Course	ITAL 110 Accelerated Italian
Professor	Joseph Luzzi
CRN	18074
Schedule	M T W Th 9:20 - 10:20 am Olin L.C. 206
Distribution	Foreign Language, Literature, and Culture

This beginning course is designed for the student with little or no prior exposure to Italian. The course will cover the major topics of grammar and give intensive practice in the four skills (speaking, comprehension, reading and writing). The grammar textbook will be supplemented by traditional homework exercises and a variety of multimedia work in the Bard Foreign Language Resource Center. Student must also enroll in a required weekly tutorial to practice oral skills. The course is designed as an indivisible, one-year sequence and includes a semester of language study in the fall (4 credits); the Intersession Intensive Italian Program in Italy (4 credits); and a final spring semester of language study (4 credits). On-line registration

Course	ITAL 220 Forbidden Books, Prohibited Knowledge
Professor	Nina Cannizzaro
CRN	18069
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm Olin 301
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Literature, Human Rights

Restrictions on speech or the access to knowledge are most often assumed to derived from some basic act of manipulation or corrupt motivation. But is censorship decreed by political or intellectual authorities ever legitimate? And is there knowledge meant to remain beyond human reach and revealed only to a special few? Was Socrates’ banishment of poetry from the Republic really comparable to the strictures of the Index of Forbidden Books (1559)? And why did it take so long for the latter to be published? Did that mean esoteric or heretical pursuits were permissible for the first 1500 years of Roman Catholicism? if so, under which guise? This course explores the historical faces of forbiddenness and the subversions of it from antiquity to the eighteenth century through the works of Plato (Republic and others); Dante, On Monarchy; On Literature in the Vernacular; Petrarch, On the Ignorance of Himself and Many Others; Galileo, Letter to Dutchess Christina, On the Chief Two World Systems; Retraction; Descartes, Discourse on Method (ch. 5); Montaigne, Essays (On the Vanity of Words; On Prayer); Marlowe, Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus; Milton, Aeropagitica; Defoe, Essay on the Regulation of the Press; Rousseau, A Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage. We will also consider the rise of societies in the early-modern period, private and public, as they relate to the idea of accessing, circumscribing and censoring different bodies of knowledge (literary academies; L’Académie Francaise; the concept of university/universitas and the early function of colleges; alchemy, secrets and hermetic science; the evolution of the ‘man of letters’ i.e. the ‘intellectual’ subsequent to the invention of the printing press; libertinism and divine brotherhoods, including the Rosicrucians, Illuminati, and the Jesuit controversy). Taught in English; Introductory level.

On-line registration

Course	ITAL 315 Theory, Crisis, and Form in Modern Italian Literature (Advanced Grammar Review)
Professor	Joseph Luzzi
CRN	18075
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 - 11:50 am Olin 303
Distribution	Foreign Language, Literature, and Culture

What is unique about the Italian literary tradition? In what ways have Italian literary theory and practice influenced the development of other national languages and literatures? This course will survey 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 (Alessandro Manzoni, Giuseppe Verdi, and Giovanni Verga were all made senators; Mussolini himself was an aspiring novelist). This course will provide a comprehensive grammar review and include a mandatory weekly meeting with the tutor; significant work in Italian conversation and composition. Authors include Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, Manzoni, Giacomo Leopardi, Futurist manifestoes, Italo Calvino, Grazia Deledda, and others. We will examine such themes as literary nationalism, the Italian language question, and the relationship of Italian literature to the "sister arts" of cinema and opera. All the course work and reading will be in Italian; Prerequisite Intermediate Italian or the equivalent. On-line registration

Course	LIT / ITAL 3205 Dante
Professor	Nina Cannizzaro
CRN	18073
Schedule	Tu 4:00 -6:20 pm Olin 310
Distribution	Literature in English

See Literature section for description. On-line registration

Course	ITAL / LIT 339 Advanced Renaissance Literature and Thought
Professor	Nina Cannizzaro
CRN	18072
Schedule	Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm Olin 304
Distribution	Literature in English

Cross-listed: Italian Studies, Medieval Studies

Aware of the watershed in learning his editions of Plato and the Hermetic corpus had become the whole of Western thought, Marsilio Ficino proclaimed his personal correspondence with foreign scholars “kept all Europe in amatorial servitude.” The continuation of Ital 215 (Introduction to Renaissance Lit. and Thought), this course will examine in greater depth topics such as: the Greek influences of the specifically “Italian” achievements of Italian humanism (Pletho; Bessarion); the impact on and response from humanists abroad (Erasmus; T. More; D. Barbaro); the evolution of the ‘author’ after the first hundred years of printing (polygraphs; cyclopediae; print licensing; the Index); the phenomenon of bibliophilia and the new social networks among print shops, libraries, book-fairs, academies and the editorial industry (the Aldine press; Conrad Gesner’s Venetians friends); the impact of Counter-Reformation reform on knowledge (the debate over “pure nature” / justification theory, and the rise of scientific knowledge in Protestant culture; and the conflation of esotericism and science. (Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Leibniz, Monadology; Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Prerequisite: one successfully completed college-level course in Classical Philosophy, History, History of Science, Renaissance Literature or Art History. Taught in English. On-line registration