CRN

94313

Distribution

D

Course No.

ITAL 106

Title

Intensive Italian

Professor

Maria Nicoletti

Schedule

Mon Tu WedTh 10:30 am - 12:30 pm LC 206

Language Lab: Fri 10:30 am - 12:30 pm LC 210

8 credits A single-semester equivalent to Italian 101-102. This rapidly paced course is designed primarily for students who have successfully studied other foreign languages. It is open to others with the instructor's permission. Four two-hour classes and two hours of language laboratory.

CRN

94527

Distribution

D/F

Course No.

ITAL 204

Title

Italian Theatre

Professor

Maria Nicoletti

Schedule

Tu Th 3:00 pm - 4:20 pm OLIN 305

Conducted in Italian. After closely reading a broad range of plays as language and as theater, students will perform scenes from them in class. Outside work will consist of writing, rewriting, and then performing monologues, dialogues and brief one-act plays. Plays studied include: Pirandello's Pensaci, Giacomino, the children's theater of Gianni Rodari which uses the conventions of Commedia dell'Arte, and a middle-class social comedy of Natalia Ginzburg, Fragola e panna. Two filmed versions of plays will be viewed: Pensaci, Giacomino and Tullio Kezich's adaptation of Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno. Prerequisite: Italian 201 or permission of the instructor.

CRN

94314

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

ITAL 214

Title

Possible Worlds, Imaginary Places, Great Conspiracies, and Anomalous Sciences

Professor

Carlo Zei

Schedule

Mon 4:00 pm - 5:20 pm OLIN 102

Wed 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm OLIN 308

What happens to a novel when it is written in the form of an Encyclopedia? Can a novel serve as a topographical map of the world's greatest empire? Can time flow backward in fiction without the protagonist even realizing it? What if History as we know it is only a cover for a great millenarian conspiracy? There is nothing that literature cannot create, once it doesn't have to rely on a "realistic" description of the world: crazy machines; impossible logic that just sounds natural; everyday logic that sounds impossible. Some novels play ironically with the very concept the "fantastic" genre; others simply resist classification. We will read novels by Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities), Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum), Martin Amis (Time's Arrow), Antonio Bioy-Casares, (The Invention of Morel), Georges Perec, (Life: a User's manual), and Milorad Pavic, (Dictionary of the Khazars). We will examine some short essays on the concepts of "possible worlds," "fuzzy logic," "phenomenology of time," and "metafiction". We will also discuss movies such as Natali's Cube, Caro's & Jeunet's Delicatessen, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, Kusturica's Underground, Fellini's City of Women, and others. Requirements: attendance, participation in class discussions, two papers.

CRN

94315

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

ITAL 316

Title

Italo Calvino

Professor

Carlo Zei

Schedule

Tu 3:00 pm - 5:20 pm LC 206

In this class we will read some of the most complex and entertaining works by Italo Calvino in the original language: Our Ancestors, The Cosmicomics, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and Palomar. We will also read some of Calvino's most famous essays, such as: Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and Why Read the Classics? All readings and discussions will be in Italian. However, copies of the books in English translation will be available in the library. Requirements: attendance, participation to class discussions, some quizzes and/or two papers in Italian.