Graduate Courses Fall 2023
Ital 552: Italian Lyric Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
An exploration of Italy’s vernacular lyric tradition from its emergence in the thirteenth century through its flowerings in the sixteenth, with special attention to the emergence of the genre of the autobiographical Canzoniere and to the ascendance of the modern authorial self. Poets studied may include those of the Scuola Siciliana and Dolce stil novo, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Poliziano, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Sannazaro, Boiardo, Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franca, and Michelangelo.
ITAL 691: Directed Studies
Individual Study
ITAL 948: Theorizing the Modern Subject
This class introduces graduate students in the Humanities and the Social Sciences to Italian critical theory from the 15th century to the present by focusing on different ways of thinking about the emergence of the modern subject, subjectivity and subjection. We read political thinkers and cultural critics like Machiavelli, Vico, Leopardi, Gramsci, Negri, Federici, Lazzarato, Agamben, Braidotti, and Eco. The theorists we read ask us to think about the multiple ways in which one becomes a modern subject by being hailed by particular ideas of what it means to be human, as well as by the State and by capitalism. Our journey into Italian thought is structured through four units: 1) Beyond the Modern Subject: Theorizing the Post-Human; 2) Subjectivity: Theorizing the Modern State; 3) Subjection: Theorizing Modern Economies; 4) The Modern Subject Before Modernity: Italian Renaissance Thought and the Human. During the course, students also draft, redraft, write, and edit a publishable article-length original piece of research working with one or more sources they have read in the class.
ITAL 999: Preparing for Doctoral Exams
The aim of this seminar is to give third-year students the opportunity to work together on the three projects that will occupy them throughout Year 3: the oral comprehensive exam (for early November), the written exam on the three topics lists (for March–April), and the writing of the prospectus, to be defended in September of Year 4. Weekly meetings are run and coordinated by a faculty member in Italian, generally the graduate adviser. Each week of the first nine weeks is devoted to a specific topic on the comprehensive lists requested by the students themselves. Students are in conversation with each other, with the presiding faculty member, and with an additional guest lecturer who is an expert in the areas under discussion. Following the ninth week, there is a dry run of the oral exam. The remaining four weeks are devoted to discussing the composition of the topics lists and to the writing of the prospectus. Informal meetings may continue through the spring to discuss these issues as well.
Prerequisite: completion of all other graduate course work (15 credits).