ITAL 299H - Honors Independent Study
Qualified students working on an individual basis with professors who have agreed to supervise such work.
Qualified students working on an individual basis with professors who have agreed to supervise such work.
This course explores Italian writers, lives and culture through Italian literature and/or film. We will learn about the various historical, socio-cultural, political and economic challenges and factors represented in these works. We will examine the representation of gender, social class, family, and national identity, and how inequity and power can shape and can be shaped by these identities. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.
How did the Italian historical context and theatrical spaces impact the creation and reception of theatrical texts? How did these texts shape the context of the Italian society? What is intermediality? How do media re-narrate, re-interpret, and adapt literary texts? How do media cross linguistic, space/time, and cultural borders? What gets lost in the translation of texts across different media? What is produced instead? These are some of the questions we will explore to improve our understanding of intermediality, or the relations among different media (theatre, opera, film), using the humanist's tools and methodologies (historical and social contextualization, close reading, critical analysis, scholars' production).We will engage with the history of Italian theater from 16thto 20thcentury, contextualizing, reading, and analyzing plays and libretti by Machiavelli, Da Ponte, Goldoni, Mascagni, Pirandello, Fo, and Ginzburg. We will combine a traditional approach to canonical texts of the Italian theatrical tradition with an interdisciplinary methodology that compares literary and visual texts.
This course investigates the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, a time when renewed interest in the Classical past completely altered Western Culture: the arts flourished, the sciences developed, and philosophers re-conceived of the value of the individual. This course focuses on the great artists and writers of the age, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian or Italian Studies (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.
This course investigates the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italy, a time of great tumult with events such as the 100 Years War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Black Plague of 1348. The course focuses on the great writings of the age, for instance, Dante's Inferno, Petrarch's lyric poetry, Boccaccio's Decameron, as well as the first women writers in Italy. This course may be applied toward the major or minor in Italian or Italian Studies (please speak with an advisor for more information). Taught in English.
Through multiple interdisciplinary approaches, this course focuses on the dynamics between Italian folklore, or materials that are produced outside of the authoritative and sanctioned Culture, and their depictions in 20th-21st-century popular culture. It will explore the oral narratives (fairy tales, legends, saints' legends) and customary crafts of ordinary Italians and Italian Americans, their variations through the transmission process and their depictions in contemporary media. To better understand folkloristics materials, we will situate them in their cultural contexts: specifically, the culture of the historical Italian peasantry and working-class people as well their geographical placements (North, South, and the implications thereof).
The study of fashion is an important conduit for the expression of social identity, political ideas, and aesthetic taste. This course considers the history of style, fashion and dress in France and Italy from a cultural and fashion studies perspective. After a general introduction to models of interpretation and conceptual terms, FREN/ITAL 231 surveys topics in French and Italian fashion design and history from the 1300s to the present day
This gateway course introduces students to Italian thought and culture through multiple perspectives and disciplines including history, philosophy. literary traditions and cultures, arts and architecture, film, cultural studies and geography. By the end of the course, students will have acquired a broad historical understanding of Italian culture and a deeper sense of the interdisciplinary perspectives that contribute meaning to individual and collective Italian identities. Taught in English.
Course represents an accelerated course covering the material of both 201 and 202 (and not merely an accelerated 202 class) therefore, it is not recommended for those students who have already taken 201.
Continued skill development; reinforcement of basic language skills.