Italian Upper Level Courses

ITAL 8: Exploring Italian Culture and Language

This course will serve as an introduction to modern and contemporary Italian literature, culture and society. It will focus on topics such as evolving political and regional identities, gender relations, the role of the media, and the culture of daily life, as they appear in forms as diverse as narrative and poetry, cinema, music, and journalism. Students will also focus on specific grammatical and stylistic issues in order to improve their fluency in Italian. Course work will consist of frequent essays and student-led discussions.

Prerequisites

Acceptance into the Dartmouth Advanced Language Study Abroad Program (LSA+ Rome)

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: SOC; WCult: W

ITAL 9: Italian Culture

Italian 9 expands on the skills acquired in the Italian language sequence (Italian 1, 2, 3, and/or the LSA) as well as offering a transition to Italian 10 and our upper-division literature and culture courses. This course introduces students to modern and contemporary Italian literature, culture and society through a focus on topics such as evolving political and regional identities, gender relations, the role of the media, and the culture of daily life. Students expand their active use of Italian, refine communicative, reading, and writing strategies, and comprehensively review grammar. Course work includes active participation in class discussions, oral presentations, and regular reading and writing assignments in the areas of narrative and poetry, cinema, music, and journalism. Instructors usually choose one or several "anchor" texts around which coursework revolves.

Prerequisites

ITAL 3 or permission of the instructor.

ITAL 10: Italian Texts and Contexts

An introduction to Italian literature, culture, and media across time that provides students with the tools to read and analyze texts critically. Through a selection of literary works, films, and other cultural artifacts, students will explore key themes such as the city, food culture, the environment, and evolving artistic forms. The course examines how ideas, genres, and narratives develop and intersect. Topics and materials vary based on the instructor's focus, allowing for an engaging and dynamic exploration of Italy's literary and cultural landscape. Not open to students who have received credit for ITAL 10.01-10.99. Prerequisites: Italian 8 or 9 or permission of the instructor. W and LIT. 

ITAL 12: Advanced Writing and Speaking in Italian

An advanced language and composition course in which students will work with a wide range of linguistic and cultural materials in order to achieve competence in Italian grammar, and oral and written expression.

Prerequisites

Acceptance into the Dartmouth Advanced Language Study Abroad Program

Distributive and/or World Culture

WCult: W

ITAL 21: Early Italian Literature and Culture

This course will offer an introduction to medieval Italian literature and culture through readings of literary masterworks of the period. The approach will be interdisciplinary: we will consider connections between literary texts and medieval art, music, philosophical currents, and historical events. Themes may include the importance of writing in the vernacular, discourses of love, conceptions of sex roles and gender, personal and political aspirations of the self in society, and the constitution of ideal forms of social organization. Readings will be selected from Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Caterina da Siena, and others.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W

ITAL 22: Humanism and Renaissance

This course explores the extraordinary cultural production of Italy from the late fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth century—the Renaissance. Students will examine broader social and historical contexts through topics such as humanism; attitudes toward the ancient world and the “discovery” of new worlds; developments in the visual arts and in science; court society; sexuality and courtesan culture; gender and family life; religious reform. Genres considered may include essay, dialogue, political treatise, theatre, lyric and epic poetry, letters, and the novella. Authors may include Petrarch, Alberti, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Isabella di Morra, Veronica Franco, Ruzante, Castiglione, Ariosto, Bandello, and Tasso.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W

ITAL 23: Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Italian Literature and Culture

This course explores the rich innovations that marked Italian literature and the arts over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the Baroque culture of crisis and change to the Enlightenment's own reassessment of earlier forms of knowledge and representation. Topics include the poetics of the marvelous, the fascination with popular culture, the nuova scienza, social class and identity, the "cult of reason," and the relevance of both Baroque and Enlightenment categories to post-modernity. We will explore traditional genres such as lyric poetry, the essay, and the novella, but also new forms: the fairy tale, women's writing, travel literature, the commedia dell'arte, the novel, and the opera. Authors and artists may include Giambattista Basile, Giambattista Marino, Galileo, Arcangela Tarabotti, Isabella Andreini, Monteverdi, Pergolesi, Bernini, Caravaggio, and Carlo Goldoni. There will also be units on books, visual arts and music, with guest lectures and visits to Rauner Special Collections and the Hood Museum.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W

ITAL 24: Nineteenth-Century Italian Literature and Culture

This course examines the changes in literary vision and artistic forms from the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the country’s unification, to the First World War. Emphasis will be placed on Italy’s growing self-awareness as a nation and on analysis of aesthetic and intellectual issues. Particular attention will be given to popular art such as satire, cookbooks, and Verdi’s operas, and to women’s literature as an innovative cultural force. Readings may include Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Giovanni Verga, Marchesa Colombi, Carlo Collodi, Grazia Deledda, and F. T. Marinetti.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W.

ITAL 25: Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Italian Literature and Culture

This course examines the radical transformation of literary form and vision that characterizes twentieth and twenty-first century Italy with its two World Wars, its colonial conflicts, and the challenges to Italian identity posed by modernization, immigration, and globalization. We will use poetry, fiction, autobiography, political writings, television, documentaries, and film to explore cultural movements such as the avant-garde and neo-realism. Particular contexts may include fascism, the resistance movements, and terrorism. Students will read canonical and non-canonical texts including, for example, recent immigrant and minority writers. Readings and films may include works by Bontempelli, Moravia, Morante, Calvino, Maraini, Fellini, Tornatore, Wertmueller, and Jadelin Mabiala Gambo.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W

Italian 26: Cinema

Italian 26:  Italian Cinema: Conducted in Italian, this course introduces students to classic Italian cinema, including its history and its predominant genres-from the silent film to comedy and melodrama and thriller. Students will become familiar with Italian cinematic movements such as Neorealism, directors such as Federico Fellini and Roberto Benigni, as well as with important concepts in film analysis.  Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.  Dist:ART; WCult:W. NRO eligible.  

ITAL 27: Topics in Italian Literature

Offerings of this course will consist of various topics in Italian literature.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist:see individual course listing.

Prerequisite: A course in the ITAL 10 series or permission of the instructor.

ITAL 27.02: Crossing Cultures

Human communication depends on translation. Much of what we know about worlds different from our own comes through translations and the dialogues between languages and cultures that they create.  In this course we will focus on translation between Italian and American cultures, and consider the larger question of the representation of "foreignness." We will explore the theory and practice of translation in various contexts—literature, film, popular media—and gain direct experience in the art of translation through workshops and a final project.

Prerequisites

ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Distributive and/or World Culture

Dist: LIT; WCult: W

Italian 33.01

ITAL 33.01 Into and Beyond Dante's Inferno -

The work of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) stages from beginning to end a struggle between personal desire, social obligation, and the conflicting cultures of Christian religion and the body politic. The unprecedented fusion Dante made of these elements in the Commedia [The Divine Comedy] has guaranteed his great poem a vast public, extending across world cultures and the seven centuries since it initially traveled among elite readers in north-central Italy in the early decades of the fourteenth century. This course will first examine the development of Dante's poetic voice in La vita nova [The New Life, ca. 1293-94] and then focus on its subsequent expansion into an all-encompassing vision of life and death in Inferno [Hell, ca. 1306-09], the first of the three canticles of the Commedia. Situating Dante in his own time and place will be essential to our analysis of his poetry, but attention to the multiple ways that Dante's work has been interpreted, translated, and appropriated in other periods, languages, and media will provide a critical framework for understanding its enduring appeal, why – in the words of Italo Calvino – it "has not finished saying what it has to say." Readings, lectures, discussion, and written work – to include a mid-term exam, two short essays, and a final digital project – will be in English. Students taking the course for major or minor credit will attend a weekly X-hour and write the two essays in Italian.  Students taking the course for major or minor credit must have ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor to enroll, and will attend a weekly X-hour in Italian. Cross Listed Courses:  REL 32.02. Degree Requirement Attributes: Dist:LIT; WCult:W.  

ITAL 34: Renaissance Studies in Translation

An examination of Italian Renaissance masterpieces in translation, which will explore the centrality of Italian ideas and ideals to the development of literary and cultural norms in Italy and Europe. Topics offered under the ITAL 034 rubric will vary.

Open to all students. Text, lectures and discussion in English. Students taking the course for major or minor credit in Italian will attend a weekly x-hour and do all written work in Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

Italian 35

Italian 35.02 XL with COLT 57.07 & INT 17.10: How to Be a Fascist; How do people become fascists?  How do they rise to power? Why did people support fascism? We will focus initially on the original model for fascist dictatorships, that is Italian fascism, but we will also have in-class presentations by Dartmouth professors on German, Spanish, French and Japanese forms of fascism.  This is a course that will concentrate on history, film, literature, and fashion in order to talk about the slippery definitions of fascism. Students taking the course for major or minor credit must have ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor to enroll, and will attend a weekly X-hour in Italian.  NRO eligible.   Cross Listed Courses:  COLT 57.09 INTS 17.10.   Dist:INT; WCult:W.

 

ITAL 37: Topics in Literature and Culture

Offerings of this course will consist of various topics in Literature and Culture.  Open to all students. Text, lectures and discussion in English. Students taking the course for major or minor credit in Italian will attend a weekly x-hour and do all written work in the Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

ITAL 85: Independent Reading and Research

Students may arrange a program of study and research with individual faculty members. Open only to Italian, Italian Studies, and Romance Language Majors. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

ITAL 88: Senior Independent Reading and Research

A program of individual study directed by a member of the staff. Open only to senior Italian, Italian Studies, and Romance Language (whose primary language is Italian) Majors. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

ITAL 89: Honors Seminar

Honors students will arrange a program of study and research during any term of the senior year on a tutorial basis with individual faculty members. A thesis, written in Italian, and a public presentation are the normal culmination of this course. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. Prerequisite: ITAL 10 or permission of the instructor.

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