Courses
100-level courses
Accelerated Italian
Italian 110/111This beginning course is designed for the student with some prior exposure to Italian or excellent command of another Romance language. The course covers the major aspects of grammar and provides intensive practice in the four skills (speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing). The grammar textbook is supplemented by traditional homework exercises and multimedia work in Bard’s Center for Foreign Languages and Cultures. Students must enroll in a weekly tutorial. The course includes an intensive program of study in the January intersession.
200-level courses
Advanced Conversation and Composition
Italian 280The aim of this course is to help students obtain a sense of fluency in their oral and written expression of Italian, through focused writing (expository and creative); strategic vocabulary building; and scheduled discussion, debate, and short presentations. The course incorporates a comprehensive review of grammar, offers a basic introduction to Italian prose stylistics (through examination of excerpts from fiction, current political commentary, humor, literary essays, philosophical texts, newspaper and magazine articles, children’s literature, etc.), and introduces students to Italian cinema and its cultural impact. Students are required to enroll in a weekly laboratory session for multimedia work. Prerequisite: Intensive Italian or permission of department.
Contemporary Italian Literature
Italian 267Students in this course study the major literary trends in Italy today—including the resurgence of dialect poetry, highly rarefied lyric, the detective novel, and politically engaged poetry. They also examine the spread of the Italian language as a significant international literary medium. Students read works by writers living in contemporary Italy and in those diasporas where Italian functions as a prinicipal or parallel means of communication. The focus on writers outside of Italy includes Italian-speaking areas in Switzerland, as well as Italian literary movements in Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. The course is conducted in Italian and includes a weekly review session with a tutor.
Dante's Divine Comdedy
Italian 225Students engage in a close reading of the Divine Comedy in its historical, philosophical, and literary contexts. The course incorporates a variety of critical perspectives (from the Middle Ages to the present), relevant passages from other texts by Dante (Vita Nova, Rime, Convivio, De Vulgari Eloquentia), other Provençal or early-Italian poets, and a brief exploration of the figurative tradition born of this poetic masterpiece. Discussion focuses on the medieval underpinnings and connotations of concepts such as intelligence (human and divine), time and history, faith, virtue versus sin, revelation, providence, allegory, and the responsibilities of authorship. The course is conducted in English
History of Italian Literature I: from Cavalcanti to Casanova
Italian 219This 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.
Humanism, Hermeticism, Hieroglyphs, Heretics: Introduction to Italian Renaissance Literature and Thought
Italian 215Many of the most appealing concepts born of the Italian Renaissance—reappropriation of Latin and Greek learning; belief in divine madness; essential cosmic harmony underlying literary and figurative expression, architecture, and mathematical formulas—were considered increasingly heretical after the office of the Inquisition was created in 1542. Nevertheless, these concepts built the foundation of European-wide intellectual exchange. This course introduces students to the repertoire of basic cultural referents with which the early-modern individual viewed knowledge and perceived history (as well as the present). Among the authors studied are Alberti, Dante, Ficino, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Pico della Mirandola, Landino, Ortensio Lando, Tasso, Sansovino, Manuzio, Doni, and Garzoni. Prior knowledge of the period is welcomed but not assumed.
Intermediate Italian I, II
Italian 201-202This course, which is for students who have completed Accelerated Italian or the equivalent of one year of college Italian, constitutes a comprehensive review through practice in writing and conversation. Students engage in discussion and must complete compositions and oral reports based on Italian literary texts and cultural material.
Intermediate Italian: Florence
Italian 255What has Florence represented since its founding, by Caesar, as a military camp in the first century b.c.e.? How has the city figured (as a theme, idea, and actual political and cultural entity) for writers? How has the burden of Florence’s profound medieval and Renaissance past affected later artists and writers? This interdisciplinary course addresses the art, architecture, and history of Florence, with an emphasis on the city’s role in literary history. Students consider the city’s persistence as a political and cultural center after its Renaissance heyday, its role as Italy’s linguistic center, its designation as capital of the newly unified Italy (in 1865), and its role at the forefront of leftist resistance in the age of Berlusconi. The course is conducted in Italian and includes a weekly review with a tutor.
Italian Cinema / World Cinema
Italian 233 | Film and Electronic ArtsStudents in this course consider the impact of what is arguably Italy’s greatest contribution to international art in the 20th century: the Italian film tradition, especially neorealism. Attention is paid to the French discovery of neorealism and its subsequent influence on the nouvelle vague and cinema verité, the presence of neorealism in the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and the role of the Italian cinema (especially the “spaghetti western”) in Hollywood. Students discuss the work of directors Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Moretti, and others. The course is conducted in Italian and includes a weekly review session with a tutor and a weekly film screening.
Italy’s Cultural Revolution
Italian 270This course, intended to improve students’ spoken, aural, and written Italian, makes use of a wealth of literary, musical, cinematic, and visual sources to explore the culture and conflicts of modern Italy’s struggle for unification. Readings include works by Foscolo, Leopardi, and Manzoni; students also analyze the operas of Verdi and the nationalist films 1860, 1900, Senso, and The Leopard. Students apply their knowledge of 19th-century Italy to major issues confronting Italians today. The course is conducted in Italian, with a weekly review session designed to strengthen Italian language skills.
L'Inferno
Italian 250A 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.
Myth and Fascism in Italian Literature
Italian 209 | Human RightsThis course explores the rise, appeal, structure, goals, and representation of the fascist ideology and regime in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, as well as the artistic and intellectual response elicited by fascism’s oppressive context. Authors studied include Carducci, D’Annunzio, Croce, Marinetti, Palazzeschi, Corradini, Ungaretti, Saba, Levi, Pirandello, Vittorini, Moravia, Gramsci, Gentile, Montale, and Calvino. Filmmakers studied include Olmi, Wertmüller, Pontecorvo, Rossellini, Taviani, Scola, Rosi, and Pasolini. The course is conducted in English.
The History of Italian Cinema
Italian 275 | Film and Electronic ArtsThis survey course, taught in Italian, examines the evolution of Italian cinema from its inception to the present day. Major films from the silent and Fascist eras up to the birth of neorealism and “New Comedy” are investigated. Featured directors include Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Scola, Wertmuller, Pasolini, and Salvatores. Special attention is given to the political and cultural influences underlying film aesthetics and production. Readings are selected from film theory/ criticism, screenplays, interviews, and Italian historical and literary texts. While the course does not provide a formal review of grammar, advanced grammar points and questions of style are addressed. Prerequisite: one 200-level course in Italian or permission of the instructor.
The Poetry of Italian Cinema
Italian 201This 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.
300-level courses
Dante
Italian 3205 / Literature 3205See Literature 3205 for a full course description.
European Literature and the Making of Italy
Italian 340 / Literature 340See Literature 340 for a full course description.
La questione della lingua
Italian 330This 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.
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