Graduate Course Offerings
RNST 500a, The Renaissance in Italy
David Quint
An introduction to the Renaissance in Italy, focused on readings and analyzing key texts.
ITAL 530a, Dante in TR
Giuseppe Mazzotta
A critical reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy and selections from the minor works, with an attempt to place Dante’s work in the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages by relating literature to philosophical, theological, and political concerns.
ITAL 566a, Saying Goodbye: Meditations on Art, Death and Afterlives, the Bible Through Shakespeare and Sor Juan Jane Tylus
How do we take leave of the people, places, and work that we love? Our objectives will be to strive to understand the important role that leave-takings play in life and artistic expression, especially between 1300-1700; to probe the differences between religious faiths of early modernity with respect to rituals of saying goodbye and the afterlife; to sharpen our skills as readers, spectators, and listeners of works that engage with complex questions regarding the meaning of life and one’s lifework; and to contextualize our readings within more contemporary conversations by theologians and theorists about dying, grief, and letting go. We will also examine rites of passage and departure, even as our main focus will be figures such as Dante, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose differing faiths during a period of religious crisis produced various kinds of finished - and unfinished - works. Our class will be held in the Beinecke library, where we will be regularly consulting first editions and in some cases (Donne’s letters and poems) autograph copies, as well as evaluating the material evidence for ways that manuscripts and books reveal how authors parted with their works (dedications, envois) and how readers commented on their own encounters with leave-takings.
ITAL 593a, Contemporary Italian Narrative
David Ward, Visiting Professor, Wellesley
A survey of the state of contemporary and near contemporary Italian narrative and critical theory, especially the turn to a new realism, political commitment (“impegno”) and the phenomenon of collective writing. Authors to be studied will include: Umberto Eco, Wu Ming 2 & Antar Mohammed, Wu Ming, Giorgio Vasta, Giuseppe Genna, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Franchini, Simona Vinci, Laura Pugno, and Leonardo Sciascia, as well as critical writings by Raffaele Donnarumma, Arturo Mazzarella, Wu Ming, and Pierpaolo Antonello.
ITAL 707b, Poets of the Duecento
Giuseppe Mazzotta
The course explores and traces the multiple ways in which the experiments and lyrical achievements of the Duecento (thirteenth century) shaped and made possible the remarkable achievements of the Italian Trecento. The core of the course consists in the reading of the Sicilian School of poetry, some Provencal troubadours and above all, of the remarkable achievements. The course explores and traces the multiple ways in which the experiments and lyrical achievements of the Duecento (thirteenth century) shaped and made possible the remarkable achievements of the Italian Trecento. The core of the course consists in the reading of the Sicilian School of poetry, some Provencal troubadours and above all, of the remarkable achievements of gifted poets, such as Francis of Assisi, Cavalcanti, Sordello etc.
ITAL 781b, The Decameron
Millicent Marcus
An in-depth study of Boccaccio’s text as a journey in genre in which the writer surveys all the storytelling possibilities available to him in the current repertory of short narrative fiction—ranging from ennobling example to flamboyant fabliaux, including hagiography, aphorisms, romances, anecdotes, tragedies, and practical jokes—and self-consciously manipulates those forms to create a new literary space of astonishing variety, vitality, and subversive power. In the relationship between the elaborate frame-story and the embedded tales, theoretical issues of considerable contemporary interest emerge—questions of gendered discourse, narratology, structural pastiche, and reader response among them. The Decameron is read in Italian or in English. Close attention is paid to linguistic usage and rhetorical techniques in this foundational text of the vernacular prose tradition.
ITAL 945a, Translation and the Politics of Language in Italy’s Borderlands
Jane Tylus and Serena Bassi
This course approaches modern and contemporary Italian literature through the prism of Translation Studies and Critical Multilingualism Studies. In order to consider the role of translation and linguistic diversity in the formation of a national canon, we will focus on texts that come from Italy’s contested and linguistically-hybrid borderlands such as Trieste and Sicily, on the literature of the Italian diaspora, on postcolonial Italophone literature and, finally, on the transnational circulation of literary texts. During the course, students will learn to a) examine the place of multilingualism in the construction of a national culture; b) consider the role of literary translation in national canon formation; and c) finally, rethink translation as a continuum of cultural and linguistic practices - including migration, self-translation and translingualism - which the class will situate and interrogate in their historical context.