Registration begins November 12, 2018 via Albert.
ITAL-GA 2312 Paradiso
12:30PM-3:15PM, Wednesdays; Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)
Alison Cornish
Same as COLIT-GA 3323.001, ENGL-GA 2271.001, EURO-GA 1156.001, MEDI-UA 2200
The final third of the Divine Comedy is its least user-friendly. T. S. Eliot charged this up to a certain modern prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry, since “our sweetest songs are those which sing of saddest thought.” Far less seductive than the Inferno and more abstract than the brightly-colored Purgatorio, the Paradiso has a reputation for being formidable, verbose and somehow irrelevant. All the more reason to study it together. It is simultaneously the most “medieval” part of Dante’s masterpiece, being rooted in historical and political upheavals of the moment and the most au courant philosophical debates coming out of Paris, as well as the most “modern,” radical and daring. Grounded in the necessity of happiness and the reality of evil, it is a reflection on the foundational ideals of a culture in constant tension with the world as it is. For this reason it can and has been studied from the perspectives of history, politics, philosophy, psychology, literature and art. The course will follow the trajectory of the Paradiso, delving into the questions it poses and the history it presupposes. Students are encouraged to investigate connections between Dante and their own research interests.
ITAL-GA 2331 Boccaccio
3:30PM-6:10PM, Tuesdays; Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)
Maria Luisa Ardizzone
Same as COLIT-GA 2965 & EURO-GA 1156.003.
This course is devoted to the reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Boccaccio (1313-1373) is the most important Italian prose writer, and the Decameron is his chef-d’oeuvre.
During the plague of 1348, seven young ladies and three young men decide to leave Florence and to go to live on the Fiesole’s hills. In the splendid framework of the 14th century Tuscan landscape, the “brigata” enjoys a natural life and spends its time in conversations interspersed with dancing and chanting. Every day during the hours in which the weather is hottest, they meet in a small wood and tell each other ten stories.
The book thus consists of one hundred stories, in which imagination and criticism of established values play a crucial role. These stories inaugurate a new way of considering human beings and their passions, goals, vices, and virtues.
This course will focus on the classical and medieval background of the Decameron and on the new elements of the culture of humanism which enter to interact and supersede the old models and ideas. This new sense of the past, a past revisited with a critical eye in order to build new ethical values for a new society, is one of the issues that will be introduced and discussed.
Among the topics considered in the course are: society, community, conversation, environment, nature, natural law, body, chastity, misogyny, eros, language, imagination, slavery, the Mediterranean, animality and sickness.
The course will also provide students with an avenue for investigating the problems of historical knowledge and guide them in developing critical tools and research skills. To that effect, the class discussion will focus on how to move from narrative to problems and from problems to narrative. Course given in English
ITAL-GA 2588 The Arts of Eloquence in Medieval & Renaissance Italy
3:30PM-6:10PM, Wednesdays; Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)
Virginia Cox
Same as MEDI-GA 2300, ENGL-GA 2270.002, HIST-GA 1981.001
Recent scholarship in medieval and early modern culture has increasingly stressed the centrality of the study of rhetoric in these periods and the range of its influence, not simply on literature but on everything from art, music, and architecture to political thought. This course serves as an introduction to medieval and early modern rhetoric in Italy, conceived of broadly as a global art of persuasive discourse, spanning both verbal and nonverbal uses.
See sample syllabus here.
ITAL-GA 2389.002 Raccontare in breve. Da Parise e Calvino, libri composti attraverso il montaggio di prose autonome
(Class # in Albert: 21180)
12:30PM-1:45PM, Tuesdays & Thursdays
*March 26 2019-May 9; 2 credits*
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Room 306
Domenico Starnone
This course will be dedicated to short narrative prose pieces, beginning with Goffredo Parise’s Syllabaries and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, both published in 1972. These works are composed of brief prose pieces that deal with important themes: desire, love, adventure, friendship, animosity, cohabitation, death, etc. The pieces do so in relatively few lines, and—as many have noted—they have the feeling of a poem, or short story, or even a novel. And yet Parise—and even more so Calvino—felt compelled to enclose the pieces within a structure, to present them as parts of a whole.
We will read some of these texts, discussing the sense of completeness that they convey, while considering the way in which they contribute to the development of the larger narrative. We will also see how those books, conceived fifty years ago, still offer models for the many writers who have used the montage of short prose pieces texts to occupy a literary space that coincides neither with the short story collection, nor with the novel, and that remains to be defined.
Students will be required to participate actively in class discussions and to write a final paper of approximately ten pages. Class and readings in Italian.
Taught by the Italian Studies Department’s 2019 Writer in Residence, the best-selling Italian novelist Domenico Starnone, author of numerous works of fiction, including Ties, Trick, and Via Gemito, which won the prestigious Strega Prize in 2001.
*Open to advanced undergraduates with a GPA of 3.3 or higher. Email italian.dept@nyu.edu for department consent.*
ITAL-GA 2389.003 History & (mis)remembering of Fascism in Postwar Italy
(Class # in Albert: 21181)
3:30-6:10, Thursdays
*April 4, 2019- May 9, 2019; 2 credits*
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)
Patrizia Dogliani
The course will examine the history of Fascism and the various ways in which it has been narrated in postwar Italian society and memory. Specific attention will be paid to different representations of this political experience and phenomenon in cinema, literature, popular culture, and to other forms of interpreting and remembering the recent fascist past in postwar Italy, by social groups, intellectuals and ordinary people. Particular emphasis will be given to the individual and collective memory of different genders and generations of Italians since 1945, as expressed in oral history, journals and unpublished testimonies. The course will include a survey of sites of Fascist and Second World War memory, their identifications, and also the controversies around some of them, such as Mussolini’s birthplace and grave. We will also analyze certain forms, traceable in national public history, of misremembering, forgetting and justification of responsibility for the fascist past, particularly in relation to colonialism, racism and antisemitism, and discrimination against people by religion, language or sexual orientation and behavior. Comparison will also be made with the public memory of Nazism and other fascisms in postwar Europe, mainly in the two Germanies, France and Spain.
The course is aimed principally at students of Italian Studies and History. Most of the readings are in English. Some are also in Italian but knowledge of Italian is not required. Students who want to explore relevant Italian history and culture in more depth will be invited to choose from recommended readings in Italian or other languages. All students will be required to read a specified number of pages per week and to prepare short reviews and at least one full presentation. A final paper is also required.
*This class will be 7 sessions over 6 weeks - 6 sessions on Thursdays and 1 session on Friday. *
*Open to advanced undergraduates with a GPA of 3.3 or higher. Email italian.dept@nyu.edu for department consent.*
ITAL-GA 3030 Research Preparation in Italian Studies
12:30-3:15PM, Thursdays; Location: Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo'
*Requires Department Consent to register. Contact Anne Wolff-Lawson (al4845@nyu.edu) to register.*
ITAL-GA 2891 Guided Individual Reading
*Requires Department Consent to register. Contact Anne Wolff-Lawson (al4845@nyu.edu) to register.*