Spring 2020 Graduate Courses

ITAL-GA 2182 Proseminar

3:30-6:10 Thursdays; Professor Rebecca Falkoff

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

This course aims to provide graduate students and advanced undergraduates with a foundation in theoretical approaches to Italian literary studies. The semester will be divided into five units, each dedicated to one major area of theoretical inquiry in Italian Studies as it is practiced in the United States today. During the Spring 2020 semester, we will focus on gender, ideology, affect, waste, and biopolitics. We will use literary texts from diverse periods of Italian history as laboratories for the use and creative misuse of theory.  

With literary texts by Giovanni Boccaccio, Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, and Giovanni Verga; and critical interventions by Agamben, Althusser, Barthes, Braidotti, Butler, De Lauretis, Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Iovino, Latour, Marx, Ngai.  

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2192 Visual Languages of the Renaissance: Emblems, Dreams, Hieroglyphs

3:30-6:10 Mondays; Professor Nicola Cipani

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as EURO-GA 2162.002

Making knowledge visible was one of the great Renaissance endeavors. Some of the period's most characteristic products were born out of the conviction that concepts could be systematically turned into images — and that such images could be organized into a visual language, more profound and universal than discursive logic. Egyptian hieroglyphs and dream visions, in their mysterious graphic exuberance, were considered typical vehicles of this advanced mode of communication. The desire to emulate their symbolic density is reflected both in literature and in art, often in ways that challenge common distinctions between visual and verbal communication. In this course you will be introduced to an assortment of works representative of such interplay between text and image: emblem books, dream books and dream-centered works, hieroglyphic inventions and studies, collections of proverbs, iconology manuals, etc. Among the books examined are some widely considered as the finest examples of design in the history of printing. Early modern and recent theory of emblems will also be discussed. As a present-day counterpart of Renaissance emblems, the course will conclude with a survey of corporate logos and Russian criminal tattoos.

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2311 Purgatorio

12:30-3:15 Tuesdays; Professor Alison Cornish

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as ENGL-GA 2270.001, MEDI-GA 2200.001, and EURO-GA   2162.001

This is a semester-long immersion into the middle canticle of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Purgatory is the only one of the three realms of the afterlife that is located above ground, on the earth, subject to the passage of time.  Literally upside-down, it is in many ways a new place, shaped by late medieval preoccupations with time and money as well as female and lay participation in religiosity, and its concerns are emphatically earthly: reason, politics, justice, ethics, and art.  It is a place in between, a middle ground, a condition of suffering and hope, a spiritual gym, participant in an economy of connection and advocacy shared by the living and the dead. Knowledge of Italian is helpful, but not required as all readings will be available in translation.  Interest in connecting the Purgatorio to its intellectual, cultural, and political roots, as well as to those of its aftermath, in whatever cultural tradition, will be strongly encouraged. In addition to assiduous participation in weekly discussion of assigned texts, students will develop their own research projects, on which they will present a short version to the class and a written version of under 20 pages for the final paper

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2565 Florentine Culture in Context, 1250-1600

3:30-6:10 Wednesdays; Professor Virginia Cox

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as ENGL-GA 2155.001 and COLIT-GA 3323 and MEDI-GA 2200.002

This course offers the opportunity to study some of the key works of late-medieval and Renaissance Florentine literary, intellectual and artistic culture in their social and political contexts, and hence to engage diachronically with the broader theoretical question of the ways in which elite culture is inflected by socioeconomic and political developments. The choice of texts to be studied has been calculated to provide both a sense of the diversity of Florentine culture and its continuities. Besides texts that conventionally fall under the rubric of literature, such as lyric poetry, verse narrative, and drama, the syllabus encompasses chronicles, sermons, and works of political, rhetorical, social, and aesthetic theory. Thematic focuses include civic and family identity; gender and sexuality; and the relationship between language and political power. The course is taught in English.

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2389 Il Novecento racconta il Novecento

January 27, 2019-March 13, 2019; 2:00-3:15 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Giorgio van Straten

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Room 306

*This is a 2 credit course*

Quattro autori e quattro libri sulla seconda guerra mondiale: 

Primo Levi, Mario Rigoni Stern, Beppe Fenoglio, Elsa Morante

Attraverso quattro libri (Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi, Il sergente nella neve di Mario Rigoni Stern, Una questione privata di Beppe Fenoglio e La storia di Elsa Morante) il corso intende studiare come la letteratura italiana ha affrontato il racconto della seconda guerra mondiale: la deportazione degli ebrei, la ritirata di Russia, la Resistenza, l’impatto del conflitto sulla vita quotidiana delle persone, soprattutto dei più deboli.

In questo senso il corso si occuperà del contesto: cioè di come la letteratura possa essere una fonte fondamentale per la comprensione della storia di un paese e anche di come questi libri sono stati accolti nei diversi momenti della loro uscita (dall’immediato dopoguerra agli anni Settanta). Ma si occuperà anche dei testi, cioè di come gli autori abbiano pensato di affrontare questi temi, con quale struttura, con quale lingua, rispondendo a quali interrogativi.

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2889 Leopardi & Italian Romanticism: Sappho's Last Song around 1800

12:30-3:15 Thursdays; Professor Eugenio Refini

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as ENGL-GA 2626.002 and COLIT-GA 3954

In 1822, Giacomo Leopardi wrote one of his most outspoken poetical manifestos, the philosophical canzone entitled Ultimo canto di Saffo. Why did Leopardi turn to the Greek poetess Sappho to voice his own concerns about the miserable state of human beings? What did Sappho’s tragic fate tell Leopardi about the role of poetry in human life? While these questions are not easy to answer, the poet’s treatment of Sappho provides us with a most fruitful lens through which to look at the complex ways in which the poetical culture of Italy developed in the decades around 1800, hanging in the balance between concurrent (and, to some extent, conflicting) trends: indeed, Leopardi’s Sappho captures the tension between the permanence of “classicist” poetical forms and the circulation of “romantic” motifs that characterized the peculiar way in which Italy received and responded to European Romanticism. In fact, Leopardi’s poem is part of a rich series of texts that, in conjunction with the modern rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry, contributed to trigger a veritable “Sappho fever” throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By exploring significant installments of Sappho’s afterlife in the period, this seminar aims to introduce students to the “classicist” roots of Italian Romanticism by studying two interrelated topics: namely, the status of the poetess’s voice vis-à-vis the poetical uses of her myth; and the relevance of such uses to broader questions about the reception of antiquity within the poetical culture of Italian Romanticism.

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2155 The Sublime: History and Geography of a Rhetorical, Aesthetic and Ethical Idea from the Middle Ages to Modernity 

3:30-6:10 Tuesdays; Professor Maria Luisa Ardizzone

Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Library (Room 203)

Same as EURO-GA 2162.004 and MEDI-GA 2300.001 and COLIT-GA 3918

The history of the sublime in the West began with Francesco Robortello publication of the Pseudo Longinus treatise On the Sublime (Basel 1554). The French translation of Boileau (1674) starts the fortune of the treatise and its dissemination through Europe between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Rather than concentrating on the fortune of the sublime, most recent studies have focused on the origin of this idea by showing that its roots are part of the ancient Greek and Latin Culture, and that although the word itself was not used before the first century BC, the concept existed long before. A basic assumption is that the pseudo Longinus treatise, dated between the second and third century, was not an original work and that it was a product of the Platonism of the time.

The course considers the sources of the sublime in the Greek and Latin rhetoric of grand style. It evaluates the importance of this notion in the biblical theological tradition, as well as in the Neoplatonic and Neoplatonic Christian authors such as Plotinus, the pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Richard of Saint Victor, and others.

Classes will be devoted to reading and discussing texts in the vernacular Italian tradition in both prose and poetry, tracing the making of this idea and its evolution from the first lyric poetry of the 13th century to authors such as Dante, Petrarch, the Platonic school of Florence, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, Galileo, Vico, Leopardi, and Montale.  In this perspective, the course also offers a kind of introduction to the theory of the sublime, as it develops from the 16th century to today, as in the work of Burke, Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Lyotard.

Conducted in English

*Course is open to qualified undergraduates.  Submit your request here or contact the department for more information.*

ITAL-GA 2891 Guided Individual Reading

*Requires Department Consent to register. Contact Anne Wolff (al4845@nyu.edu) to register.*