Authors, themes, or texts of courses below may vary from semester to semester.

ITAL 106 Accelerated Italian (Nina Cannizzaro, Joseph Luzzi)

The Italian program at Bard offers an accelerated language course for which students earn 8 credits, with the possibility of 4 additional credits upon completion of the month of study in Italy (in June).

This rigorously-paced course provides a comprehensive introduction to Italian language and culture during the academic year and is followed by a month of study in Italy. The course best suits students who have studied foreign languages previously with good results, but is open to all those willing to adopt the disciplined schedule necessary to complete the course successfully (meaning B- or higher). Students attend five hours of class Monday through Friday, with two additional hours in the language lab per week, in addition to nightly homework, and weekly quizzes.

Following the accelerated course students may enroll in Bard's 200-level Italian courses. All of these are specifically designed to review and improve language skills while working on significant cultural topics and literary texts.

The fall 2005-spring2006 course is scheduled to go to Florence. Please contact Prof. Joseph Luzzi for further details (jluzzi@bard.edu).

ITAL 201 The Poetry of Italian Cinema (Joseph Luzzi)

This course improves students' knowledge of Italian through inquiry into the dramatic relationship between Italian poetry and cinema. Students 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.

ITAL 219 History of Italian Literature I: from Cavalcanti to Casanova (Nina Cannizzaro)

This course will examine the various permutations of the concept of Love during the Medieval, Humanist, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and the diverse literary modes chosen to best exemplify them (poetry, novelle, dialogues, the scientific trattati d'amore, chivalric poems, personal epistles, memoires, and theatre). Authors include Guinizelli, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Boiardo, Ficino, Ariosto, Bembo, Machiavelli, Aretino, Franco, Michelangelo, Stampa, Patrizi, Bandinello, Bruno, Marino, Pallavicino, Casanova and others. All discussion, coursework and primary texts will be in Italian, although students will be regularly assigned critical readings English. Students will further review first-year grammar and do intensive work on their written and oral skills in a weekly discussion section.

ITAL 270 Advanced Italian: Italy's Cultural Revolution (Joseph Luzzi)

This course explores the culture and conflicts of modern Italy's struggle for Unification, drawing on a wealth of literary, musical, cinematic, and visual sources. Students read Italian Romantic authors Foscolo, Leopardi, and Manzoni; and analyze the operas of Verdi as well as the nationalist films 1860, 1900, Senso, and The Leopard. The course also draws on Bard's Viva Verdi cultural programs and apply our study of 19th-century Italy to some major issues confronting Italians today. Conducted in Italian, with a weekly review session designed to strengthen spoken, aural, and written Italian

ITAL 271 Hieroglyphs, Emblems, Natural Magic, Eros, Forbidden Books, Heretics: Italian Academies of the Renaissance (Nina Cannizzaro)

Many of what now seem to us the most striking beliefs held by Italian thinkers of the Renaissance — the belief in "divine madness", natural magic, "hidden wisdom," and an essential cosmic harmony underlying poems, hieroglyphs, emblems, and even mathematical formulas— were considered both dangerous and heretical at the time, but could be discussed and explored in privately run academies (le accadmie). This course will introduce students to the canonical literature of this period within its academic, historical, and cultural context. No prior knowledge of the period is assumed. All class discussion, coursework, and primary texts are in Italian; secondary literature predominantly in English. Students must also attend a weekly lab section to review grammar and improve written and oral expression.

ITAL 250 L'Inferno (Nina Cannizzaro)

A close reading of the Dante's Inferno, the first 'cantica' of the Divine Comedy and the first literary work composed in Italian. Primary sources, class discussion and coursework will be conducted in Italian, but supplemented regularly with critical literature in English. Students will also attend an additional hour of tutorial to review first-year grammar and improve oral and written expression.

ITAL 330 La questione della lingua (Nina Cannizzaro)

This seminar will focus on the early history of the Italian language, and examine questions such as cultural diglossia, bilingualism and hybridity, the Latin foundations of Old Italian, early Italian 'raccolte', Dante's theory and response in the Comedy and De Vulgari Eloquentia (Literature in the Vernacular), the Renaissance pursuit of neologisms, grammatical and orthographic standardization, and early Italian dictionaries and grammar books. Conducted in Italian; no prior knowledge of Latin assumed.

Many courses from other programs focus on Italian literature, culture, and history, and may therefore count toward the Italian Studies concentration. To find out whether additional courses to those listed below or cross-listed in the Course List are eligible, contact the Italian Studies Program.

ARTH The Early Renaissance (Jean French)

A survey of Italian painting and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Major trends from Giotto and Duccio through Piero della Francesca and Botticelli are analyzed within a wider cultural context. Consideration is given to the evolution of form, style, technique, and iconography; contemporary artistic theory; and the changing role of the artist in society.

ARTH 227 Roman Urbanism from Romulus (753BCE) to Rutelli (2000CE) (Diana Minsky)

Politicians and popes, from the time of the founding of the city of Rome to the current Italian government (including Francesco Rutelli, mayor of Rome), have made conscious use of the historical significance of the urban topography and architectural history of the city to craft a capital that suits their evolving ideological aims. Proceeding chronologically, this class will focus on the commissioning of large-scale representational architecture, the creation of public space, the orchestration of streets, and the ongoing dialogue between the past and present in the city of Rome. Ideally, students should have previously taken classes that consider either the art, architecture, or politics of Rome during some period of its long history from antiquity to the present. Requirements will include critical essays, a research paper, and a class presentation. Open to all students.

ARTH 352 Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (Diana Minsky)

This seminar will situate Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper within the tradition of Last Suppers, Renaissance concern with perspective, and depictions of the life of Christ by focusing on Leo Steinberg's Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper. Concurrently, the evolution of iconographic interpretations of art and Steinberg's role in its recent history will be analyzed by situating Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper and Steinberg's other major contributions (including the controversial Sexuality of Christ) within this tradition. The seminar will touch on the issues surrounding the restoration of this painting. Requirements will include short critical essays, a class presentation, and a research paper on another artist's Last Supper.

ARTH 330 Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Jean French)

This seminar examines the ideas that inspired sculptors and the patrons who footed the bills. It explores the relationship among artists, poets, and philosophers of the Renaissance and the degree of influence exerted by patrons and their associates on the selection of thematic content and the establishment of stylistic trends. Topics of discussion include the materials and forms of sculpture, the changing social position of the artist, the Neoplatonic movement in Florence, and Renaissance theories of love. The major sculptors of the Renaissance are studied, with an emphasis on the works of Ghiberti, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and Michelangelo. Also investigated are the political ambitions and the socioeconomic milieu of such remarkable patrons as Cosimo de Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Julius II.

ARTH 331 Venetian Painting of Renaissance (Jean French)

The course is an introduction to the major painters of the Venetian School: Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Carpaccio, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Students investigate the development of independent easel painting, the poetic landscapes of Giorgione, the enigmatic Venuses of Titian and Veronese, the pageantry of Venetian narrative cycles, and the special character of Venetian patronage and of the city itself. The class attempts to define those qualities that made for a distinctively Venetian style.

GER 250 Verdi, Opera, and Politics: The German Connection (Franz Kempf)

Verdi's third favorite author, after Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, was the German dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The operas Giovanna d'Arco, Joan of Arc (1845), I masnadieri, The Robbers (1847), Luisa Miller (1849), and Don Carlo (1867) are more or less loose adaptations of four of Schiller's historical dramas. Verdi (in his own times) and Schiller (in the nineteenth century) became immensely popular symbolic figures in their countries' politics, especially for the blend of liberalism and nationalism that lead to unification. We will compare the libretti of the operas and the texts of the dramas against this political background, and examine features of the dramas that may have drawn Verdi to Schiller, the high rhetoric, for instance, the seemingly disjointed (in the Brechtian sense) epic structure, the intertwining of idealism and realism, the hauntingly tragic situations that arise when great powers (society, state, church, destiny) clash with private passions of the revolutionary individual. While expert knowledge of opera is neither expected nor provided, we will also explore issues related to the adaptation of one artistic medium, drama in words, to another, drama in music. A conflict of a different kind occupies center stage in Verdi: A Novel of the Opera (1924) by the Austrian writer Franz Werfel (Prague, 1890-Beverley Hills, 1945). Woven into the narrative fabric is a fictional encounter between Verdi and Wagner in Venice in 1883. Werfel introduces the two as antithetical figures in musical and cultural terms, representing (roughly) the natural simplicity of the South as opposed to the cerebral sophistication of the North. The splendidly written novel became an immediate bestseller and Werfel, who also translated Verdi libretti into German, helped usher in a Verdi renaissance in Germany in the twentieth century. Taught in English. Tutorial in German can be arranged.

HIST 111 The High Middle Ages (Alice Stroup)

The rise of towns is one of many changes that transformed Europe after 1000. The High Middle Ages is an era of cultural flowering, population growth, and political consolidation, occurring between the two cataclysms of Viking invasions and bubonic plague. Primary sources and monographs help us understand this intriguing and foreign world. We will read modern analyses of medieval inventions, heretics in Southern France, the plague, and women's work. We will also examine medieval texts—including anticlerical stories, epic poetry, and political diatribes—to get a contemporary perspective on values and issues.

HIST 261 European Intellectual and Cultural History since 1870 (Gregory Moynahan)

In this course, we will study transformations in the modern perception of society and nature within a political, cultural, and institutional framework. Beginning with discussions of key figures such as Freud, Nietzsche, Mach, and Weber, the course will outline the suppositions and fault lines on which twentieth-century thought developed. Central themes will include movements such as impressionism, positivism, and existentialism, as well as more specific problems such as the crisis of liberalism and the intellectual roots of fascism. The course will conclude with studies of post-structuralism, French feminism, and the role of intellectuals and artists in the fall of state communism in Eastern Europe. Please note that the first semester of the course, History 2136, is not a prerequisite for taking the second semester. Students who have not taken the first semester of the course should speak with the professor in advance and have some background in social theory, philosophy, or modern European history.

LIT 335 Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages (Karen Sullivan)

"There is no one more Christian than the heretic," writes Bernard of Clairvaux, the powerful Cistercian abbot and pursuer of heretics. How was it that medieval Catholics, like Bernard, could at once acknowledge the apparent sanctity of heretics and advocate their persecution in the name of the faith? What was it that heretics represented for their contemporaries that they prompted such harsh reactions from them? Why was it that members of the religious orders most respected for their learning, their holiness, and their pastoral concerns were also the people most likely to staff the Inquisition? In this course, we will be attempting to answer these questions, among others, through a close reading of a series of texts, including sermons, chronicles, inquisitors' manuals, trial transcripts, and lyric poems. While we will address the historical development of heresy and Inquisition between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially in France, Italy, and Germany, where these phenomena were most important, our focus will be on the rhetorical depiction of heretics and inquisitors in the works we are reading. At the end of the semester, we will consider what the words "heresy" and "Inquisition" have come to mean in the modern, secular world and, by extension, how a certain version of "the medieval" has survived among us to the present day.

LIT 2107 Byzantium (Karen Sullivan)

This course considers the culture and, especially, the literature of Byzantium, from the city's founding in 330 AD to its fall to the Turks in 1453. We will be studying writings by the Greek Church Fathers, chronicles on the Byzantines by Greeks, Muslims, and westerners, and treatments of such important historical events as the iconoclast controversy and the Crusades, in addition to the principal works of medieval epic, romance, and lyric poetry from this region. While our focus will be upon the city nowadays known as Istanbul and its surrounding territories, we will also be examining the Byzantine presence in the Balkans and parts of Italy, Russia, and northern Africa. We will end by contemplating the influence of what W. B. Yeats calls "the holy city of Byzantium" upon later civilizations

LIT 3205 Dante (Joseph Luzzi)

This course will introduce students to the world and work of the so-called "founder of all modern poetry," Dante Alighieri. Our close reading of the entire Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) will consider such issues as the phenomenology of poetic inspiration, medieval theories of gender, Dante's relationship with the literary ghosts Virgil and Cavalcanti, the sources and shapes of the human soul, and how the weight of love (pondus amoris) can save this same soul. We will also read selections from Dante's other works, including the story of his poetic apprenticeship (The New Life) and his linguistic treatise (On Eloquence in the Vernacular). Conducted in English, readings in English translation; option of work in Italian, with biweekly discussion session, if student wishes.

LIT 3306 Scholasticism vs. Humanism (Karen Sullivan)

Throughout the Middle Ages, intellectual life was dominated by scholastics, who sought to integrate reason and faith, logic and revelation, classical philosophy and the Christian Gospels. For many of these thinkers, the City of Man, in which we now live, should ideally mirror the City of God, in which we hope one day to reside: both are single, unified, exquisitely ordered and hierarchical structures, in which the individual part is harmoniously integrated into the greater whole. During the Renaissance, however, intellectual discourse was taken over by humanists, who stressed empiricism over abstraction, rhetoric over dialectic, and Plato over Aristotle as the means of access to truth. With experience now privileged over logic, the personal, subjective perception expressed in literature became prized over the impersonal, seemingly objective cosmos of philosophy. In this seminar, we will be exploring the tension between scholastic and humanist thought against the background of the rise of the university, the shift from Gothic to Renaissance architecture, the discovery of the New World, and the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, as well as within the context of more recent historical eras. Authors to be read include Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Descartes.

LIT 3641 Verdi the Dramatist (Frederick Hammond)

An examination of eight Verdi operas - Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata, Ballo in Maschera, Otello, Falstaff - largely from the dramatic, theatrical point of view, Verdi's music is discussed only in relation to the text. In some cases original literary sources (Shakespeare, Hugo, Dumas) are studied in order to identify the special problems of setting spoken drama to music. No musical knowledge is required, but a taste for music, theater, and literature is essential. Enrollment limited.

MUS 207 Nineteenth Century Italian Opera before Verdi (Frederick Hammond)

An examination of the works of Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini covering the years 1810-1844, a glorious but imperfectly-known period of Italian opera. We will study such works as Barber of Seville, The Lady of the Lake, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma as musical creations, in relation to their literary sources and contemporary taste, and in terms of scenography and staging.