ITAL UA 115 Readings in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
MW 9:30-10:45am, Casa Library
Taught in Italian
(Prereq: ITAL-UA 30; Same as MEDI 115)
Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of authors such as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch,Machiavelli, and Ariosto, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. Covers Italian literature from its origins to 17th century.
ITAL-UA 142 - The Courtesan in Renaissance Culture & Society
Cox
TR 11-12:30pm, Casa Library
Examines an intriguing figure within the social panorama of Renaissance Italy, the "honest courtesan" or cortigiana onesta. It contextualizes courtesans' social position and cultural status, embracing elements of social history, literary history, and music and art history. Texts studied include both representations of courtesans, such as the notorious dialogues of Pietro Aretino, and writings by courtesan poets, such as Tullia d'Aragona and Veronica Franco.
ITAL UA 173-001 Topics in Italian Culture: Media, Society and Politics in Italy: Since 1943
Forgacs
TR 2-3:15pm, Casa Library
The course aims to give students a good understanding of how the mass media and popular cultural forms have interacted with social change and political power in Italy from the fall of Fascism to the present. Some observers have seen postwar Italy as following a relatively normal pattern of evolution of the mass media within a democratic polity, whereas others have seen Italy as exceptional, among the western democracies, both for the degree of political interferences with the media and, since the later 1990s, for the breakdown of democratic norms. This course will enable students to assess these views in an informed way. It will also allow them to consider how far the media should be seen as mirrors of social change and how far were they themselves agents of change. The course will cover some of the most significant moments and turning points in the political and social history of the period, using contemporary sources and documents from various media.
ITAL UA 174 Italian Films, Italian Histories I
Albertini
T 12:30-3:15pm; R 12:30-1:45pm, Casa Auditorium
Studies representation of Italian history through the medium of film from ancient Rome through the Risorgimento. Issues to be covered throughout include the use of filmic history as a means of forging national identity.
ITAL UA 270 Dante's Divine Comedy in Translation
Freccero
MW 11-12:15pm Casa Auditorium
(same as MEDI 271, COLIT 270, ENGL 142)
Students study the Divine Comedy both as a mirror of high medieval culture and as a unique text that breaks out of its cultural bounds. The entire poem is read, in addition to selections from the Vita Nuova and other complementary minor works.
ITAL UA 271 Boccaccio's Decameron
Ardizzone
MW 2:00-3:15pm, Casa Library
A study of Boccaccio’s Decameron with particular emphasis on themes, conceptual innovations, and influences on French and English literatures.
ITAL-UA 285 Topics in Italian Literature: Food in Italian Literature and Culture - The Art of Taste, The Taste of Nation: Italian Literary and Cinematic Gastronomy
Falkoff
TR 12:30-1:45pm, Casa Library
Casa Library
Sample Syllabus
“What is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti?” Italian journalist Giuseppe Prezzolini famously asks in his 1954 history of pasta. While numerous cookbooks cite Prezzolini to evoke Italy’s consummate culinary achievements, this course instead poses the question: “What is the glory of spaghetti compared to its representation in literature and film?” We begin the semester with short stories by Giovanni Boccaccio in which the preparation and consumption of food becomes a critical act of communication. Turning to films, novels, memoirs, cookbooks, and manifestos from the late nineteenth century to the present, we will reflect upon the narrative functions of elaborate descriptions of culinary triumphs. Do such descriptions constitute a form of “food-porn”? If so, how is the project of reading and interpreting the texts changed? We will also ask what ideological work is performed by literary gastronomy; and how it contributes to the production of national, regional, and local identities, and socioeconomic differences.