ITAL UA 161/ITAL GA 2192.002 (SECTION 2) Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno & Purgatorio
Wed 3:30 - 6:10
Professor Ardizzone
Casa Library
The first of a sequence of two semesters, the course approaches The Divine Comedy both as a poetic masterpiece and as an encyclopedia of medieval culture. Through a close textual analysis of the Inferno, and the first half of Purgatorio, students learn how to approach Dante’s poetry as a vehicle for thought, an instrument of self-discovery, and a way to understand and affect the historical reality Dante utilizes the scientific-philosophical encyclopaedia of his time, but relives it in light of the Christian message. A text of the Christian "paideia" par excellence, the Commedia, is also an extraordinary modern work. Organized on the patrimony of values formulated by classical- medieval culture, the Commedia is a journey towards awareness, in which knowledge implies the rediscovery of the self. These themes will be investigated in the course along with the central theme of the Commedia as a discourse about the "other world" which implies the unveiling of the meaning of "this world." The course will be conducted in English. Dante’s Commedia will be read in light of Dante’s “minor works.” The objective of the course is to familiarize students with one of the most significant texts in Western Culture. Through Dante’s text students will gain a perspective on the Biblical, Christian, and Classical traditions as well as on the historical, literary, philosophical context of medieval Europe.
Text: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Purgatorio, 2 vols. Translated by R. Hollander and J. Hollander, Notes by R. Hollander. New York: Doubleway, 2000-2007.
Additional reading: Jacoff, Rachel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge, University Press, 2004.
***PLEASE NOTE: The course is strictly a graduate course, but is open to advanced undergraduates. Professor Consent for undergraduates is required. Please contact Professor Ardizzone at mla1@nyu.edu, and CC ma4542@nyu.edu in order to obtain consent.
This course is taught in English, and also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 271 Boccaccio's Decameron
Mondays, 3:30 - 6:10 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Ardizzone
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 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 topics that will be introduced and discussed. 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.
This course is taught in English, and also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
CORE UA 760 Fascism, Anti-Fascism & Modern Culture
Tuesdays & Thursdays
11 - 12:15 p.m.
CASA Auditorium
Merjian
The terms “fascism” and “culture” frequently resonate as opposites. We think immediately of sterile, bunker-like architecture, book burnings, and reactionary archaisms. Much fascist culture certainly entailed these. Yet we ignore the centrality of advanced culture to fascist ideas – both in the early twentieth century and beyond – at our own peril. This course examines the nuances of that centrality, through particular instances in historical context: Mussolini’s Italy (home of the first fascist revolution and regime), Nazi Germany, Popular Front and Vichy France, and international anti-fascist activity up through World War Two. In particular, we will look at Paris’s 1937 Exposition Internationale as a site where these competing cultural ideologies first clashed on a world stage and in aesthetic form. The Exposition forms a kind of laboratory and concentration of these various political phenomena and their respective aesthetic arsenals.
Through the lens of particular cases we will tackle various questions: May we speak of a general fascist theory of culture and representation? How did fascist governments use aesthetics to respond to modernity, or to create a modernism of their own? Was the concept of an avant-garde alien to fascist culture, or useful to it? To what extent was there a movement of international anti-fascist resistance? How did it play out in art, architecture, or literature? May we even speak of a clean, absolute break between an aesthetics of fascism and that of anti-fascism? Did fascism die with World War Two? If not, how (and where) does it live on? What do we mean by the term “fascist” in contemporary culture and society?
We will begin by addressing the history and theory of fascism. We will then examine specific case studies: Italian Futurist art and literature and its relationship to the founding of Fascism; the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome; National Socialist (Nazi) aesthetic policy, Nuremberg rallies, and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935); John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages; Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 Exposition Internationale; the 1937 Degenerate ‘Art’ Exhibition in Germany; and revivals of anti-fascist rhetoric and protest in the events of 1968 in the US and abroad. In the context of neo-fascist resurgence, we will also consider more recent manifestations of fascism in cultural discourse, from Timus Vermes’ compelling book Look Who’s Back (2012), to the nationalist populism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
This course is taught in English, and also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 265 Violence and Memory in Contemporary Italy
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2- 3:15 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Forgacs
Acts of violence, against individuals or groups of people, have been recurrent in the history of modern Italy. They have also been open to conflicting interpretations. Was the crowd stamping on Mussolini’s corpse in Milan in April 1945 expressing anti-fascist retribution or displacing their collective guilt over years of acquiescence to Fascism? Were the bullets and bombs of the “anni di piombo” from 1969 to 1980 or the mafia bombings of the early 1990s assaults on the fabric of a democratic nation or symptoms of a malfunctioning political system? Violence also has a complicated relationship with collective memory. Did commemorations of executed partisans obstruct the memory of violence against former Fascists? Why are some massacres of civilians well known and publicly commemorated and others largely removed from collective memory? This course looks at five cases where violence has given rise to intense controversy and debate over historical memory. Through close examination of materials in different media and class discussions students will learn to examine sources critically and gain an in-depth understanding of some fundamental themes and controversies in contemporary Italy.
This course is taught in English, and also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 862 The Sicilian Novel: From Garibaldi to The Godfather
Mondays & Wednesdays, 11 – 12:15 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Tylus
Modern Sicilian art and literature emerged in the wake of unification in the mid-19th century. How could an island that had been ruled over the centuries to the Greeks, the Arabs, the French, and the Spanish suddenly become Italian? And why did so many writers and artists abandon Sicily - only to return to it constantly in their work?
In attempting to answer these questions, we’ll read short stories by Giovanni Verga and Luigi Pirandello and gialli and critical essays by Leonardo Sciascia, watch several films (Visconti’s Gattopardo, The Godfather II, and Terraferma), and familiarize ourselves with extraordinary figures such as the artist Renato Guttoso and the activist Danilo Dolci. We’ll also read some background material on Sicilian politics and history, including Peter Robb’s dark appraisal of Sicilian politics, Midnight in Sicily, and Dacia Maraini’s Bagheria.
Students will be required to do all primary reading in Italian, write weekly response papers, translate one of the short readings, and submit a final paper/project.
Discussions will be held in English and Italian.
This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 173 Murder & Modernity
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Falkoff
A genre whose development is inextricable from urbanization, crime fiction—like so many other emblems of modernity—is often considered to have arrived belatedly in Italy. Despite this belatedness, Italy is the birthplace of a school of thought that is essential to crime fiction: modern positivist criminology. And in the postwar period a number of critically acclaimed writers refashioned crime fiction as a narrative space from which to launch a broader commentary on Italian culture. This course will investigate the ways in which Italian playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, and artists have made crime a point of departure for literary and artistic experimentation, philosophical reflection, and cultural critique.
This course is taught in English. This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 166 Contemporary Italy
TAUGHT IN ITALIAN!
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2 – 3:15 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Albertini
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.
***THIS COURSE WILL BE TAUGHT IN ITALIAN***. This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 295 Crime and Punishment in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Digital Approach
Mondays & Wednesdays, 3 – 4:45 p.m.
Casa Auditorium
Vise
What can the court of the criminal trial tell us about the court of history?
Both operate via competing narratives about the truth. In each case, this storytelling is also intimately tied to evolving technologies for producing that truth. Historians must have their training, manuscripts, and computers; medieval lawyers their knowledge of procedure, admissible witnesses, and scribes.
How then can we best tell histories of crime and criminality? This course will explore (a) the history of crime, law enforcement, and punishment during the period of 1200-1600 and (b) the role that digital tools can play in constructing that history. Our central project will be to investigate the deep problems of writing history from a paucity of very biased sources: the criminal records of a world of the past. We will begin with the central historical questions: What counted as criminal when, who defined it and with what authority? What could count as proof of guilt? What constituted acceptable punishment (torture, imprisonment, spectacle executions, penance) and how did this change over time? From this nexus of problematics, we will then seek to create a digital world of criminality and criminalization through a number of online, collaborative media. These tools will permit us to enter the spatiality and narrative interactivity of the people and places we study. The final project will put our central issues of competing narratives and the production of truth front and center via the creation of a Law and Order type webisode about an historical trial.
No prior digital experience necessary—all skills will be taught in-course.
This course is taught in English. This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 311 Court Culture in Renaissance Italy
Mondays & Wednesdays, 2 – 3:15 p.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Swain
This course offers the chance to study Italian Renaissance culture within its social and political contexts, focusing especially on the princely courts of northern/central Italy, which were among the most dynamic and innovative cultural centers in Europe in this period. A historical overview will be combined with a focus on particular texts and art-works, and on particular courtly contexts, including the Este and Gonzaga courts in Ferrara and Mantua and the Medici court in Florence. In addition to literature, painting, and sculpture, we will also be looking more generally at the material culture of the courts, at ritual, and at cultural-social practices such as dance, equitation, feasting, and dress.
This course is taught in English. This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 724 Italian American Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11 – 12:15 p.m.
Casa Italiana, 2nd Floor, Casa Library
Hendin
A study of the fiction and poetry through which Italian American writers have expressed their heritage and their engagement in American life. From narratives of immigration to current work by "assimilated" writers, the course explores the depiction of Italian American identity. Challenging stereotypes, it explores changing family relationships, sexual mores, and political and social concerns.
This course is taught in English. This course also satisfies one of the advanced literature and/or culture & Society course for the Major or Minor in Italian Studies, Romance Languages and Italian & Linguistics.
ITAL UA 116 Readings in Modern Literature
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:30 – 10:45 a.m.
Casa Library, 2nd Floor, Room 203
Ducci
Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of authors such as Alfieri, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga, D'Annunzio, Moravia, and Calvino, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. Covers Italian literature from the 18th century to the contemporary period.
This course is taught in Italian. This course satisfies the Literature Survey Course requirement for the Romance Languages Major & the Major in Italian Studies.