Summer 2019

ITAL-UA 10 Intensive Elementary Italian

Summer Session 1: May 28, 2019 - July 5, 2019

Mondays-Fridays 9:00AM-12PM

Instructors: Humberto Gonzalez Chavez & Gianna Albaum

ITAL-UA 20 Intensive Intermediate Italian

Summer Session II: July 8, 2019 - August 16, 2019

Mondays-Fridays 9:00AM-12PM

Instructors: Katherine Travers & Emily Antenucci

ITAL-UA 173 A History of Violence: Italian Cinema, Femicide, and the Changing Place of Women In Italy

Summer Session II: July 8, 2019 - August 16, 2019

Tuesday & Thursday 2:00PM-5:00PM

7 East 12th St, Room 325 (SB)

Professor Karen Graves

This course uses cinematic examples of violence against women and femicide to explore the ways in which norms regarding women’s roles and value in Italian society have been defined and redefined at key moments in 20^th and 21^st century Italian history: from Fascism and WWII through the economic boom, from revolutionary feminism in the 1960s and 1970s through the Berlusconi era, and, now, during the still-unfolding #MeToo moment. These topics will be addressed through the close analysis of key examples from Italian cinema. The films analyzed will provide a framework for our considerations of the changing legal and cultural perspectives on violence against women in Italy. This course seeks to help students understand how perceptions of, and expectations for, women evolve over time and how cinema can reinforce, challenge, or question those perceptions and norms while carefully examining the roles of violence against women and femicide in this discourse. Additional materials and readings will include supporting texts and criticisms, as well as examples from literature, music, comics, and other popular mass media. Primary films studied will include examples of melodrama, commedia all’italiana, neorealism, giallo, and horror. All films are in Italian with English subtitles. This course will be conducted in English

Previous Summer Courses

SUMMER 2018

ITAL-UA 10 Intensive Elementary Italian

Summer Session I: May 21 - June 29

MTWRF 9:00AM-12:00PM

Gianna Albaum, Humberto Gonzalez Chavez

ITAL-UA 20:  Intensive Intermediate Italian

Summer Session II: July 2 - August 10

MTWRF 9:00AM-12:00PM

Matthew Zundel, Katherine Travers

ITAL-UA 172.001 Street Revolutions: Italy’s 1968 in a Global Context

Summer Session I: May 21 - June 29

Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00PM-5:00PM

Rachel Love

Casa Italiana (24 W 12th St), Library, Room 203

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of 1968, a year when students, workers, and other activists challenged existing political and social hierarchies through collective action. In this course, we will examine 1968 in Italy and contextualize it within protest and movements around the world, paying particular attention to anti-colonial movements, the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and 1968 in France. First, we will explore how key texts—such as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, and Malcolm X’s Autobiography, among others—linked diverse groups of people around the world and offered new approaches to political action. From this global, comparative context, we will consider the upheavals of the 1960s in Italy, which include the splintering of traditional political parties, the proliferation of student and worker movements, and the rise of mass culture and television. We will look at how various media—social critique, film, fiction, art, and music—expressed dissent and commented on these upheavals. Throughout, we will critically engage with issues of race, gender, and class. In addition to working extensively with primary sources and film, we will also visit the New York Public Library exhibit, “You Say You Want a Revolution: Remembering the 60s,” and take advantage of NYC events dedicated to the 50th anniversary of 1968.

SUMMER 2017

ITAL-UA 10 Intensive Elementary Italian
5/22/17 - 7/2/17
9 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
MTWRF

ITAL-UA 20:  Intensive Intermediate Italian
7/3/17 - 8/13/2017
MTWRF
9 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

SUMMER 2016

Topics in Italian Literature: The 'Coming of Age' Tale in 20th Century Italy
ITAL-UA 285
Riccardo Antonangeli
7/5/16-8/14/16
Tuesday/Thursday 2:00pm-5:00pm

The story about the growth and education of a hero – known as the Bildungsroman - develops in Italy only after the turn of the 20th century, even as it was already flourishing elsewhere in Europe. Born as the attempt to envisage the life of one individual as a coherent and meaningful totality, the Italian Bildungsroman thus originates belatedly, when Modernism has already undermined the possibility to shape the hero’s life as a knowable and uncomplicated unity. We will analyze the narrative development of heroes always menaced by affect, trajectories of lives that are fragmented by the disruptive interference of the unnamable, traumatic events, emotions, or the presence of minor characters who resist meaning and evaluation. We will explore the Italian Bildungsroman in both literature and cinema, focusing on major authors such as Calvino, Pasolini, Svevo, and the best-selling contemporary author Elena Ferrante as well as films by Fellini, De Sica, and Visconti. In addition to studying the genre’s formal aspects, we will examine its connections with Italian history and the wider European context: the Bildungsroman as a narrative strategy to deal with the ‘Southern question,’ the ‘novel of formation’ as the ‘symbolic form’ of the years of reconstruction immediately after the fall of Fascism, the role of the political Bildugsroman during the 50’s and 60’s. We will also read some short theoretical texts by Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and others to help us explore issues such as crisis, the negotiation of narrative space between one protagonist and many minor characters, and the evolution of a genre such as the Bildungsroman from its supposedly pure form to a complex, dialectic one.

ITAL-UA 10 Intensive Elementary Italian
Anna Fay Wainwright
5/23/16-7/3/16
Monday-Friday 9:00AM-12:00PM

ITAL-UA 20:  Intensive Intermediate Italian
Giovanni Braico
7/5/16-8/14/16
Monday-Friday 9:00AM-12:00PM