr. Ray Fleming
Italian 5060 is intended to prepare students to read Italian texts from newspapers, magazines, and from literary, cultural, and contemporary texts. The course will seek to assist students to attain a precise understanding of much of the basic and essential vocabulary, structures, and grammatical principles of the Italian language. This course aims to have students able to translate a wide range of Italian texts into coherent and grammatically correct English that is a reflection of a clear understanding of written Italian. Students will also be expected to master the pronunciation of the Italian that they will encounter in the assignments. Students who wish addition pronunciation practice will find related tapes available in the language laboratory in 130 Diffenbaugh. Additional grammar textbooks to consult will be available for ITA 5069 students in 130 Diffenbaugh.
ITW 4700 / 5705 The Trecento – Dr. Ray Fleming
In the Western tradition of humane letters perhaps no country has ever achieved in a comparable period of time the monumental and influential flowering of literature that we find in Italy in the early to mid-fourteenth century. The richness, i.e., the variety, subtlety, and literary sophistication, both formal and technical, of the entire fourteenth century literary achievement, known in Italian literary history as the Trecento, is attested to by the works of such poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, and Cecco Angiolieri and by such prose writers as Marco Polo and Giovanni Villani. Even so, the three Italian writers of this literary period whose names have become all but synonymous with the Trecento are Dante Alighieri(1265 -1321), Francesco Petrarca(1304 - 1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio(1313 -1375). Their major works in Italian, the Divina Commedia, the Canzoniere, and the Decameron, respectively, establish Italian literature in the 1300s as the model for European vernacular literatures in the areas of poetry and prose until well past the Renaissance. While it is not the primary purpose of this course to trace in detail the influence of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio upon the development of the Western literary tradition from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, and Keats (who in the nineteenth century termed the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet as the “legitimate” sonnet, as opposed to the English or Shakespearean sonnet), it should, nevertheless, be noted that Ronsard in France and Santillana in Spain used Petrarchan models in developing their own amorous poetry. Their sonnets subsequently became the standard models for the development of the sonnet traditions in France and Spain. It also is worth mentioning as a fact of literary history and comparative aesthetics that German writers from the classicist Goethe and the Romantic Kleist to twentieth century German writers such as the novelist, Thomas Mann, and the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, were influenced by Dante, Petrarca, and/or Boccaccio, and acknowledged their literary indebtedness in their writings. It is perhaps glossing the obvious to point out that such writers as the Anglo-American poet, T.S. Eliot, in his The Wasteland and the Afro-American poet Amiri Baraka in his The System of Dante’s Hell borrow directly from Dante. What I wish to suggest then is that the major achievements of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio have an unusual resonance in the Western canon of literature in and of themselves, but I am also suggesting that a knowledge of the nature of the cultural achievement represented by their major Italian works can help us to better understand the ideology and values that inform Western literature as a whole. These observations are made not so much with the intent of endorsing, commending or condemning these values, but rather with the intent of understanding those values and how and why they arose in the past, and how and why they impact the present. In our investigation of the Trecento I wish to explore with you the texts of the three most famous writers of that period as well as some important criticism, both Italian and English. Our objective will be to achieve a scholarly understanding of these authors and their times and how and why their works and the cultural issues they raised continue to resonate in our own time.
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