ITAL 6570b / FREN 6700b / LING 5640b / SPAN 5000b, Principles of Language Teaching and Learning  Staff

Introduction to the basic principles of second-language acquisition theory, focusing on current perspectives from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Topics include language teaching methodology, communicative and task-based approaches, learner variables, intercultural competence, and models of assessment.
HTBA

ITAL 6578b / ENGL 6576b, Medieval Women Mystics: Piety and Disobedience  Jessica Brantley and Jane Tylus

How was female sanctity practiced in medieval Europe? How did mystical engagement, in particular, spark both piety and disobedience? How was mysticism explored in writing and the arts by women themselves—especially those women who would challenge the status quo by asserting their own direct connections to the divine? Finally, how do we “access” these medieval minds today, and to what extent do contemporary theoretical concerns about gender identity, subjectivity, and alterity enable us to grapple with the intensely personal dynamics of mystical experience? We introduce these questions—and many others—in connection to the lives and works of five medieval women, beginning with Clare of Assisi, who fled her parents’ wealthy home in the middle of the night to join her radical neighbor, Francis. We consider the writings of Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich, all formative figures in the crisis-ridden fourteenth century who unsettled the boundaries between private and public, religious and “profane.” Finally, we read the Book of Margery Kempe as a fifteenth-century record of how the mystical experiences of female saints inspired one bourgeois woman’s negotiation between her piety and her community. Historical, cultural, and religious topics to be considered include: the influence of the emerging vernaculars on religious movements and texts; the reassessment of Biblical figures such as Mary, Mary Magdalene, Judith, and Ruth; the impact of marginal, possibly heretical groups such as the Beguines; and the rise of the mendicant orders and the resulting changes to monastic and convent life. If our funding applications are successful, we take a course trip to England and Italy during spring break.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

ITAL 6990a / CPLT 6640a, Taking Leave: Meditations on Art, Death, and the Afterlife from the Bible to the Twentieth Century  Jane Tylus and Bruce Gordon

This seminar seeks to contextualize leave-taking within the explicitly religious and artistic contexts of Western culture. We open with readings from ancient texts from Mesopotamian, Greek, Latin, and Judaic cultures, and end with the U.S. Civil War. And in between we spend considerable time on the ways in which the advent of Christianity and, in turn, the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and modern worlds influenced the practices and understanding of leave-taking. En route we explore how, for example, Catholicism sought to extend life into the third realm of Purgatory, why the Reformation sought to undo those imaginative excursions, and the extent to which the different faiths of figures such as Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and John Donne produced radically different kinds of finished—and unfinished—works. As we explore the transformative potential of the goodbye in literary and religious works, we also engage with more recent discussions from theologians, theorists, and therapists about grieving, transitions, and letting go. Our objectives are: to strive to understand the important role that leave-takings play in the history of Christianity and artistic expression, especially between 1300–1850; to probe the difference 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 one's life and one's lifework; and to contextualize our readings within contemporary conversations about dying, grief, and letting go. Area V and Area III.
W 9:25am-11:15am

ITAL 8594a, Canons and Counter-Canons: Modern and Contemporary Italian Prose  Serena Bassi

There’s no such thing as “the great Italian novel”. The modern bourgeois aesthetic form par excellence may be routinely described by literary theorists as emerging and seeing its major developments in Spain, Britain, France, or Russia. Italy is usually excluded from this particular invented cultural trajectory. Instead of seeing this assessment as an indictment on Italian versions of the novel form, we interpret the supposed lack as an opportunity for rethinking the novel from a marginal vantage point. We read six canonical Italian novels and six minor ones that may be read as critical responses to the better-known texts, beginning at the start of the nineteenth century and ending two centuries after with the likely winner of the 2025 Premio Strega. Throughout the class, we ask what may be peculiar or eccentric about the Italian novelistic tradition by focusing, in particular, on the ways in which the novel registers and encodes philosophical debate about the nature of time and history; collective and individual memory; class and social mobility; Bildung and selfhood. The class is held in English, but reading knowledge of Italian is required (we read all texts in Italian; many of them do not have available English translations).
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

ITAL 8783a / FILM 7790a, Italian Film Ecologies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow  Millicent Marcus

Landscape and the natural environment have never occupied “background” status in Italian film. Given the spectacular visual presence of its terrain—thanks to the relative proximity of mountain chains and the long seacoast—and given the pivotal importance of farming and pasturage in this traditionally agrarian economy, the synergy between the human and natural worlds has played a prominent role in Italian filmmaking since the very inception of the industry. Most recently, two developments have pushed this issue to the forefront of scholarly attention: the advent of ecocriticism, which found one of its earliest and most influential champions in Serenella Iovino, and the establishment of regional film commissions, grassroots production centers that sponsored cinematic works attuned to the specificity of “the local.” The course includes study of films that predate our current environmental consciousness, as well as recent films that foreground it in narrative terms. In the case of the older films, which have already attracted a great deal of critical commentary over time, we work to shift our interpretive frame in an “eco-friendly” direction (even when the films’ characters are hardly friends of the environment). Among the films considered are Le quattro volte, Il vento fa il suo giro, L’uomo che verrà, Gomorra, L’albero degli zoccoli, Riso amaro, Red Desert, Christ Stopped at Eboli, and Il ladro di bambini. We screen one film a week and devote our seminars to close analysis of the works in question.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm, M 7:30pm-10pm

ITAL 9999a, Preparing for Doctoral Exams and Prospectus Writing  Serena Bassi

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).
T 1:30pm-3:20pm