Fall 2018 Graduate Courses

ITAL-GA 1050 Publication Workshop

Wednesdays 3:30-6:10; Virginia Cox

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò Library (Room 203)

This course combines elements of a substantive course and of professionalization and training in research and scholarly writing. It takes as its object of study a particular text or artwork; and it engages students in a structured manner in the processes of research, analysis, writing, and revision necessary to produce a publishable research paper on the subject. The first half of the course is taken up with the research process, conducted collectively by the students under the guidance of the instructor. In the second half of the course, the class will collectively write and revise an 8,000-word article suitable for publication as a journal article. In this iteration, the object of study chosen is a late sixteenth-century poetic manuscript containing a copy of a vernacular translation of the seven penitential psalms, by the Benedictine monk, Agostino Cesari, or Cesareo. The manuscript is of interest as evidence of the continuing use of manuscript as a means of circulation in the typographical era; and the work it contains offers a starting place for the study of the fascinating and under-researched field of Counter- Reformation Italian religious literature. Topics covered in the initial, research section of the course include the penitential psalms and their vernacular traditions; the Benedictine order and its contribution to Counter-Reformation religious literature; the sixteenth-century tradition of Petrarchizing rime spirituali; and the relation of manuscript and print.

ITAL-GA 1981.001 The Politics of History in the Renaissance

Mondays 12:30-3:15; Karl Appuhn

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò Library (Room 203)

Same as HIST-GA 1001.001, MEDI-GA 2300.001, EURO-GA 1981.001

Late Renaissance Italy witnessed the emergence of new forms of historical writing. Scholars have long seen writers such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini as among the first to employ modern techniques of historical reading and writing. This course will examine how and why sixteenth-century Italian writers--including Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Botero--broke from both ancient models such as Livy and Thucidides, as well a from the robust medieval and Renaissance chronicle tradition, to create a new literary form aimed at creating a usable past. The course will emphasize close readings of key texts in historical context. 

ITAL-GA 2192.001 Dante as Public Intellectual: Ancient Medieval Political Theories, Law, Imperial Power, Intellectual Debates, Communities, History

Mondays 3:30-6:10; Maria Luisa Ardizzone

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò Library (Room 203)

Same as COLIT-GA 3323, ENGL-GA 2271.001, EURO-GA 2162.002, HIST-GA 2707.002, & MEDI-GA 2300.002

A reading of Dante’s Monarchia, the political treatise that Dante wrote during his exile and probably between 1311 and 1312. Assumed by some readers to be a utopian treatise that looks at the restauration of the feudal sacred Roman Empire, and thus at a re-evaluating the role of nobility and its historical meaning, the Monarchia  has as its antecedent the debates on power and sovereignty that have been crucial in the medieval time and powerfully active in Dante’s age

Placed on the Index in 1559 at the time of the Counter-Reformation, Dante’s Monarchia did have a long dispute as its background. It started immediately after the death of the poet, when the Pope John 22 and Cardinal Bertrand of Pujet condemned the book, which, according to Boccaccio, was publically burnt.  The events of the 14^th century, however, did not hinder the reading and interpretation of Dante’s political treatise, at that time already well-known. Around the middle of the 14^th century, Cola di Rienzo, the Roman Tribune friend of Petrarch and admirer of Dante, gave his own lecture on the Latin treatise, writing a commentary on it. Later, in the 15^thcentury, Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato and leader of the platonic academy of Florence, made a vernacular translation of the treatise. Because the treatise gained to Dante the accuse of being a heretic (as noted by Boccaccio and Bartolo of Sassoferrato), it was not in Italy but in the Protestant Basilea that the Monarchia’s first printed edition appeared in 1559, published by Giovanni Oporinus, a humanistic pseudonym for Johannes Herbst.

That Dante’s political work, although rooted in the medieval debates, anticipated in some ways the spirit of Reform is suggested by its troubled reception but also by the work itself. The decision of the Tridentine Concilium to place the Monarchia on the Index—its reception, contents, and theses being responsible for this decision—comes as no surprise. The course rereads Dante’s Monarchia in light of the synchronous political debate and focuses on Dante’s role as philosopher and public intellectual. Great attention will be given to Dante’s source such as Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics and the medieval commentaries on them. Other readings include a selection of Dante’s works in which he discusses political issues, as well as excerpts  from Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Justinian Codex, Augustine,  Alfarabi ,Brunetto Latini, Thomas Aquinas, Gratian and the canonists. The course will be in English.

ITAL-GA 2192.002 Literature and Machines

Thursdays 3:30-6:10; Nicola Cipani & Rebecca Falkoff

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò Library (Room 203)

Same as COLIT-GA 2917.001, ENGL-GA 2917.001, EURO-GA 2162.003

Machine metaphors and narratives play an important role in modern literature, conveying shifting beliefs and anxieties about the nature of human intention and consciousness, the creative process, the dynamics of desire and gratification, gender roles, the organization of society, the meaning of “nature,” etc. This course explores different manifestations of the machine theme in literature, broadly clustered around the following categories: imaginary machines constituting the centerpiece of narrative plots; machine aesthetic as modernist ideal (e.g. Marinetti’s “identification of man with motor”); and mechanization of the inventive process (text-generating machines). We will read and discuss a selection of works from different periods and cultural contexts (Victorian era, Belle Époque, Futurist period, and Post-war experimental literature), representing a spectrum of affective dispositions and moods, ranging from the dreamy immersion in virtual realities to enlightened machine-assisted awakening, from the obsessive fear of mechanistic dehumanization to the desire of man-machine fusion.

ITAL-GA 2891 Guided Individual Reading

ITAL-GA 3020 Ph.D. Exam Preparation Seminar

Fridays 3:15-5:15; Ara Merjian

Casa Italiana Zerilli - Marimò Library (Room 203)