ITL 321                         INTRODUCTION TO ITALIAN LITERATURE    

                                                     

 

The course will introduce students to different literary genres and periods of Italian literature.  Selections of poetry, prose and drama from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romanticism, and the Twentieth century will be examined in class from the language as well as the literary perspectives.  We will try to point out basic characteristics and changes in language, themes, and style throughout the centuries.  Given the fact that most of the literature we know from the past was written by male writers, we will focus on the representations of woman, beginning with the idealized woman-angel of the Middle Ages, and, whenever possible, confront it with those made by women writers.  Authors represented in this course include: Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Gaspara Stampa, Giacomo Leopardi, Luigi Pirandello, Sibilla Aleramo, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, Natalia Ginzburg, Dacia Maraini, Italo Calvino, Eugenio Montale.

 

Required Texts:

 

Letteratura Italiana per Stranieri by Paolo E. Balboni & Anna Biguzzi (at Co-op or Amazon)

Natalia Ginzburg, La città e la casa(at Co-op)

ROME STUDY PROGRAM

 

ITC F349 – Rome

Rome in Words, Images and Music

 

Instructor: Daniela Bini

 

 

Course Description:

 

The course will briefly sketch the rich life of the Eternal City through literary texts, architecture, painting, sculpture, lyric opera and cinema. Choosing some pivotal periods in its history, we will learn of ancient Rome from Livy, Ovid and Virgil, but also from the Forum and the Ara Pacis.  Michelangelo and Raphael will take us into the magnificence of Renaissance Rome, and with Borromini and Bernini will enter its sumptuous Baroque palaces and churches.  Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca will lead us into the Risorgimento movement, the revolts against the Pope and its temporal power. Fascism will be examined with Moravia’s novel The Conformist, and Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. We will conclude with Federico Fellini’s films La dolce vita and Roma that well demonstrate the director’s ambivalent feelings for this unique city where decadence and beauty coexist.

 

Textbooks:

 

Packet of Xerox-copied material (to be purchased in Austin)

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist (in English, to be purchased on amazon.com)

Additional reading material will be announced

 

Grading:

 

30%    Short quizzes

50%    Two exams

10%    Oral Reports

10%    Participation

 

ROME STUDY PROGRAM

 

ITC F349 – Rome

Rome in Words, Images and Music

 

Instructor: Daniela Bini

 

 

Course Description:

 

The course will briefly sketch the rich life of the Eternal City through literary texts, architecture, painting, sculpture, lyric opera and cinema. Choosing some pivotal periods in its history, we will learn of ancient Rome from Livy, Ovid and Virgil, but also from the Forum and the Ara Pacis.  Michelangelo and Raphael will take us into the magnificence of Renaissance Rome, and with Borromini and Bernini will enter its sumptuous Baroque palaces and churches.  Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca will lead us into the Risorgimento movement, the revolts against the Pope and its temporal power. Fascism will be examined with Moravia’s novel The Conformist, and Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. We will conclude with Federico Fellini’s films La dolce vita and Roma that well demonstrate the director’s ambivalent feelings for this unique city where decadence and beauty coexist.

 

Textbooks:

 

Packet of Xerox-copied material (to be purchased in Austin)

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist (in English, to be purchased on amazon.com)

Additional reading material will be announced

 

Grading:

 

30%    Short quizzes

50%    Two exams

10%    Oral Reports

10%    Participation

 

ITL 375. Sicily Through Literature and Cinema

INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Daniela Bini

 

This course will be taught in Italian.

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

 

Sicily with its rich history and culture, but also with her serious problems can be considered, as Leonardo Sciascia noted, a microcosm of Italy, where the problems that affect the country are magnified on the island. The course will examine the richness and complexity of the island culture through the works of some major Sicilian writers, such as Leonardo Sciascia, Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, Elio Vittorini and Vitaliano Brancati. We will compare the picture that these Sicilian writers give us of the island with that created by non Sicilian filmmakers (Luchino Visconti, Gianni Amelio, Pietro Germi, Marco Tullio Giordana, the Taviani brothers) who have been drawn to the island as a space for cinematic experimentation and artistic self-discovery.

 The course will involve close analysis of selected novels, short stories, and films with specific focus on such issues as unification history, the Mafia, and social/sexual mores. Attendance at the screenings is required.

 There will be few short response papers to be written in Italian, pop quizzes, and two exams.  Since the course will be conducted as a seminar, a great deal of emphasis will be placed on active class participation.

 The final grade will be computed as follows:

    Papers: 40%;

    Quizzes and Exams: 45%;

    Class Participation: 15%

The course will begin with an introduction to the Italian Enlightnment, and in particular, the figure of the iterant intellectual, such as Carlo Goldoni and Lorenzo Da Ponte. We will then follow the intellectual as the participant in the construction of national identity during the cultural movement of Risorgimento.  We will read from the works of Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni and listen to selections of Bellini’s and Verdi’s operas. After Italy’s unification the discrepancy between north and south became more apparent. We will concentrate on the south by reading from the works of Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello and Carlo Levi. The impact of two world wars and Fascism on Italian culture and literature, in particular, that brings the intellectual to a crisis, will be discussed through the works of writers as different as Morante, Ginzburg, Ungaretti, Montale. We will conclude with a few short stories by Italo Calvino. Several films will be shown to reinforce some of the themes discussed.

 

Required Texts:

Course packet (Speedway in Dobie Mall)

Carlo Goldoni, La locandiera,

Luigi Pirandello, Così è (se vi pare),

Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli

Natalia Ginzburg, La città e la casa--            Books at Co-op on Guadalupe

COURSE  DESCRIPTION

 

Sicily has always occupied a priviledged place in the Italian literary and cinematic imagination.  While such writers as Pirandello, Sciascia, and Verga have created what can legitimately be called a distinctly Sicilian category of Italian literature, such filmmakers as Visconti, Rosi, Tornatore have been drawn to the island as a space for cinematic experimentation and artistic self-discovery.  From Visconti's 1948 neorealist masterpiece La terra trema to Tornatore's 1988 Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso, from Verga's late nineteenth century short stories to Sciascia's Mafia-based thrillers, Sicily has become both a mythic space of the mind, as well as a signifier, in extremis for its own, and the rest of Italy's, social, political, and historical problems. Recently the development of Mediterranean studies and Franco Cassano’s Il pensiero meridiano have began a revaluation of the south and of the contributions that it can offer to a western culture too much concerned with production, velocity, progress. The course will involve close analysis of selected novels, short stories, and films with specific focus on such issues as unification history, the Mafia, and social/sexual mores.  Attendance at the screenings is required.  This course will be taught in Italian.

 TESTI  

Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo

Vitaliano Brancati, Il Bell'Antonio

Leonardo Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo

Marcelle Padovani, La Sicilia come metafora (reserved at PCL in English)

Luigi Pirandello, selezione da Novelle per un anno:

http://www.filosofico.net/pirandellonovelle/pirandello_novelle.htm

Giovanni Verga, selezione da Novelle rusticane e Vita dei campi:

http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/v/verga/tutte_le_novelle/html/index.htm

Giuseppe Fava, alcuni saggi nel pacchetto a Speedway.

Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano

Vincenzo Consolo, Di qua dal faro

Gesualdo Bufalino, La luce e il lutto

 

 FILM

Gianni Amelio, Ladro di bambini                                    Optional: Mauro Bolognini, Bell’Antonio

Luchino Visconti, Il Gattopardo                                                    Francis Ford Coppola, Godfather 2

Franco Zeffirelli, Cavalleria rusticana                                            Giuseppe Tornatore, Cinema Paradiso

Vittorio e Paolo Taviani, Kaos                                                      Elio Petri, A ciascuno il suo

Pietro Germi, Divorzio all’italiana                                                  P. Germi, Sedotta e abbandonata

Marco Tullio Giordana, I cento passi

Giuseppe Tornatore, L’uomo delle stelle

ITL 390L The Question of Italian Romanticism: Foscolo, Manzoni,

                                             Leopardi

Instructor: Daniela Bini; Office: HRH 2.122; Office Hours: Mon. 10-12 and by appointment

 

                                    The course will centered on the so called three Crowns of Italian Romanticism, in order to show how ambiguous and unreliable these categories are. Not only Romanticism is a difficult category to define, but the Italian version of it is even more arduous as the study of these three writers with their diversity will prove. They will be studied in their own right, but through their diversity we will explore the complex issue of Italian Romanticism in order to try to understand the absence in European and American criticism of a discourse on Italian Romanticism. We will thus touch upon the discourses of national identity, neo-classicism and the construction of the myth of Italy by foreign writers.

                                    We will briefly discuss the major role played by Madame De Stael’s view of Italy in her famous novel Corinne, some manifestos of Italian Romanticism, and the ideas expressed in F. Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry, in order to understand the long debate between Classicists and Romantics, 'ancients' and  'moderns.'  These discussions will be propaedeutic to the reading of our authors, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni.  The social aspect of Italian Romanticism will also be discussed in the light of the historical movement Risorgimento. We will watch Visconti’s film Senso, some of Vincenzo Bellini’s and Giuseppe Verdi’s operas, and read some sonnets by Milanese writer Carlo Porta, and Roman writer Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli.

 

GRADING POLICY

The final grade will be determined by class participation-discussion, short response essays, one oral report (40%) and one final paper of 15 to 20 pages (60%).

 

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259, http://www.utexas.edu/diversity/ddce/ssd/

Academic dishonesty: Plagiarism, the use of others’ ideas and words without appropriate acknowledgement, will not be tolerated.

Religious Holidays. By UT Austin policy, you must notify me of your pending absence at least fourteen days prior to the date of observance of a religious holy day.  If you must miss a class, an examination, a work assignment, or a project in order to observe a religious holy day, you will be given an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

 

TESTI PRIMARI (at Coop and a packet at IT Copy, 512 West  MLK Blvd. Phone: 476-6662):

Ugo Foscolo, Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, “Dei sepolcri,” alcuni sonetti

Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali,  Canti, Pensieri, Zibaldone (a selection)

Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi, Lettera sul Romanticism, few examples of poetry.

Bellini, Vincenzo, Norma

Verdi, Giuseppe, Aida, Excerpts from other operas.

Some sonnets by Carlo Porta and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

 

TESTI SECONDARI (on reserve at PCL):

E. Raimondi, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo; A. Ascoli & K.C. Von Henneberg, Making and Remaking

Italy: The cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento; M. Praz, "Romantic Sensibility " in The Romantic

Agony; H. Honour, Romanticism, "Introduction"; M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism;

 H. Bloom ed., Romanticism and Consciousness; J. Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy; M. Puppo, Il Romanticismo Z. Baranski & R. West. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture

 

 

                     SYLLABUS

26 agosto      Introduzione al corso

31 agosto               Luzzi: Introduzione: “Italy Ambivalent Modernity”

Discorsi e lettere sul Romanticismo: De Stael, Leopardi, Di Breme, Manzoni

http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Sulla_maniera_e_utilità_delle_traduzioni

http://www.classicitaliani.it/ottocent/dibreme02.htm

http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Lettera_sul_romanticismo_a_Cesare_D'Azeglio

1 settembre   lezione di Alex Wettlaufer su Corinne di Germaine De Stael.

 

7 settembre   Luzzi: I capitolo; Foscolo: alcune lettere d’amore.

9 settembre   Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis

 

14 settembre   Foscolo, Dei sepolcri

16 settembre   Foscolo, sonetti

 

21 settembre     Giacomo Leopardi: selezione da Zibaldone ed Epistolario

23 settembre Leopardi, Canti: All’Italia, “L’ultimo canto di Saffo,”Il primo amore,“Il passero solitario”

 

28 settembre   Leopardi, Canti: “L’infinito,” “La sera del dì di festa,” “Alla luna”

30 settembre   Leopardi, Canti: “La vita solitaria,” “Alla sua donna,” “A Silvia,”

 

5 ottobre             Leopardi, Canti: “Le ricordanze,” “Il canto notturno,”

7 ottobre             Leopardi, Canti: “La quiete dopo la tempesta,” “Il sabato del villaggio”

 “A se stesso,” “Aspasia,”        

 

12 ottobre       “Il tramonto della luna,” “La ginestra”

14 ottobre   Leopardi, dalle Operette morali

 

19 ottobre       Leopardi, dalle Operette Morali

21 ottobre       Leopardi: dalle Operette morali

 

26 ottobre       Alessandro Manzoni: qualche poesia; I promessi sposi

28 ottobre       I promessi sposi

 

2 novembre   I promessi sposi

4 novembre   I promessi sposi

 

9 novembre   Vincenzo Bellini: Norma; some excerpts fromVerdi’s operas

11 novembre   Verdi’s Aida

  

16 novembre   Camillo Boito’s “Senso” and Luchino Visconti: Senso

 

18 novembre   Sonetti di Carlo Porta e di Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli

23 novembre   Oral reports

 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

 

30 novembre   Oral reports

2 dicembre   Oral reports

 

 

 

                                    

 

                                                                        

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