These courses count as advanced courses and carry both
university and major credit
214.251 (H) Survey of Italian Literature
An overview of the key texts of the Italian literary canon
from the Middle Ages to the present. Taught in Italian.
Staff 3 credits
214.359 (H) 3 Renaissance Books of Conduct
A reading of Erasmus, Castiglione and Della Casa on conduct.
Forni 3 credits 214.361 (H) The World of Dante
This course focuses on the social, cultural, political,
and moral concerns that shape Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Together with selected cantos from Inferno, Purgatory, and
Paradise, students read parts of Dante’s New Life and On
World Government.
Forni 3 credits 214.363 (H) Dante in Translation, Divine Comedy, Inferno
A lecture and discussion course which focuses on readings
from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The structural aspect of
the poem, as well as the historical and theological ones
will be emphasized. One paper and final examination.
Forni 3 credits 214.366 (H) Literature and Ethics
This course focuses on the moral implications of the acts of reading and writing literature. Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Boccaccio, and Freud are among the featured authors.
Forni 3 credits 214.370 (H) Magic and Marvel of the Italian
Renaissance
Discover the Magic and Marvels-both literal and figurative-
of Italian literature between 1350 and 1550. Poets,
philosophers, political theorists, dramatists, and fiction
writers ponder the nature of humanity, in itself and in
its relations with the supra-human beings described by
religion and literature. Readings include Machiavelli’s
Prince and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the epic romance that
inspired works as varied as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and
Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Stephens 3 credits 214.371 (H) The Name of the Rose and the Middle Ages
Umberto Eco’s acclaimed novel as an introduction to the
study of the Middle Ages. An optional third hour for readers
and speakers of Italian.
Stephens 3 credits 214.373 (H) Italian Comedy
For students who have completed Intermediate Italian
(210.251-252). Readings and discussion, in Italian, of the
grand tradition of comedy, satire, and humor in Italian literature:
from the humor of the Middle Ages through the
Romance Languages and Literatures / 313
rebirth of the theater around 1500, to the modern classics
of opera, stage, and film. Class will be paced to build
linguistic and literary competence; emphasis on reading,
writing, speaking, and recitation. If enrollment suffices,
a one-act play can be produced. Readings in Dante, Boccaccio,
Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, Mozart’s librettist
Da Ponte, Pirandello, Calvino; films by Toto, Roberto
Benigni, and others.
Stephens 3 credits 214.374 (H) Italian Identity: Autobiography From Now Until Dante
Being Italian has meant different things in different historical periods. This course examines autobiographies, both real and fictional, from the present time to that of Dante, working backward in time. Entirely in Italian.
Stephens 3 credits 214.379 (H) Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance
This course will allow students to explore the intellectual background to the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance. Most Italian intellectuals from the late fourteenth century through to the early sixteenth century wrote, not in Italian, but in a “new” Latin, like the Latin used in ancient Rome, rather than (what they saw as) the inauthentic Latin of medieval universities and the Church.
Recent scholarship has allowed us to have greatly increased access to these authors who wrote in the era between Dante (1265-1321) and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). Thinkers such as Leonardo Bruni (perhaps the best-selling author of the fifteenth century), Lorenzo Valla (who is now emerging as a major philosopher of language), and Marsilio Ficino (whose influence on literature and the arts in his own era is comparable to that of Freud in ours), are comparatively little known today. But their work represented the intellectual backbone of Renaissance Italy and was widely diffused in succeeding centuries in early modern Europe. This course will allow students to explore this forgotten legacy and thus to understand a missing chapter.
Celenza 3 credits 214.380 Italian Short Fiction
Course will read major examples of the short story and
novella, beginning with contemporary writers and working
backward through several centuries of Italian fiction
to build vocabulary and literary-historical knowledge.
Taught entirely in Italian.
Stephens 3 credits 214.390 (H) Machiavelli in Context
This seminar course will offer students the chance to read most of Machiavelli’s major works in English translation. In addition, Machiavelli will be examined both in the context out of which he emerged – the Latinate Italian humanism of the fifteenth century – and in the context in which he carried out his daily activities – the bustling day to day world of Florentine politics. A separate section will be offered for students with adequate reading knowledge of Italian, in which we will read Machiavelli’s Prince in Italian, in a new, definitive critical edition.
Celenza 3 credits 214.462 (H) Story and History in Italian Novecento
Prose texts, considered classics of contemporary Italian literature
will be read and studied in their historical context.
Works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giorgio Bassani,
Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi will be read in Italian.
Forni 3 credits 214.472 Tass The Epic and Tradition
Stephens 214.479 (H) The Divine Comedy: An Intensive Reading
in English
A reading and discussion of Dante’s masterpiece, the
Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, in its entirety, in
English translation. Concentration on its structure and
relation to the most pressing theological, philosophical,
social, and political problems of Dante’s time. Its ongoing
relevance to our own concerns about ethics, government,
art, and mortality.
Stephens 3 credits 214.561-562 Italian Independent Study 214.563 Italian Internship
| 
