Italian Cultural Studies

HNGR W1101x-W1102y Elementary Hungarian 4 pts. Prerequisite for W1002: HNGR W1101 or the equivalent. Introduction to the basic structures of the Hungarian language. Students with a schedule conflict should consult the instructor about the possibility of adjusting hours.

ITAL V1101x-V1102 Elementary Italian I & II 4 pts. Lecture and lab. Enrollment limited. Prerequisite for V1102: ITAL V1101 or the equivalent. Introduction to Italian grammar, with emphasis on reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. Lab: hours to be arranged.

ITAL W1101x or y-W1102y Elementary Italian I & II 4 pts. Limited enrollment. Same course as ITAL V1101-V1102. Prerequisite for W1102: ITAL W1101 or the equivalent.

ITAL V1121x or y Intensive Elementary Italian 6 pts. Limited enrollment. No previous knowledge of Italian required. An intensive course that covers two semesters of elementary Italian in one, and prepares students to move into Intermediate Italian. Grammar, reading, writing, and conversation. May be used to fulfill the language requirement only if followed by an additional two (2) semesters of Italian language. ITAL V1201-V1202, or ITAL V1203 and ITAL V3333, V3334, V3335, or V3336, for a total of three(3) semesters of Italian Language.

HNGR W1201x-W1202y Intermediate Hungarian 4 pts. Prerequisite for W1201: HNGR W1202 or the equivalent. Prerequisite for W1201: HNGR W1201 or the equivalent. Further develops a student's knowledge of the Hungarian language. Students with a schedule conflict should consult the instructor about the possibility of adjusting hours.

ITAL V1201x-V1202y Intermediate Italian I & II 4 pts. Prerequisites: For V1201: ITAL V1102 W1102 or the equivalent; for V1202: ITAL V1201 or W1201 or the equivalent. If you did not take Elementary Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester. Limited enrollment. A review of grammar, intensive reading, composition, and practice in conversation. Exploration of literary and cultural material. Lab: hours to be arranged. ITAL V1202 fulfils the basic foreign language requirement and prepares students for advanced study in Italian language and literature.

ITAL W1201x or y-W1202 Intermediate Italian I and II 4 pts. Prerequisites: For W1201: ITAL V1102 W1102 or the equivalent; for W1202: ITAL V1201 or W1201 or the equivalent. If you did not take Elementary Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester. Same course as ITAL V1201-V1202. Limited enrollment. Prerequisite for W1202: ITAL W1201 or the equivalent.

ITAL V1203x or y Intensive Intermediate Italian 6 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V1102 or the equivalent. Prerequisites: ITAL V1102 or equivalent, with a grade of B+ or higher. Limited enrollment. An intensive course that covers two semesters of intermediate Italian in one, and prepares students for advanced language and literature study. Grammar, reading, writing, and conversation. Exploration of literary and cultural materials. This course may be used to fulfill the language requirement if preceded by both V1101 and V1102. Students who wish to use this course for the language requirement, and previously took Intensive Elementary, are also required to take at least one of the following: ITAL V3333, V3334, V3335, or V3336, for a total of three (3) semesters of Italian Language.

ITAL W1221x-W1222y Intermediate Conversation 2 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL W1112 or sufficient fluency to satisfy the instructor. Recommended parallel: ITAL V1201-V/W1202 or W1201-W1202. Conversation courses may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or fulfill major or concentration requirements. Intensive practice in the spoken language, assigned topics for class discussions, and oral reports.

ITAL W1311x-W1312y Advanced Conversation 2 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL W1222 or sufficient fluency to satisfy the instructor. Recommended parallel: ITAL V3335-V3336 Conversation courses may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or fulfill major or concentration requirements. Practice in the spoken language through assigned topics on contemporary Italian culture.

ITAL V3333x Introduction To Italian Literature, I 3 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V1202 or W1202 or the equivalent. V3334-V3333 is the basic course in Italian literature. V3333: Authors and works from the Duecento to the Cinquecento. Taught in Italian.

ITAL V3334y Introduction To Italian Literature, II 3 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V1202 or W1202 or the equivalent. V3334-V3333 is the basic course in Italian literature. V3334: Authors and works from the Cinquecento to the present. Taught in Italian.

ITAL V3335x or y Advanced Italian 3 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V1202 or W1202 or the equivalent.
If you did not take Intermediate Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester. Written and oral self-expression in compositions and oral reports on a variety of topics; grammar review. Required for majors and concentrators.

ITAL V3336x Advanced Italian II: Italian Language & CultureThrough Cinema 3 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V3335 Advanced reading, writing, speaking with emphasis on authentic cultural materials. Topic and semester theme varies, to include "Italian in Film Comedy," "Linguistic and Cultural Diversity of Italy," etc.

ITAL V3337y Advanced Italian Through Cinema. 3 pts. Students will develop advanced language competence while analyzing and discussing Italian film comedies and their reflection of changing Italian culture and society. Films by Monicelli, Germi, Moretti, Wertmuller, Soldini and others. ITAL V3335 is a prerequisite.

HNGR W3340x-W3341y Advanced Hungarian 3 pts. Prerequisite for W3340: HNGR W1201 or the equivalent. Prerequisite for W3341: HNGR W3340 or the equivalent. W3340 focuses on the more complex syntactic/semantic constructions in addition to vocabulary enrichment. Readings in literature, oral presentations, translations, and essays serve to enhance the grammatical material. W3341 has an emphasis on rapid and comprehensive reading of academic materials. In addition to weekly readings, oral presentations and written essays serve to improve flulency in all aspects of Hungarian.

CLIA V3660y Mafia Movies : From Sicily To the Sopranos 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Examines representations of the mafia in American and Italian film. Special attention to questions of ethnic identity and immigration. Comparison of the different histories and myths of the mafia in the US and Italy. Readings include novels, historical studies, and film criticism.

ITAL V3993x or y Senior Thesis/Tutorial 3 pts. Prerequisites: Permission of the faculty advisor. Senior thesis/tutorial. 3 pts. T. Barolini, J. Cavallo, F. Ghezzo, E. Leake, N. Moe, P . Valesio. Prerequisite: the faculty adviser's permission. Senior thesis or tutorial project consisting of independent scholarly work in an area of study of the student's choosing, under the supervision of a member of the faculty.

ITAL W4000y Stylistics 3 pts. Prerequisites: ITAL V3336 or the equivalent and instructor's permission. Students read short texts, analyze the anatomy of an Italian essay, observe and practice sophisticated sentence structures, solidify their knowledge and usage of Italian grammar, and expand their vocabulary. After discussing and analyzing examples of contemporary prose, students will integrate the structures and vocabulary they have acquired into their own writing.

ITAL W4012y The Theory and Practice of Writing: Laboratorio di scrittura 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Development of advanced reading and conversational skills. Close reading and extensive practice writing in a variety of genres which will include: the letter, the diary, the essay, the critical review, and will focus especially on the composition of short stories and vignettes. In Italian.

ITAL W4018y The Theory and Practice of Writing II: Laboratorio di Traduzione 3 pts. Experiments and analyses of translations, especially from literary texts, from English into Italian and from Italian into English. Classroom discussion of aspects of the translation process, and of the general interpretation of the translated texts. Each student will keep a "Translation Notebook." In Italian

ITAL G4050x The Medieval Lyric: From the Scuola Siciliana To Dante 3 pts. This course maps the origins of the Italian lyric, starting in Sicily and following its development in Tuscany, in the poets of the dolce stil nuovo and ultimately, Dante. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.

ITAL W4055x Anthropology of Contemporary Italy: Pluralism, Creativity and Identity 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This seminar examines ways in which Italy is understood and represented by Italians and non-Italians. It will analyze the formation of multiple discourses on Italy, how Italian culture and society are imagined, represented and/or distorted. Based on an anthropological perspective, this course will examine ways in which we can understand Italy through the intersections of pluralism, ethnicity, gender, and religion. The course will study how Italy strives for political and economic unity, while there is a concurrent push toward inequality, exclusion, and marginalization. Moreover, the course will analyze the revitalization of nationalism on one hand of regionalism on the other, and will focus on the concepts of territory, identity, and tradition. Short videos that can be watched on computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course.

ITAL G4060y Italian Quattrocento Civic Humanism 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Moral philosophy, art and literary theory, history, and educational methods in the writings of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Matteo Palmieri, L.B. Alberti, Guarino Veronese and his son Battista, and Lorenzo Valla.

ITAL W4060x Italian Quattrocento Civic Humanism 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Discussion of texts by the major 15th-century humanist writers including Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Matteo Palmieri, L.B. Alberti, and Guarino da Verona. Students can read texts in Latin, Italian, and/or English.

ITAL G4066x The World Beyond Europe in Italian Renaissance Literature 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course will explore encounters with the lands and peoples of Asia and Africa in a selection of Italian fictional works from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with attention to the historical and literary context. Classes will be in English, but many of the works are available in Italian only.

ITAL G4079x Boccaccio's Decameron 3 pts. While focusing on the Decameron, this course follows the arc of Boccaccio's career from the Ninfale Fiesolano, through the Decameron, and concluding with the Corbaccio, using the treatment of women as the connective thread. The Decameron is read in the light of its cultural density and contextualized in terms of its antecedents, both classical and vernacular, and of its intertexts, especially Dante's Commedia, with particular attention to Boccaccio's masterful exploitation of narrative as a means for undercutting all absolute certainty. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.

ITAL G4086x Castiglione and the Italian Renaissance Court 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Focus on Castiglione's Book of the Courtier as educational treatise, philosophical meditation, sociopolitical document, and book of courtly manners; other courtly writings of the period, from Della Casa's Galateo to Ariosto's Satires to Bembo's Asolani. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.

ITAL G4089y Petrarch's Canzoniere 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. A reading of the Canzoniere that explicates Petrarch not only as he fashions himself authorially in contrast to Dante, but brings to bear ideas on time and narrative from authors such as Augustine and Ricoeur in order to reconstruct the metaphysical significance of collecting fragments in what was effectively a new genre. We will consider this new genre-the lyric sequence-as well as read Petrarch's Secretum and Trionfi. Lectures in English; text in Italian, although comparative literature students who can follow with the help of translations are welcome.

ITAL G4091x Machiavelli 3 pts. Focus on the principal works of Machiavelli in an effort to understand the various facets of his complex and at times seemingly contradictory literary personality. His role as political scientist, historian, comic playwright, and short story writer. In English.

ITAL W4091x-W4092y (Section 001) Dante's Divina Commedia I & II 4 pts. Prerequisites: Reading knowledge of Italian. A year-long course in which the "Commedia" is read over two consecutive semesters; students can register for the first, the second, or both semesters. This course offers a thorough grounding in the entire text and an introduction to the complexities of its exegetical history. Attention not only to historical and theological issues, but also to Dante's mimesis, his construction of an authorial voice that generations of readers have perceived as "true," and the critical problems that emerge when the virtual reality created in language has religious and theological pretensions. Lectures in English, text in Italian; examinations require the ability to translate Italian.

ITAL W4091x-W4092y (Section 002) Dante's Divina Commedia I & II 4 pts.*ITALIAN MAJORS AND ITALIAN DEPT GRADUATE STUDENTS MUST REGISTER FOR SECTION 001* A year-long course in which the "Commedia" is read over two consecutive semesters; students can register for one or both semesters. This course offers a thorough grounding in the entire text and an introduction to the complexities of its exegetical history. Attention not only to historical and theological issues, but also to Dante's mimesis, his construction of an authorial voice that generations of readers have perceived as "true," and the critical problems that emerge when the virtual reality created in language has religious and theological pretensions. Lectures in English, examinations in English; students who can follow lectures with the help of translations but who cannot manage the Italian should register for this section.

ITAL G4097x-G4098y The Italian Renaissance Romance Epic, I and II 3 pts. An in-depth study of Italy's two major romance epics, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in their literary and historical contexts. Topics include creative imitation, genre,allegory, ideology, and politics. Attention will also be given to the place of these two texts in the global history of the epic.

ITAL G4100x Narratives of Modernity 3 pts. In revisiting two major authors of the Italian modern novel, the course investigates the relation between fiction and the "conditions of modernity" (personal risk, anxiety and lack of control on reality, secularization, to name a few). Special attention will be paid to the response of the novelistic discourse to modernity, and to Italy's peculiarly peripheral position in the modern world. Primary texts will be read in Italian, while theoretical references will be in English.

ITAL G4102y Renaissance Chivarlic Epic and Folk Performance Traditions 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course will examine a selection of chivalric narratives, primarily episodes from Boiardo and Ariosto, as they pass from written word to theatrical performance in the form of Sicilian puppet theater and Tuscan-Emilian epic Maggi(folk opera). Classes will be in English, but the performances and some readings are in Italian without available translations.

ITAL G4108x Writing the Self: the Tradition of Autobiography In Italy From the Middle Ages to the 18th Century 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Starting with the discussion of the archetype of Western autobiography, Augustine's Confessions, this course will proceed by analysing the diverse motivations (religious, spiritual, political) and different stylistic features which mark this genre in different eras. While tracing the evolutionary line of autobiography in its dialogue with contemporary culture, literature, and society, the focus will be on the distinction between different forms of autobiographical writings (letters, journals, diaries and fictional autobiography) and on the rhetorical strategies authors deploy to authorize their writing (about) their own selves. Close reading of canonical autobiographies (Cellini, Vico, Goldoni, Alfieri, Da Ponte, Casanova, Verri and Gozzi). In Italian

ITAL G4109y Writing the Self: the Tradition of Autobiography in Italy, 19th-20th Centuries 3 pts. Against the backdrop of the heated critical debate on the boundaries and limitations of the autobiographical genre, this course addresses the modern and contemporary tradition of autobiographical writings, focusing in particular (but not exclusively) on exploring and positing the potential difference between male and female autobiographers. More specifically, we will question the adequacy of the traditional model of autobiographical selfhood based on the assumption of unified, universal, exemplary and transcendent self to arrive at an understanding of women's autobiography. Topics to be addressed include: the crisis of the subject, "je est un autre", the "man" with a movie camera, strategies of concealment and disclosures. Authors to be studied include: D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Svevo, Fellini, Moretti, Ortese, Ginzburg, Manzini, Cialente, Ramondino. In Italian

ITAL G4120y Futurism and Beyond: F.T. Marinetti's Poetry, Narrative, and Drama 3 pts. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism (arguably the first great avant-garde movement in modern European literature), is also one of the most remarkable writers of the Italian 20th century in his own terms. The course will explore Marinetti's basic contribution to modern Italian literature. Available editions as well as the typescripts of forthcoming books will be used. Marinetti's epoch-making contribution will also be studied in a comparative European and American context. Lectures in English, most texts in Italian, some in French; open also to comparative literature students who can read Italian and French with the help of translations.

ITAL G4125y Italian Tales 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The course examines the important Italian contribution to modern and contemporary narrative, especially in the genre of short narrative (short story, novella), with attention also to novels, combining narrative theory with close reading. Authors include A. De Céspedes, E. Morante, as well as S. Vassalli, D. Del Giudice, P. V. Tondelli, etc. Lectures in English, texts in Italian.

ITAL W4140x Fictionalizing History: Fascism in Literature and Film 3 pts. The course aims at providing students with a broad knowledge of the political and cultural issues affecting Italy in the crucial, dramatic years between 1922 and 1945. Against the backdrop of Mussolinï's politics, our investigation examines the complex, multifaceted ways the dictatorship has been portrayed in fiction and cinema. Our research will require the evaluation of written texts and films produced both during this period and after it. We will analyze some fundamentals of the fascist doctrine and the most prominent strategies through which Fascism succeeded in creating a popular consensus (i.e., social projects and sophisticated techniques of propaganda). Then we will proceed alternating the analysis of historical documents with literary and cinematic works authored by Moravia, Vittorini, and Fellini, among others.

ITAL W4190y "Multicultural Italy": A European Country of Diversities 3 pts. This seminar examines what can be considered a tremendous Italian diversity. Italy is a multicultural society, not only because of the flow of immigrants throughout the most recent decades, but also because of a too often neglected historical, cultural, linguistic and political 'inner' diversity. Linguistic minorities, religious groups, cultural enclaves, 'nomadic' cultures, immigrants & refugees, and border residents are the main focus of this course. The seminar will also analyze how these differences constructively cohabitate or how they can represent sources of conflict; it will provide examples of either peaceful pluralism or of conflictual social friction. Videos that can be watched on the computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course.

ITAL G4210x Body that Matters: Poetics of Identity in Saba, Pasolini, Morante 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This is a course devoted to the poetics - including prose, poetry and film - of three major Italian writers and poets of the XX Century: Umberto Saba, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante. It is a graduate seminar and will be conducted as an open dialogue between instructor and students, on the basis of the scheduled reading assignments. Texts are in Italian and include novels, scripts, poems, letters, journals and a film: students with reading knowledge of Italian are welcome to join the class, despite their oral and written proficiency. A selection of critical essays will help students to contextualize the authors' activities among their contemporaries and within the turmoil of Italian society during and after WWII. We'll start reading Saba's Scorciatoie e raccontini, Canzoniere, Ernesto and Lettere sulla psicanalisi to move then to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Amado mio, La nuova gioventù, Salò and finally to Elsa Morante's Diario 1938, L'isola di Arturo, Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini and Aracoeli. Instructor will assist students in organizing their bibliographic search, oral presentations and conclusive final papers. In Italian

ITAL G4220y Introduction to the History and Theory of Literary Interpretation 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. What is Interpretation? How does it work? What are the major Theories of Criticism in Italy? What is the difference between aesthetics, poetics, critique and the work of art in itself? What is their relationship to other aspects of culture? These and other questions will be addressed in this course,We will begin with a sketch of the Italian tradition from Humanism to the late nineteenth century, then focus on Idealism and its pervasiveness in most realms of culture from the beginning of the twentieth century through the post-WWII period. Subsequently, discussions will be dedicated to a broad variety of critical methods and their relevance as and for interpretive strategies.

ITAL W4255y Foundations of the Italian Novel, 1840-1900 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. An investigative overview of the Italian novel from the Risorgimento to the end of the 19th century, with special attention to the novelistic form, the shaping of the national identity, and the reception of the European novel in Italy. Authors include Manzoni, De Marchi, Verga, De Roberto, D'Annunzio, Svevo. In Italian.

CLIA G4280x Gabriele d'Annunzio: Between Two Centuries 3 pts. The course examines the exceptional contribution of d'Annunzio to Italian literature as it moves from late nineteenth century symbolism to early twentieth century modernism. While all the genres illustrated by this prolific author will be sampled (newspaper article, short story, drama, novel, narrative notebook, memoir, private letter, critical and political essay, diary), special attention will be paid to his poetry. Lectures in English, texts in Italian.

ITAL G4340x Italy's Southern Question: Geography, Culture, Power 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. This course examines Italy's Southern Question from the nineteenth century to the present, investigating the interrelations among cultural representation, geography, and power by focusing on three writers/artists who produced major representations and theorizations of the Southern Question in three different cultural forms: the fiction of Giovanni Verga, the theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci; the films of Luchino Visconti. Readings and discussion in English. Optional additional readings in Italian. Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor.

ITAL G4390x Gender and Literary Identity: the Experience of Italian Women Writers 1870-1930 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014..A study of women writers working in Italy from the Unification to the 1930's. Examination of how they shaped and defined their status, how they mediated between their own experience and those dominant modes of representation and discourse that constituted the Italian literary tradition; and the fictional portrayal of the woman writer in male-authored texts. In Italian.

ITAL G4391x Challenging Genres, Gendering Fiction: the Experience of Italian Women Writers, 1945-90 3 pts. Addresses women writers working in Italy from the postwar period to the 1990s. Analyzes the historical novel, fantastic fiction, and autobiography. Against the backdrop of the critical debate on the literary canon, explores the specificity of women's writing and the way these articulated their difference by subverting and altering dominant literary codes. In English.

ITAL W4395y Fifty Years of Impatience: The Italian Novel between 1950-2000 3 pts. The course examines some of the most important novels that belong to Italy's period of major social and economic transformations. Only after WWII Italy finally becomes a modern nation, i.e. a republic based on truly universal suffrage, and an industrialized country. Such accelerated progress, though,causes deep social instability and mobility which obviously results in heavy psychological pressures on the people: adaptation becomes crucial and inevitable. Fiction therefore resumes the task to represent such awkwardness of integration into a modern bourgeois society that, contrarily to its European and American counterpart, is extremely tentative and insecure per se, since it's political identity has extremely precarious grounds. Among other authors, primary readings include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Italo Calvinos's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Primary Readings in Italian

ITAL G4401y WWII, the Resistance and the Holocaust In Italian Literature and Cinema 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The political, social, and cultural issues affecting Italy in the crucial, dramatic years between 1943 and 1945. More specifically, the canonical literary and cinematic representations of the war, the "Resistenza" and the Holocaust and the aesthetic issues related to the encounter between history and fiction, reality and imagination. Further examination of how the war has affected women: such an inquiry will require the evaluation of lesser-known women's texts.Topics to be addressed include: war and gender, women as subjects of history, the intersection of the political and the private. Authors to be examined include: Calvino, Fenoglio,Pavese, Levi, Rossellini, Wertmuller, Rosi, Vigano', Milli, Zangrandi, D'Eramo.

CLIA G4405x Poetry, Poetics, and Contemporary Society, 1945-Present 3 pts. Italian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century from the end of the war to our days gives life to one of the most remarkable poetic cultures in international literature. The course will study the relationships that poetic texts entertain with their author's ideas about poetry (their poetics) on the one hand and developments in society at large on the other hand. Attention will also be paid to English translations. Starting with some important collections from the Forties (by Cesare Pavese and Umberto Saba), we will move to the neo-avantgarde and neo-realism, and to individual figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli, etc. Lectures in English, texts in Italian; open also to comparative literature students who can read Italian with the help of translations.

ITAL G4420y The Window On the World: Reassessing Italian Neorealism 3 pts. Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and other Italian filmmakers challenged modes of film production in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, both in theoretical and practical terms. This course will analyze both the feature films and the theoretical writings of such directors as those mentioned and others, in order to investigate the modes of representation of reality in the immediate postwar years, their relation to the identity of the newborn Italian Republic, and their significance in post-WWII filmmaking. All readings and lectures in English; Films in Italian or French, with English subtitles.

ITAL G4490x A Stray Branch of Laurel: Venice and Literary Modernity 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. In the enormously broad context of what has been called the "eternal pilgrimage" to Italy, even when concentrating on a single city does not by itself guarantee a specific focus --especially when examining a city as culturally, historically, and spiritually rich as Venice. To at least partially solve this problem, this course concentrates on the modern period (from the late 18th century to today) and focuses on two dialectic contrasts: that between the public domain (strategically powerful historically visions) and the private dimension (intricacies of everyday emotions); and the contrast between the Italian and the foreign literary observer. The arc of the course begins with the period of elegance and decadence of the Serenissima in the late 18th century and concludes with the case of a contemporary novelist writing between Venice and the United States. Authors read in the course will include: Goethe, Voltaire, Giacomo Casanova, Ugo Foscolo, Frederick Rolfe, Camillo Boito, Henry James, Gabriele d'Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, P. M. Pasinetti, and others.

CLIA G4491x "Killing off the Moonlight" Venice and International Moderninsm 3 pts. This course continues the analysis of Venice as the locus of myth, anti-myth, and the degradation of myth, and it also continues the discussion of the dialectic between the public and private dimensions. However, this course is autonomous and independent from ITAL G4490 "A stray Branch of Laurel: Venice and Literary Modernity." This course's perspective is concerned with the development from Late Romanticism to Symbolism, to Modernism, and on the contemporary scene. Among other elements, Venice will be considered as a case study for revisiting the widely used notion of the "floating signifier."Authors read in the course include John Ruskin, the brothers Boito, Henry James, Ezra Pound, Gabriele d' Annunzio, F.T. Marinetti, Thomas Mann, Daphne du Maurier, Giuseppe Berto, and Pier Maria Pasinetti. The readings are integrated with film screenings. Additional elements of the course include: a concise bibliography, critical essays, and guest speakers.

ITAL W4502x Italian Cultural Studies, I: From Unification To World War I 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society in the years between Unification in 1860 and the outbreak of World War I. Drawing on novels, historical analyses, and other sources including film and political cartoons, the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with a knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian.

ITAL W4503y Italian Cultural Studies, II: From World War I To the Present 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. An interdisciplinary investigation into Italian culture and society in the years between World War I and the present. Drawing on historical analyses, literary texts, letters, film, cartoons, popular music, etc. the course examines some of the key problems and trends in the cultural and political history of the period. Lectures, discussion and required readings will be in English. Students with a knowledge of Italian are encouraged to read the primary literature in Italian.

ITAL W4520x See Naples and Die: Portrait of a City 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. Explores the cultural representation of Naples and the Neapolitans over the past two centuries through literature, music, film, theater, and historical readings. Special attention to the different perspectives of insiders and outsiders. Works include texts by Goethe, Dumas, Serao, Benjamin, Conrad, Norman Lewis, De Filippo, Ortese; films by Rossellini, Rosi, Totò, Pasolini; and songs by various artists. Advanced reading knowledge of Italian required. Lectures and discussion in English.

ITAL G4725x Pirandello and Modern Drama 3 pts. The course will examine the foundations of modern drama and stage representation by analysing Luigi Pirandello's plays and theoretical works in close comparison with the major authors and drama theorists of the XIX century, including Bertolt Brecht, August Strinberg, and Jean Genet.

CLIA W4790y Italo Calvino: Italian Literature in a Global Context 3 pts.Not offered in 2013-2014. The course investigates Italo Calvino's fiction in the global perpective it deserves. Far before globalization, Calvino always conceived literature in an international perspective. While thinking and writing in Italian -- and making the Italian language as modern and functional as possible, closely responding to contemporary reality -- he always thought of literature as going beyond national boundaries and proposing ehtical models across historical times. It is not by chance that almost at the same time Calvino wrote his first novel and a thesis on Joseph Conrad (another writer crossing national boundaries). Calvino's writing develops in a tight dialogue with the European literary tradition (Conrad and Voltaire are clear examples), but also with contemporary writers to whose solicitations Calvino may respond (Vargas Llosa) or whose works clearly exemplify Calvino's reception (Oz, Pamuk). In our times, Calvino stands as an example of a writer who is aware of the internationalization of literature and of the ethical contents it conveys. This course will introduce undergraduates and graduates not only to the intertextual connections of a major author of the twentieth century, but also to a project of literature that, contrarily to what is usually professed about Calvino's supposed "post-modernity", still proposes social and ethical models.