CORE-UA 400-70 Texts and Ideas: Visible and Invisible Cities
Tuesday/Thursday
11:00am-12:15pm, CASA Auditorium
Cox
Sample Syllabus
The experience of living in a city is one vital thread that connects us with our ancient, medieval, and early modern ancestors, and that continues to provide a unifying element in millions of our contemporaries’ disparate lives across the globe. Urban life is a constant environment and stimulus, whether you find yourself in New York, Florence, Accra, or Shanghai. Our aim is to supply conceptual frameworks and historical contexts for this experience by exploring the ways human communities have been theorized and imagined within the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Renaissance, particularly the city, conceived since Aristotle as the proper habitat of humankind, and the relationship between the family or household and the state. The primary texts encompass utopian writings and works of political theory, but also texts describing and analyzing real-world communities and visual and cartographic representations of cities and urban space. Readings include the canonical—from Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Dante, Boccaccio, More, Shakespeare—to texts from Christine de Pizan and Moderata Fontelong, marginalized from the canon and only now becoming visible.
ITAL-UA 115 Readings in Medieval & Renaissance Literature
CANCELED
ITAL-UA 165 Italian Fascism (same as HIST-UA 171)
Monday
11am-1:45pm
Ben-Ghiat
Conducted in English
Syllabus
This interdisciplinary course examines the dictatorship that ruled Italy between 1922 and 1943. We address the relationship between culture and politics, public and private; Fascist biopolitics; anti-Fascism; fascist colonialism and racism; the cult of Mussolini; and Fascist-era feminities and masculinities. We will combine secondary sources with readings of Fascist speeches and anti-Fascist novels, and viewings of newsreels and Fascist war films. The course is conducted in English, and most of the readings are in English.
ITAL-UA 166 Contemporary Italy (same as EURO-UA 164)
Tuesday/Thursday
12:30pm-1:45pm
Albertini
Conducted in English
Covers the political, cultural, economic, and social history of Italy since World War II. Starting with the transition from fascism to democracy, examines the Cold War, the growth of a mass consumer society, the social and political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, the battle against the Mafia, postwar emigration, the rise and fall of postwar Christian Democracy and Italian communism, and the emergence of new parties in the 1990s such as Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Bossi's Northern League, and Fini's neofascist Alleanza Nazionale.
ITAL-UA 172 Portraits of Women: From 19th to 20th Century
Monday/Wednesday
11am-12:15pm
Ducci
Conducted in Italian (Prereq: ITAL-UA 30 Advanced Review of Modern Italian)
The purpose of this class is to understand the changing image and voice of Italian women in a period of intense change from traditionalism to modernity.
The course is based on a choice of short texts in Italian, selected for their relevance and accessible language, combined with images and visual material taken from painting, photography, fashion, theater, and film.
The emphasis is on improving skills of reading and communication in Italian, while at the same time discussing the history of gender and its politics in a country where the struggle between tradition and change often invests the image and life of women.
ITAL-UA 173 Violence and Memory in Contemporary Italy
Tuesday/Thursday
2:00-3:15pm
Forgacs
Conducted in English
Sample Syllabus
Acts of violence, against individuals or groups of people, have played an important part in the collective memory of Italy after Fascism. However, they have also been open to conflicting interpretations. Was the execution of Mussolini and Clara Petacci and the public desecration of their corpses in Milan in 1945 an act of legitimate retribution for the sufferings inflicted by the Fascist regime and its alliance with Nazi Germany or an act that displaced Italians’ collective guilt over acquiescence? Were the bullets and bombs of the “anni di piombo” from 1969 to 1980 assaults on the fabric of a democratic society or symptoms of a malfunctioning political system and civil society? Did the collective mourning of mafia victims in the 1990s allow attention to be turned away from collusion between politicians and organized crime? Why are some massacres well known and publicly commemorated and others largely removed from collective memory? This course takes five cases where violence has given rise to these kinds of controversy and debate over historical memory.
ITAL-UA 270 Dante's Divine Comedy
Monday/Wednesday
11am-12:15pm
Freccero
Conducted in English
Sample Syllabus
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 285-001 Love in the Renaissance: From Lyric to Letters
Wednesday
11am-1:45pm
Bolzoni
Conducted in English, Readings in Italian.
Love is one of the central themes of the Renaissance literature. The course is aimed to investigate how such topic is represented and discussed in different literary genres: poetry, theatre, letters, chivalric poems. Special attention will be paid to the representation of passions and the figure of woman.
During the course, a number of texts will be read: compositions of women poets, such as Gaspara Stampa and Isabella di Morra, will be analysed; among the theatre pieces, La Mandragola by Niccolò Machiavelli; as far as letters are concerned, students will investigate the epistolary exchange between Pietro Bembo and Maria Savorgnan; finally, regarding the chivalric poems, episodes from Orlando innamorato of Matteo M. Boiardo and Orlando furioso of Ludovico Ariosto will be analysed. Moreover, the reading of a number of love poems by Michelangelo will represent an occasion for investigating the intertwining links between literature and figurative arts.
ITAL-UA 285-002 Ecologies of Italian Literature
Monday/Wednesday
2pm-3:15pm
CANCELED
ITAL-UA 861 Past and Present Stories of Italian Immigration
Monday/Wednesday
2:00pm-3:15pm
Marazzi
Syllabus
Conducted in English
This course provides a cultural approach to the history of the adaptation of Italian immigrants to American culture and society, and compares it with the present change occurring in Italy, in the light of an unprecedented inbound immigration. The epical phenomenon of the Italian mass migration to the U.S. will be examined using immigrants’ words as primary sources – analyzing novels, poetry, “colonial” journalism and theatre, and private letters – with a keen attention to cases of bilingualism and code-mixing.