92285

ITAL 201  Intermediate Italian

Franco Baldasso

M T W     11:50 am-12:50 pm

OLINLC 120

FL

This course intends to reinforce students’ skills in grammar, composition, and spoken proficiency, through intensive grammar review, conversation practice, reading/analysis of short texts, writing simple compositions, as well as the use of magazine articles, video and songs.  Students engage in discussion and must complete compositions and oral reports based on Italian literary texts and cultural material. Prerequisites: Two semesters of elementary Italian or Intensive Italian 106 (or the equivalent).

Class size: 22

 

92286

ITAL 217  Topics in Italian Culture: Love and Lust in 14th-Century Italy

Karen Raizen

M  W 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLINLC 115

FL

Cross-listed: Literature

Courtly love was big in the fourteenth century. Lovers and bards serenaded angelic ladies, praising their perfection. But there were also tales of other, earthlier kinds of love and lust—a woman who, by having sex, could perhaps become a horse; a woman who placed her beloved’s decapitated head in a basil plant; lovers who fell in love because they were bad readers. This course explores narratives of love and lust in fourteenth-century Italy, from the allegorical love for the angelic woman to the bawdy romps of directionless youths. Texts will include excerpts from Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Francesco Petrarca’s Rime. We will also study troubadours and discuss musical traditions from the period. Prerequisites: Advanced Review of Italian, or permission of instructor. Taught in Italian. Prerequisite: Italian 235 or equivalent. This course counts as a pre-1800 offering.

Class size: 22

 

92287

ITAL 323  On Living Among Ghosts: Trieste, Nationalism, Confession

Franco Baldasso

M       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 302

FL

Cross-listed: Human Rights

 “The best way I know of talking about myself is talking about someone else”, thus Claudio Magris summarized his writing experience, heir of the modern tradition of conjuring together, with distinctive irony, autobiography and absence. In his statement, Magris mirrors the spectral quality of his city, Trieste, a beautiful Mediterranean port where Italian, German, Slavic and Jewish identities coexisted and created a unique culture at the margins of triumphal nationalisms. Trieste has been the place where Joyce, Rilke and Freud met with the surgent Italian modernism, where migrants and exiles declared their desperate need for a place to call home. Yet it was also the city of Fascist, Nazi, Communist and then American occupation, of displaced people and diaspora. In 1970s Franco Basaglia founded in Trieste "Democratic Psychiatry": the revolutionary movement that first abolished mental hospitals. The city was also the place where in the 1990s flocks of refugees were first hosted after fleeing the Balkan wars, the oldest of them remembering fleeing Fascist violence. Its history has always been too big for its modest size: the city is today the terminal port of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Trieste’s many ghosts haunt its picturesque shores. By surveying its multinational literature, from Svevo to Saba to Marisa Madieri, the course aims to explore how the ghosts of nationalism, exclusion and political violence haunt personal confession and European history. Conducted in Italian. Prerequisite: A 200 level course in Italian or permission of instructor.

Class size: 15

 

 

92224

LIT 241  Sex, Lies and the Renaissance

Joseph Luzzi

M  W 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 101

FL

Cross-listed: Art History; Historical Studies; Italian Studies Class size: 22

 

92238

LIT 366  History of Italian Cinema

Joseph Luzzi

W     1:30 pm-3:50 pm   W     6:00 pm-8:00 pm

OLIN 101 OLIN 102

FL

Cross-listed: Film and Electronic Arts; Italian Studies Class size: 18