ITALIAN

CRN

13173

Distribution

D

Course No.

ITAL 201

Title

Intermediate Italian: The Poetry of Italian Cinema

Professor

Joseph Luzzi

Schedule

Tu Th 11:30 am - 12:50 pm LC 210

Review Mon 10:00 am - 11:20 am LC 118

This course will improve students' knowledge of Italian through inquiry into the dramatic relationship between Italian poetry and cinema. Students will actively examine the poetic roots of Italian cinematic history by means of a variety of communicative activities designed to strengthen students' spoken, aural, and written Italian. Our focus will be on the way Italian film directors employed poetic citation, allusion, imagery, and theory into their films. We will also consider how upheaval in 20th-century Italy -- including fascism, conflict between northern and southern Italy, and the pervasiveness of American consumer culture -- informed the transition from literary text to filmic image. The issues we will discuss include: Dante's Inferno in Antonioni's Red Desert, Rossellini's "anti-Romantic" revision of foreign myths of Italy in Voyage In Italy, the influence of Leopardi's poetry on Fellini's Voice Of The Moon, the engaging cinemetic theory of Pasolini, and the use of Italian literary history in contemporary Italian Neorealist film. This course will be conducted in Italian and will include a weekly review session designed to strengthen Italian language skills.

CRN

13041

Distribution

D

Course No.

ITAL 271

Title

Hieroglyphs, Emblems, Natural Magic, Eros, Forbidden Books, Heretics: Italian Academies of the Renaissance

Professor

Nina Cannizzaro

Schedule

Mon Wed Fr 11:30 am - 12:50 pm OLIN 308

Le accademie, or privately run academies, became the Renaissance forum par excellence for exploring interests considered "heretical" to the Catholic-based political and cultural context, and for this reason disallowed. In an attempt to curb the expanding belief in the right to unconfined intellectual pursuit that proliferated among these circles, the Church devised a number of means to thwart academic ambitions such as the Index of Forbidden Books. This course will explore the controversial, "heretical" concepts most fervently debated by academic participants as pertaining to various disciplines of knowledge, such as their belief in a "hidden wisdom" and "essential harmony of the cosmos" contained within hieroglyphs, emblems, mathematical formulas or encyclopedic works; the belief in "divine furor" or "madness", or the possibility of human deification during the poetic process (n.b. it is during the Renaissance that Dante's Commedia acquires the appellative "divine"); the belief that the rules of rhetoric, architecture or etiquette indicated the presence of a "natural" social order of the universe; the belief that "natural magic" or libri dei segreti, "books of secrets" could explain the underlying causes of transformative processes (such as turning wood into smoke and ash, or creating substances lacking in nature, like perfume or glue whose utility seemed to improve upon the Creator's original plan). Conducted in Italian. Students must also enroll in a discussion section where they will do intensive work on their written and oral expression.

Prerequisite: Italian 110, 219, 245, or permission of the instructor.

CRN

13174

Distribution

B/D

Course No.

ITAL / LIT 3230

Title

'Genus Italicum': Theory, Crisis, and Form in Modern Italian Literature

Professor

Joseph Luzzi

Schedule

Tu 1:30 pm -3:50 pm OLIN 304

Cross-listed: Italian Studies

What is unique about the Italian literary tradition? Conversely, in what ways have Italian literary theory and practice influenced the development of other national languages and literatures? This course will examine the exceptional nature of modern Italian literature in light of the major aesthetic and historical developments that have shaped what the philosopher of history Giambattista Vico called the peculiar "sapientia Italorum" ("Italian wisdom"). Among the questions we will explore are: Did Italy have an Enlightenment? Did Italian Romanticism exist? Why did modern Italian artists have such political influence (Manzoni, Verdi, and Verga were all made senators; Mussolini himself was an aspiring novelist). Authors and texts we will study include Vittorio Alfieri's The Prince and Literature, Ugo Foscolo's Last Letters Of Jacopo Ortis, Manzoni's The Betrothed, Verga's House By The Medlar Tree, Futurist manifestoes, theoretical writings of Antonio Gramsci, Umberto Eco's semiotics, Italo Calvino's blend of science and fantasy, and the so-called "weak thought" of the post-modernist philosopher Vattimo. We will also examine such themes as literary nationalism and the Italian language question, the relationship of Italian literature to the "sister arts" of cinema and opera, and the forging of a premodern myth of "primitive" Italy in European Romanticism. Taught in English with discussion session to be announced. Option of course work in Italian and biweekly Italian section meeting.