CORE-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Visible and Invisible Cities
Tuesday/Thursday
9:30am-10:45am, 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 and Renaissance Literature
Tuesday/Thursday
9:30am-10:45am, CASA Library
Instructor TBD
Conducted in Italian, (Prerequisite of ITAL-UA 30 or by Department's permission)
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 148 Giordano Bruno and the Art of Memory
(same as HIST-UA 126)
Tuesday
12:30pm-3:15pm, CASA Library
Cipani
Conducted in English
The Art of Memory reached a peak of refinement and complexity during the Italian Renaissance. Far more than a mere tool for passive retention of information: memory devices had the ambition to assist in the structuring of thought, the organization of knowledge, the solving of philosophical questions, and were intended also as tools for creative output. This course examines the impact of the pervasive culture of memory on the literary production of the time, highlighting the interdependence between textual and visual codes. A main focus will be on the heretic philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno, burnt at stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600, who conceived his imposing mnemonic system as an inner mirror of the infinite universe and of nature's creative principles. We will first examine Bruno's works explicitly devoted to memory, assessing elements of continuity and innovation with respect to the tradition. Subsequently, sampling Bruno's Italian dialogues, his writings on magic, and his satyrical comedy Candlebearer, we will look for intersections between his theory of memory, on the one hand, and his strategy of self-representation, his literary style, and his doctrine of infinity on the other.
ITAL-UA 164 Italian Colonialism
(same as HIST-UA 204, EURO-UA 161)
Monday
9:30am-12:15pm, CASA Library
Ben-Ghiat
Conducted in English
ITAL-UA 172 Topics: Narrating Immigrant Experience
(same as COLIT-UA 173, EURO-UA 174)
Monday/Wednesday
12:30pm-1:45pm, CASA Library
Lakhous
Conducted in English
How can we narrate immigration today? Can we argue that the immigrant experience is universal? How can we recount family memories of immigration? What is the relationship between identity and memory? What are the connections between immigration, emigration, and colonialism?
We will attempt to answer such questions – and to approach different narratives of immigrant experience – through novels, films, documentaries, and essays. We will examine cases in different national and cultural contexts. We will look in particular at the Italian case; for, Italy represents a unique case in the world: after decades of exporting immigrants, it has become an importer. But we will also examine other histories and experiences (whether in China, Vietnam, Tunisia, France, Romania, the USA, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and others); internal migration (especially to the North of Italy in the fifties and the sixties); and finally non-European Community immigrants.
ITAL-UA 173 Topics in Italian Culture: Medieval Italy
(same as HIST-UA 123)
Monday/Wednesday
2:00pm-3:15pm, CASA Library
Vise
Conducted in English
Medieval Italy can look like a land replete with impossible contradiction. The northern cities witnessed Europe’s first stirrings of formal republican self-governance since the Fall of Rome but also the violent repression of political dissenters; the flowering of vernacular literature in writers like Petrarca, Dante and Boccaccio but also the highest levels of Latinity in Europe; the development of systems of justice to which modern institutions trace their origin but also notoriously bloody factional violence and vendetta; the boom of a mercantile economy but also wildly popular grassroots religious critiques of wealth. In one city we find the first broad-based emancipation of slaves and serfs in the West while in another, the brutal exclusion of the turbulent lower-class guild of wool carders from political life. They were the “cities of God” where sometimes heretics ruled.
The Mezzogiorno, southern Italy, glittered with literary and artistic achievement and bustled with ethnic and religious diversity under the succession of multiple foreign monarchies. And in the middle, the Papal States staggered in competition with the powers of the North, the South, and its own squabbling aristocracy. Yet at the same time, its ruler claimed a monopoly on the souls of European Christians and operated the highest court of appeals for major European legal disputes.
In this class, we will explore this complex culture by looking at a wide range of primary sources from poetry to prisoner graffiti, high and low art, and complimentary secondary sources. The course will begin with the early medieval period and the emergence of the communes, Papal states, and Southern Kingdom after the fall of Rome and then proceed thematically to conclude by considering what this period bequeathed to subsequent generations. For each theme, our central question will remain: were these deep contrasts ultimately a source of strength and creativity or of chaos and division? Topics to be covered include: legal and extra-legal justice, religious plurality, politics and religion, women and gender, wealth and poverty, intellectual life, art and patronage, factions and la familia, and the creation of state.
ITAL-UA 270 Dante's Divine Comedy
(same as COLIT-UA 270, ENGL-UA 142, MEDI-UA 271)
Monday/Wednesday
2:00pm-3:15pm, CASA Auditorium
Conducted in English