1 - 10 of 21 results for: ITALGEN

Preference to freshmen. Literary responses to Italy by writers in English during the past hundred years and how they continue to constuct myths of Italy. How these myths have been transformed into commodities in consumer culture, making Italy a profitable fiction. Authors include Hawthorne, Howells, James, Wharton, Forster, Unsworth, Hellenga, and Mayes.

A new generation of Italian filmmakers who examine the contradictory encounters between Italians and the migrant others in contemporary Italy. Critical texts from film studies, gender studies, ethnic and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and history. I English; films, in Italian with English subtitles, by Amelio, Ozpetek, Munzi, Garrone, Melliti, Tornatore, and Giordana.

We will compare both Italian and American fantasies of the Mafia to its historical origins and impact on Italian culture. Central topics: do the media inevitably idealize corruption or can they criticize it? how do Mafia stories reflect tensions between North and South in Italy, and between Italians and Italian-Americans? how do we triangulate the myths of the Mafia, popular culture, and the anti-institutional bias of much modern Italian fiction? In English.

What truths are in dreams? How does the quest for a symbolic object embody a moral struggle? What motivates a personal search for divine love? Study of arguably the most influential work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Focus on the work as erotic, allegorical quest for the mystical Rose, and scholastic encyclopedia through close analysis, secondary readings, and study of manuscript illumination. Use of medieval and modern French edition.

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.

For graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso in the context of the social and political world of Renaissance Italy. Topics include: its relationship to precursor texts and traditions (classical, Arthurian, Carolingian); Ferrarese court culture and the politics of dynastic epic; its relationship to early modern ideologies of gender. Taught in English but requires advanced reading knowledge of Italian.

Literary works that evoke a medieval past in contrast to a historical present, and critical texts that treat aspects of the medieval or medievalism. How does the concept of medievalism emerge and evolve through the ages? The impact of the Reformation and romanticism, the study of Gothic architecture, and the use of the term medieval in modern political discourse. Authors include Hugo, Grimm brothers, Flaubert, Mâle, Pound, de Rougemont, Eco, Bataille, and Holsinger; films by Bresson and Pasolini.

The first canticle of Dante's masterpiece.

The predominantly female mystical experience or direct-embodied encounter with a spiritual reality that is difficult, perhaps impossible, to reduce to words, or to explain rationally. Sources include European texts from the Middle Ages to the present by women and men who attempt to convey the experience metaphorically, to interpret it theologically and philosophically, and to transmit it actively to others.