Advanced Language Courses

Advanced Review of Modern Italian (ITAL-UA 30)

Section 1: MWF 9:30-10:45

Section 2: MTW 12:30-1:45

Conversations in Italian (ITAL-UA 101)

Section 1: MWF 11:00-12:15

Most courses can count toward the "Culture & Society" or "Literature" component of the Italian Studies major/minor, Romance Languages major, and Italian and Linguistic major. Contact italian.undergraduate@nyu.edu if you are unsure what requirements a course fulfills.

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

ITAL-UA 116 Readings in Modern Italian

2:00-3:15 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Elena Ducci

Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of authors such as Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga, Deledda, Ortese, Calvino, Morante and Ferrante, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. Covers Italian literature from the 18th century to the contemporary period.

Conducted in Italian

ITAL-UA 140 Traduttore-Traditore: La Commedia di Dante

Time: TBA; Professor Alison Cornish

This 2-credit course offers an opportunity for students of Dante’s Divine Comedy (UA 270) who know Italian to read, discuss, decipher, memorize and work with the original Italian text in a number of creative ways aimed at improving comprehension and expressive skills while becoming deeply familiar with a great classic.

*Note: This is a 2-credit course.*

Prerequisite: Intermediate Italian; Students must be enrolled in ITAL-UA 270

Email Italian.undergraduate@nyu.edu for a permission code to enroll.

ITAL-UA 141 Primo Levi: Untranslated

Time: 11-12:15pm Thursdays; Professor: Rebecca Falkoff

This course is dedicated to a close reading of two works by the writer, chemist, and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi. We begin with his first book, Survival at Auschwitz, published in 1947. Along with the memoir, we will read key intertexts: selections from Dante’s Inderno and Samuel Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. We end the semester with essays from Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved. Response papers and short translation assignments due every two weeks.

*Note: This is a 2-credit course.*

Prerequisite: Intermediate Italian or equivalent proficiency

Conducted in Italian

ITAL-UA 147 Machiavelli

2:00-3:15 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Stefano Albertini

The inventor of modern political science, Niccolò Machiavelli is one of the most original thinkers in the history of Western civilization. In this course, Machiavelli’s political, historical, and theatrical works are read in the context in which they were conceived - the much tormented and exciting Florence of the 15th and early 16th centuries struggling between republican rule and the magnificent tyranny of the Medici family. The course also aims at dismantling the myth of evilness that has surrounded Machiavelli through the centuries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, through a close reading of such masterpieces as The Prince, The Discourses, and The Mandrake Root.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 152 Visual Languages of the Renaissance: Emblems, Dreams, Hieroglyphs

11:00-1:45 Thursdays; Professor Nicola Cipani

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 turned into images and organized into a visual language, more profound and universal than discursive logic. 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.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 172 Italy & Africa: History, Politics, Literature, Cinema & Media

12:30-1:45 Tuesdays & Thursdays; Professor Amara Lakhous

This course critically examines these questions about the history, present, and future of Italian (post)colonialism in both Africa and Italy as a means for understanding the origins of current debates of integration, citizenships, and what it means to be Italian today in an increasingly di- verse Europe and Mediterranean region. We will explore these different themes through vari- ous literary, cinematographic, and everyday narratives that bring the Africa-Italy connection into light. We will then have the opportunity to discuss these issues with guest speakers such as Igiaba Scego, Ali Cristina Farah, Dagmawi Yimer and Salvatore Alloca.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 173 Modern Art and the City: Cubism, Futurism, and the European Avant-Garde

9:30-10:45 Tuesdays & Thursdays; Professor Ara Merjian

The city loomed large as both the site and subject of experimentation for the twentieth-century European avant-gardes. Whether as a nexus of aesthetic exchange, a metaphor of social and physical transformation, or simply a set of formal circumstances, urban space lay at the center of modernist activity. In this course, we will examine Cubism and Futurism not simply in formal terms, but as phenomena bound up with contemporary political and philosophical activity. Beginning with the vital changes to representation ushered in with Realism and Impressionism, we will consider the far-reaching consequence Cubism’s shattering of pictorial space. We will look at its immediate influence in a wide range of media – from sculpture to literature to architecture – as well as its importance for Futurism in Italy and elsewhere. Along the way, we will consider the bearing of Cubism and Futurism on contemporary modernist movements

such as Dada, Metaphysical painting, Expressionism, Suprematism, Purism, and Constructivism. We will also read and think about contemporary ideas about the modern city in philosophical, sociological, and political terms, particularly in France and Italy. By looking carefully at specific images, tendencies, and texts, we will try to elucidate the city’s dialectical relationship to modernity and modernism: between order and chaos, administration and revolution, desire and repression, chance and planning, futurity and nostalgia, boredom and distraction, rupture and platitude. We will examine various questions raised by the intersection of urban space and the pictorial imagination: questions of utopia and dystopia, technology, speed, simultaneity, war, fascism and anti-fascism. Primary readings will include works by F.T. Marinetti, Giorgio de Chirico, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Simmel, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Giovanni Papini, Albert Gleizes, Umberto Boccioni.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 270 Dante's Divine Comedy

11:00-12:15 Tuesdays & Thursdays; Professor Alison Cornish

This course is dedicated to a one-semester guided reading of the Divine Comedy in its entirety. The text will be read in facing-page translation for the benefit of those who know some Italian and those who do not. Lectures and discussion are in English. Students will learn about the historical, philosophical, and literary context of the poem as well as how to make sense of it in modern terms. Evaluation will be by means of bluebook midterm and final, testing knowledge of key terms, concepts, and passages, two short papers, and active participation in lectures and discussion.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 400 From Polenta to Marinara: History of Italian Food

2:00-3:15 Wednesdays; Professor Roberto Scarcella-Perino

In this course we will cover the Italian varieties of food in their past and present forms. First, we will explore the history of food from past civilizations, leading up to World War I, just after the great immigration to the New World. Time periods examined will be ancient Rome, Medieval, Renaissance, Risorgimento, leading to the modern era. This course includes topics ranging from Pellegrino Artusi’s famous cookbook in the contest of Italian unification, the relationship between Italian Futurism and food. The second part of the course will introduce students to the regional varieties of Italian food. We will examine the ways in which food shapes contemporary Italian society, from the more intimate family kitchen to the most elegant Italian restaurant in New York City.

* 2-credit course*

Conducted in English

Note: For the first week, half the seats will be reserved for Italian Studies majors and minors. Afterwards, remaining seats will open to all other majors.

ITAL-UA 401 La Bella Figura: Self and National Identity in Italian Fashion

2:00-3:15 Tuesdays; Professor Laura Bresciani

Italian identity, culture, and economy remain are connected to fashion as both an institution and industry. Well before Italy’s belated unification in 1861, fashion played a key role in the construction of national style and courtly life from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century design houses that reshaped not only commercial and aesthetic trends, but solidified Italy’s association with post-war design culture more broadly. This course explores the development of Italian fashion from its roots in Medieval Communes to the dynamics of the modernity and the post-modernity of the 19th and 20th centuries, concluding with a close look at contemporary fashion as a creative force of socio-cultural change.

* 2-credit course*

Conducted in English

Note: For the first week, half the seats will be reserved for Italian Studies majors and minors. Afterwards, remaining seats will open to all other majors.

ITAL-UA 861 The Italian Immigrant Experience in the United States

11:00-12:15 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Marcella Bencivenni, 2020 Tiro a Segno Visiting Professor.

This course will introduce students to the history, culture and contributions of the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States: the Italian Americans. Interdisciplinary in nature, the syllabus integrates historical, literary and audiovisual sources to promote a holistic understanding of the Italian immigrant experience as part of a global labor diaspora that from 1870 on has propelled some twenty-six million people out of Italy. The scope is intentionally broad; the topics that will be explored cover different dimensions of Italian American cultural, political and social life from the late nineteenth century to the present, such as arrival and settlement, community and family life, women’s roles, labor, discrimination, ethnic identity formation, and incorporation into American society. Emphasis will be placed on the multidimensional and transnational character of Italian immigration, with a particular focus on questions of class, gender and race.

Conducted in English

ITAL-UA 999 Senior Honors Seminar

Time: TBA; Professor David Forgacs

This collective, interdepartmental course lends practical, methodological, and strategic support to the writing of the Senior Honors Thesis. We will read theoretical works on the process of research and the craft of academic writing, as well as short scholarly texts, upon which we will exercise our own critical readings and analyses.

Conducted in English

CORE-UA 554 Cultures & Contexts: Italy in Global Context

12:30-1:45 Tuesdays & Thursdays; Professor David Forgacs

Almost anything one might think of as typically Italian, from pasta to pizza, neorealism to Sophia Loren, Armani to the mafia, has been made or remodeled by contact and exchange with the world beyond Italy. This does not mean that they are “not really” Italian. They are, but what has made them really Italian have been circuits of international travel and trade and the accompanying processes of naming and comparison by which non-Italians have defined certain things as essentially Italian and Italians have seen themselves mirrored in those definitions, modified them, or branded and marketed themselves through them. To look at how all this works, we start with an overview of ideas of Italy from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century. We then move to an analysis of travel to and within Italy, the internationalization of Italian food, drink, music and fashion, the Futurist assault on Italy’s cultural heritage, and theItalian film and television industries in a global system. We examine how movements of people, both out of and into Italy, have involved a remaking of collective identities. Finally, we turn to international relations and changing perceptions of Italy on the world stage as a result of foreignpolicies, wars, and membership of the European Union. Throughout, students are invited to reflect critically on how Italy’s culture, political identity, and icons have been produced over time, and to consider how far similar process are at work in other nations, including their own.

Conducted in English

FYSEM-UA I, the Author. Narrating the Self in Contemporary Literature

3:30-4:45 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Chiara Marchelli

This course will focus on identity and the autobiographical experience as narrated by a selection of contemporary American and European authors, with a particular attention to Italian examples. Through the analysis of their work, it will focus on how authorship and the identity/presence of the author has evolved in contemporary times, and how this evolution reverberates beyond national borders. We will investigate what moves these authors, what aspects of their experience they choose to narrate and how they relate to their own subjectivity and the world. We will explore thematic differences and convergences, social and historical influences, the relationship between the self and society, the evolution of narrative languages and purposes.

FYSEM-UA History of Italian Opera

2:00-3:15 Mondays & Wednesdays; Professor Roberto Scarcella-Perino

The course covers the evolution of opera from Monteverdi to the early 20th century. The genres analyzed in this course are favola in musica, intermezzo, opera seria, opera buffa, grand opera, dramma lirico. Operatic production styles are considered with regard to the recordings used in the course; class discussion is meant to help students develop a critical approach to opera appreciation.

FYSEM-UA Reading the Plague

12:30-1:45 Tuesdays & Thursdays; Professor Rebecca Falkoff

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a story about a group of young Florentines who flee their plague-devastated city to enjoy country estates, stories and song, begins with a simple claim: “It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer.” The plague Boccaccio describes tests the strength of compassion and even humanity: brothers abandon their brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, wives their husbands, fathers and mothers their own children. The plague also tests the power of Boccaccio’s pen and, more broadly, the possibility of language to evoke incomprehensible, apparently unprecedented pain and sorrow: “What I have to tell is incredible, and if I and many others had not seen these things with our own eyes, I would scarcely dare to believe them, let alone write them down.”

In this seminar we will read, discuss, and analyze historical and literary works about the plague and other contagious illnesses, real and fictional. In the account of Thucydides, the plague threw funeral customs into confusion, as desperate Athenians sought to dispose of the dead in any way possible. In a haunting story by Dino Buzzati, an infectious disease that afflicts automobiles also debases social relations, as friends turn on friends and neighbors turn on neighbors to report those suspected of harboring infected vehicles. Reading these and other seminal accounts of the plague through the centuries by survivors, historians, storytellers and philosophers, and noting remarkable similarities, we will gain perspective on these tragic and unsettling times, finding compassion in—that is, “suffering with”—the past.

Graduate Courses

Qualified undergraduate students who are interested in enrolling in a graduate level Italian Studies course complete the HERE. NOT ALL GRADUATE COURSES ARE OPEN TO UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. Visit our Graduate Course page here for the applicable semester to see which courses are open to  qualified undergraduate students. The Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and instructor of the course will review the submitted form and decide if enrollment is appropriate. Completion of the below form is NOT confirmation of your acceptance into the course. Please allow approximately 2 weeks for review.

Qualifications

• GPA of 3.5 or higher
• For courses taught in Italian, demonstrated proficiency in the language

*Note:

• Any credits taken above the undergraduate maximum of 18 credits will be subject to applicable fees.

 Questions? Contact italian.graduate@nyu.edu.