Global Arc

An investigation on modern and post-modern experimentalism focused on gender issues and gendered perspectives. The main object of analysis will be Italy, from futurism to the current revivals of vanguardism, but a variety of trans-national and international voices will substantiate the historical landscape. We will address a number of case studies and their socio-cultural contexts: from aviatrixes and futurist women to the bodies of surreal metamorphic creatures in paintings and stories, to neo-avant-garde movements in the Sixties and Seventies, to post-punk books, non-textual literature, and audio/video-poetry.

Intensive practice of written and spoken Italian through close analysis of grammatical and syntactic structures, literary translation, and the stylistic study of representative literary works from the Middle Ages to the present. Focus on rhetorical structures and on Italian linguistic change. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in Italian or instructor's permission. Two 90-minute classes.

Topics will range from the study of a single author (such as Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga) to the thematic, artistic, and cultural analysis of either a genre or a literary movement (such as Romanticism, Verismo). One three-hour seminar. Prerequisite: a 200-level Italian course or instructor's permission.

A study of the influence of Marxist ideology on major Italian directors from the Cold War to the present. Representative films include: Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, Visconti's The Leopard, Pasolini's Teorema, Wertmuller's Seven Beauties, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. The approach will be interdisciplinary and will combine the analysis of historical and political themes with a cinematic reading of the films. One lecture, one two-hour preceptorial, one film screening.

This course will explore the ways in which national identity was imagined and implemented within Italian literature, culture, and cinema before, during, and after the period of Italian Unification in the mid-XIX century. Examples are drawn from a wide range of literary, artistic, and cultural media. Prerequisite: 200-level Italian course or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

This course will deal with the development of the Italian language from the Early Middle Ages to the present. Special attention will be given to the passage from Latin to Italian from the 10th to the 14th century; to the fundamental "Questione della lingua" in the 16th-century; the establishment of Italian literary language; the problems of Standard Italian versus dialects; and the influence of foreign languages (mainly American English) in the 20th and 21st century.

"Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?" asked Italo Calvino in 1967, hopeful that computers would write "the literature." In 1962 poet Nanni Balestrini instructed a computer to write a poem eager to hear "the voice of the machine." Rough novels and 200,000 non-fiction books have already been written through algorithms and a literary novel is expected soon. Can we instruct a computer to write a novel? Should we use an algorithm or machine learning? Students will create with their own writing experiment analyzing the "Wiki" tradition of collective writing, the Bible, Homer up to the bizarre Slender Man saga.

This seminar approaches the two most studied phases of Italian history, the Renaissance and the 20th Century, by placing otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins. We will look at pivotal events and phenomena (the rise of Humanism, the rise of fascism, courtly culture, the two World Wars, 16th century art, the avant-garde) from the point of view of non-white, non-Christian, non-heterosexual witnesses, authors, and fictional characters. We will adopt a trans-historical, intersectional, and interdisciplinary perspective: themes will be analyzed at the crossing of the two historical phases and of the three topics in exam.

Investigation of a major theme or author, with special attention to formal structures and intellectual context. Topics may range from the medieval chivalric tradition in such Renaissance masterpieces as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso to a reading of the writings of Primo Levi as these examine the issue of the annihilation of the personality. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in Italian or instructor's permission.

Starting with ancient Israel's radically new conceptions of the divine, morality, and history, this course explores the complex nature of Judaism and its development as a religion and culture over millennia--a development marked by internal debates and external challenges to continuity and survival. Emphasis is on the traditional bases of Judaism, such as religious beliefs and practices, interpretations of sacred texts, and shared communal values. Attention also to the variety of Jewish encounters with modernity, philosophy, secularism, and non-Jewish cultures. Two classes, one preceptorial.