Advanced Language Courses

Advanced Review of Modern Italian (ITAL-UA 30)

Section 1: MWF 9:30-10:45

Section 2: TRF 12:30-1:45

Conversations in Italian (ITAL-UA 101)

Section 1: TRF 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 121, The Renaissance

Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30-10:45; Professor Stefano Albertini

The history of the Renaissance from its origins in the14th century to its waning at the end of the 16th century. Focuses on developments in Italy, especially the development of republican city-states, the social basis for the explosion in artistic and intellectual production, and the emergence of new forms of political and scientific analysis.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 171.001 Topics in Italian Culture: Amori e Magia nella Letteratura del Rinascimento

Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30-10:45 (First 7 Weeks); Professor Lina Bolzoni

Il tema dell’amore, nelle sue diverse manifestazioni, è centrale nella letteratura del Rinascimento. Si intreccia con il tema della magia, dell’inganno, della follia.

Si vedrà come le diverse esperienze dell’amore vengono rappresentate nei diversi generi letterari della letteratura del Rinascimento: nella lirica, a cominciare da Petrarca, nelle poesie delle donne; nel teatro (nella Mandragola di Machiavelli), negli epistolari d’amore, nei poemi cavallereschi (in particolare nell’Orlando Furioso).

Particolare attenzione sarà rivolta al rapporto della letteratura con le arti figurative.

Il seminario sarà tenuto in italiano, ma si leggeranno via via anche le traduzioni in inglese dei testi presi in esame.

*2-credit course*

**Conducted in Italian**

ITAL-UA 171.002 Topics in Italian Culture: Portraits of Italian Women in the 20th and 21st Century

Mondays & Wednesdays 9:30-10:45 (Second 7 Weeks); Professor Elena Ducci

The goal of this class is promoting the understanding of a crucial aspect of Italian culture and life: the role of women in Italian society and culture, viewed as agency by women and as representation in literature and art.

 This perspective, from Sibilla Aleramo to Elena Ferrante and Igiaba Scego, will be illustrated through the close analysis of texts, mostly from literature but also from other media, like journalism or political writing, and of visual artifacts such as film, painting and photograph.  At the same time the class will help students build skills in spoken Italian through a constant interaction and discussion.

The class will have a focus that is literary but also historical: the literary texts will be read in the context of the social forces that shaped them. The role of women will be contextualised in the evolution of Italian society and culture. Special attention will be devoted to the theme of women and Fascism, the role of women in the Liberation process, and the struggle for vote in the postwar period. In the discussion of literature in Republican Italy, after the Liberation, we will approach topics such as family relationships, individual rights for women, and the impact of the economic boom and the rise of a consumer society.

The instruction will be in accessible Italian and all concepts and critical ideas will be explained and made accessible, by using a clear language and by providing original texts with English translation. The secondary readings will be mostly in English.

The class is particularly suitable for majors or minors in Italian, but it is also open to students with some prior knowledge of Italian.

*2-credit course*

**Conducted in Italian**

ITAL-UA 171.003 Topics in Italian Culture: Traveling to Italy; Archaeology, the Grand Tour, Sustainable Tourism

Mondays & Wednesdays 2:00-3:15 (Second 7 Weeks); Professor Elena Ducci

This class examines the origins and development of a crucial idea in today’s global culture: the imaginary of beautiful lands as ideal and idealized goals for tourism. This idea requires the articulation of a model of a culturally prestigious and rewarding experience. The territory with its people and problems becomes an ideal land, endowed with a promise of enjoyment and cultural improvement. This is why many people decide to travel even today.

In class we will discuss the case of Italy, an area of Europe that emerges already at the outset of the early modern period as a privileged destination for travelers and visitors from abroad. We will explore how important in this evolution is the idea not just of a discovery, but of rediscovery. Important episodes of this process include the rediscovery of Rome as a prestigious ruin and as a city of Empire in late Medieval age, the reemergence of ‘Rome’s other population’ (L. Barkan), that is the Classical statues dug out in the generation of Michelangelo, the recuperation of non-Roman and pre-Roman civilization, such as the long forgotten ‘Etruria’, the impact of a sudden discovery at Pompeii on modern imagination, and in the XIX century the consecration of Venice and of Tuscany as respectively the ideal city and the ideal country landscape. 

After discussing the emergence of the Grand Tour and its impact on the origin of tourism as we know it, the class will discuss the effect of globalization and the all-important problem of sustainability: the example of Venice will be again used as a test case.

All the texts and documents discussed (including voices and viewpoints of foreign visitors and of Italians experiencing foreign contact and interaction) will be in English; they will be accompanied by visual material such as art, paintings and drawings, photographs, and cinema. Participants will be able to enhance their critical awareness of the history of tourism as a cultural phenomenon, and of the importance of cultural memory in travel experience and travel narrative. A main aim of the course is to invite and empower a discussion on how individual territories are transformed in the collective imagination into exemplary and desirable ‘other places’, and how this process requires attention to conservation and sustainability.

*2-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 171.004 Topics in Italian Culture: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Culture

Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:30-1:45 (Second 7 Weeks); Professor Ara 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. 

We will pay close attention to efforts to combat fascism’s rise and hegemony in a variety of contexts.  Through particular cases we will tackle various questions: May we speak of a general fascist theory of culture or representation?  How did fascist regimes 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?  How do culture and propaganda work in tandem? Or else in resistance to dominant discourses?

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; Weimar culture and the rise of National Socialist (Nazi) ideology and ciulture; John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages; Picasso’s Guernica at the 1937 Exposition Internationale; Italian Fascist architecture and colonialism; Futurist art and Fascist propaganda; the 1937 Degenerate ‘Art’ Exhibition in Germany; and the politics of memory in post-war Europe.

*2-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 173.001 Topics in Italian Culture: Language, Culture, and Identity in Italy

Tuesdays & Thursdays 3:30-4:45; Professor Nicola Cipani

What we call the Italian language today—the Italian of newspapers and television, of Italian language tuition, of street signs, of the Italian parliament—is only one variant among many languages spoken within the Italian peninsula throughout its history. Examines how local dialects and regional variants of Italian continue to have a significant cultural role in literature, music, and cinema. 

*4-credit course*

**Taught in Italian**

ITAL-UA 173.002 Topics in Italian Culture: Futurism and the City

Wednesdays 12:30-3:15; Professor Ara Merjian

“We will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke…”

- F.T. Marinetti, Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909

Few twentieth-century artistic movements proved as aggressively and relentlessly urban as Italian Futurism.  Founded in Milan and launched in Paris, Futurism shuttled between nationalist fervor and international ambition; its exponents quickly swept the globe in cities from Tiblisi to Tokyo, Belgrade to  to Buenos Aires.  As Europe’s first comprehensive avant-garde, it went on to influence everything from the Dada and Surrealism, to the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, to a host of other interventions into aesthetics and architecture.  In seeking to cleanse Italy of its burdensome history, the Futurists used the “frenzied activity of the great capitals” as a literal and metaphorical laboratory to destroy the past and construct modernity.

This course examines the role of the city as both site and subject in Futurism.  Why did it emerge from and concentrate on the urban environment so intensely?  What about its ideological and philosophical ambitions lent its experiments to city spaces?  How did the movement intend to transform architecture itself, and modern urbanism more broadly?  To what extent did the movement’s ambitions intersect with the Fascist regime that it anticipated and often abetted?  What are Futurism’s legacies in the twenty-first century metropolis?

We will approach such questions through some case studies.  Looking first at the “revolution in the modern metropolis” as it first unfurled in Impressionism and Cubism, we will proceed to examine larger questions through specific works: Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises, and Development of a Bottle in Space; Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” and related objects of proto-design; Antonio Sant’Elia’s plans for the New City; examples of Fascist rationalist architecture which transformed certain Futurist principles.  Addressing the importance of the Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson’s writings  to modernism, the course will examine the philosophical origins of Futurism as well as its socio-political consequence.  Along the way we will tackle some related problems and topics: social utopia; gender politics; the role of speed and simultaneity; questions of colonialism and imperialism; the origins and development of Italian Fascism; the phenomenon of modernist “design”; the modernist manifesto”; the concept of the avant-garde; the notion of “visionary architecture.”

Knowledge of Italian not required. 

Previous coursework in art history, architecture/architectural history, literature, philosophy, or Italian Studies greatly encouraged.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 180 Drama Queens: Gender and the Poetics of Excess

Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:30-1:45; Professor Eugenio Refini

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drama queen is “a person who is prone to exaggeratedly dramatic behavior.” While drama queens exist in real life, opera is their ideal environment. Echoing back to their tragic fates, the powerful voices of opera’s heroines never ceased to affect their empathetic public. In fact, excess and overreactions are key to the operatic experience both on stage and in the audience. By focusing on the ways in which drama queens are brought to life, the course explores the social, political, and gender dynamics that inform the melodramatic imagination. Along with a broad introduction to the development of opera from 1600 to 1900, the course offers a theoretical background across literature and musical culture, reception, voice/sound and gender studies. Case studies include works by Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccin. No musical skills required.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 265 Violence and Memory in Contemporary Italy

Tuesdays & Thursdays 11:00-12:15; Professor David Forgacs

From the execution of Mussolini in April 1945 to the mafia bombings of the early 1990s, acts of violence against individuals or groups of people have been recurrent in the history of modern Italy. Examines case studies where violence has given rise to intense controversy over historical memory. Through close examination of materials in different media and class discussion students learn to examine sources critically and gain an in-depth understanding of some fundamental themes and controversies in contemporary Italy.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 271 Boccaccio's Decameron: Inventing a New Life: Morality as Anti-Nature and the Genesis of a New Ethics

Mondays & Wednesdays 12:30-1:45; Professor Maria Luisa 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 and 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 issues that will be introduced and discussed.

Among the topics considered in the course are: society, nobility, merchants, conversation, environment, nature, natural law, body, chastity, misogyny, eros, language, imagination, the Mediterranean, animality and sickness.

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.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 282 Italian Cinema & Literature

Tuesdays 9:30-10:45 & Thursdays 9:30-12:15; Visiting Professor Vincenzo Binetti

This course addresses issues of sovereignty, state formation, migration, citizenship, and globalization in order to further investigate and problematize various and often controversial modes of representation of Italian “identities” in contemporary cultural, literary and cinematic production. Close readings of novels by Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Enrico Brizzi, Andrea De Carlo, Elena Ferrante, and Amara Lakhous; screenings, among others, by Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Bernardo Bertolucci, M. T. Giordana, Roberto Benigni, Gianni Amelio, and Liliana Cavani.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 285 Topics in Italian Literature: Giacomo Leopardi: Poetry, Archaism and Revolt. The Deep Voice of the Self in 19th Century Italy

Mondays & Wednesdays 2:00-3:15; Professor Maria Luisa Ardizzone

Giacomo Leopardi (Recanati, 1798 - Naples, 1837) is one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century and perhaps of all time. He is also a prose writer, philosopher and philologist with a deep knowledge of the ancient and classical world. His poetry, which has exerted a great influence, is shaped by an extraordinary capacity for reflection, in which thought and imagination interpenetrate and blend. The tone of Leopardi's poetry is unique. Its roots are in the archaic strata of the self that emerge as a voice that is primordial and modern at once.

Life and death, truth and nothingness, revolt and tradition, despair and melancholy but also desire and hope are part of his inner experience and of his poems.  

The course reads a selection of Leopardi’s poetry and prose that includes Cantos, Zibaldone, Moral Works, and Thoughts. It explores the relationship between biography and work, between the space-time in which Leopardi lives and the utopian dimension in which he takes refuge.

Love, nature, primitivism, pain and pessimism, brotherhood and human solidarity are among the themes that his work addresses linking them to the European intellectual debates of his time. The crisis of Western culture and the inevitable destruction of the values ​​on which it rests, as they manifest themselves in the poetry and prose of Leopardi, are part of the topics that the course considers and discusses.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

ITAL-UA 307 Narrating the Mediterranean

Mondays & Wednesdays 11:00-12:15; Professor Amara Lakhous

The distance between the two banks of the Mediterranean, connecting Europe and Africa, is only fourteen kilometers, the length of the Strait of Gibraltar. In reality, this is false. The actual distance is much longer due to complex pasts, present and future realities of (neo)colonialism, xenophobia, violent conflict, etc. What do we have to do to reduce this distance? How can we narrate the Mediterranean today? What is the relationship between the past, present and future? What are the connections between colonialism, (de)colonization, and immigration? The course aims to teach students how (post)colonialism, immigration and conflict have influenced past and current sociopolitical contexts of the Mediterranean. Through class discussions and critical writing assignments, the course considers the relationship between Mediterranean history/politics and its unique forms of artistic production and narration that have emerged in recent years.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

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

Section 1: Tuesdays 2:00-3:15; Professor Roberto Scarcella-Perino

Section 2: Thursdays 2:00-3:15; 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**

ITAL-UA 861 Topics in Italian-American Culture: “The Ruin of Souls.” A New History of Italian Religious Life in the United States

Mondays & Wednesdays 11:00-12:15; Professor Massimo DiGioacchino

Originating from the most updated and groundbreaking scholarship on the matter, this course explores the  religious life of Italian immigrants in the United States, aiming sometimes to prove true, and other times to  repudiate, the general understanding of their experience outlined in the ethnic studies of the 1960s and 1970s. The  time covered spans from the first preaching of Alessandro Gavazzi in New York City in 1853 to the present day.  Over the course of this journey through nearly 150 years of Italian life in the United States, missionaries will  travel from Italy to the US in order to assist or convert immigrants, popes will issue encyclicals to fight the rising  apostasy in communities, confraternities will challenge clerical authority in churches, and religious processions  will raise condemnation from Protestant white society. Considerable attention will be paid to the settlement of  the first communities in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, their religious needs and strategies, their relationship with the religious hierarchies in Italy, their devotional and ecclesial practices. The course will also  attempt to explore how Italian Americans have influenced and still influence religious discourse in America.

In order to answer these and other questions, the course will examine religious and political materials produced  by Italian communities, trying to shed light on the historic tensions and conflicts in religious history between the  religious canon (the set of laws and norms produced by hierarchies at the time), and the actual practices and  beliefs of the people. 

The course will host contributions from notable scholars. Students will be invited to give presentations, comment  on the readings, and be actively engaged all the time. Attention will be paid to the original Italian documents or  their translation. Students with no knowledge of the Italian language are welcome to join.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

CORE-UA 400 Texts and Ideas: Topics—Literature and Automatic Invention

Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00-3:15; Professor Nicola Cipani

Italian poet and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti once described the ideal creative process as the unforeseen result of a “seemingly severed hand that writes.” The idea of using automatic procedures for literary purposes is not unique to Marinetti’s era. This course aims at outlining a tradition of text-generating methods across genres and time. We will encounter two broad groups of ‘text machines’. The first works on the assumption that certain mental states lead to a hidden repository of higher content. Psychic automatisms, dreams, trance-like states, inner dictation, and glossolalic runs are all means to explore an unconscious ‘other side’ — and often, a hypothetical superior realm mirrored in the hidden self. This ‘inherited automaton’ relies on the mind’s own automatic action. The second type foregrounds a procedural framework of made-up rules and constraints — the construction of a formal apparatus, sometimes very elaborate, of admissible elements and combinations. By running the wheels of such prosthetic automaton, the author seeks to obtain surprising stylistic and narrative results, all the while putting the text in communication with its countless dynamic possibilities.  Along with the various contributions to each of these ideal directions — the inner and the outer automaton — the course explores attempts to articulate connections between them. Readings include: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, William James The Hidden Self, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Freud’s The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, Henry James’s The Jolly Corner, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, Breton’s Soluble Fish, J.L. Borges’ Library of Babel, Stanislaw Lem’s The First Sally, John Cage’s Composition as Process, Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies.

*4-credit course*

*Conducted in English**

FYSEM-UA 800 I, the Author. Narrating the Self in Contemporary Literature

Thursdays 3:30-6:00; 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 have 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.

The selection of readings is representative of the emergence of a new literary genre that blends memoir, autofiction and fiction, and describes the changing intellectual, cultural and social landscape of a literature that can no longer be contained within its national boundaries, but is inspired by a quest for a new identity or new identities, ignited by and reflected in today’s globalized world.

*4-credit course*

*Conducted in English**

FYSEM-UA 801 History of Italian Opera

Tuesdays 11:00-1:30; 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.

*4-credit course*

**Conducted in English**

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.