Faculty

Faculty >> Sergio Parussa

Courses

ITAS 201 – INTERMEDIATE ITALIAN

ITAS 209 – ITALIAN JEWISH LITERATURE (IN ENGLISH)

In the light of events like the high-profile trial of a Nazi war criminal and Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter on the responsibilities of Christians in the Holocaust, this course aims to discuss the question of Jewish identity in contemporary Italian culture. Students will read prose and poetry, essays and articles, as well as watch films that address issues such as religious and national identity in a culturally, racially, and linguistically homogeneous country like Italy. The course will also give students an overview of the formation and transformation of the Jewish community in Italian society. In addition to well-known Jewish Italian writers like Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, students will read pertinent works by non-Jewish writers like Rosetta Loy.

ITAS 272 – SMALL BOOKS, BIG IDEAS: A JOURNEY THROUGH ITALIAN IDENTITIES

Unlike other European literatures, contemporary Italian literature lacks a major work of fiction representing the nation’s cultural identity. Rather, Italian literature’s boast is the small book, brief unclassifiable narratives that express the variety and complexity of Italian culture. Realistic novels or philosophical short stories, memoirs or literary essays, these works are a fine balance between a number of literary genres and, as such, are a good entranceway into the multifaceted and contradictory identity of Italy as a nation. The course will combine a survey of contemporary Italian literature with a theoretical analysis of how Italian identity has been represented in works by Pavese, Calvino, Ginzburg and others.

ITAS 274 – WOMEN IN LOVE: PORTRAITS OF FEMALE DESIRE IN ITALIAN CULTURE

This course is dedicated to the representation of female desire in Italian culture. From Dante’s Francesca da Rimini to Pasolini’s Medea, passing through renowned literary characters such as Goldoni’s Mirandolina, Manzoni’s Gertrude, and Verdi’s Violetta the course will explore different and contrasting voices of female desire: unrequited and fulfilled, passionate and spiritual, maternal and destructive, domestic and transgressive. In particular, the varied and beautiful voices of women in love will become privileged viewpoints to understand the changes that occur in Italian culture in the conception of desire and other intimate emotions, as well as in the notion of gender and sexuality. Students will read texts by men and women from a wide variety of literary genres and artistic forms including not only prose and poetry, but also theater, opera, and cinema. They will also read important theoretical essays on the conception of love in Western cultures by Barthes, de Rougemont, Gidden, and Nussbaum.

ITAS 309 - ITALIAN JEWISH LITERATURE (IN ITALIAN)

ITAS 311 – THEATER, POLITICS, AND THE ARTS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY

The flourishing Italian theatre in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is an extraordinary and unmatched phenomenon in the history of Italian culture. At the courts of the Medici, the Gonzaga and the Estensi families, as well as in the squares of major Italian cities, theatre became the center of a dynamic relationship between power and culture. Under the aegis of princes and popes, artists of all kinds put their skills to the service of an idea of theatre as the most comprehensive and complete cultural phenomenon. Poets, painters, architects and sculptors worked for the stage to celebrate and, at the same time, to criticize the same power that both fostered and limited their intellectual freedom. The stage became a distorting mirror in which Renaissance Italy, while attempting to admire its beauty, came face to face with its distorted image. Introducing students to the complex and fascinating relationships between theatre, politics and the arts that animated cultural life during the Renaissance, the course will include readings of major plays such as Bibiena's Calandria, Machiavelli's Mandragola and Ariosto's Lena. Attention will also be given to the paintings, drawings and sketches used in the staging of these plays.

ITAS 312 - RINASCIMENTO & RINASCIMENTI

The period of Italian history which goes under the name of Renaissance witnessed deep cultural transformations which still influence our behavior and our way of thinking. Current notions of class, religion, gender and sexual orientation, for instance, find their roots in the cultural debate which animated Italian courts and piazze during the XV and XVI centuries. In this course we will explore the ways in which these notions have been shaped and challenged. We will introduce students to the Italian Renaissance from a cultural studies prospective and will show how there is not only one Rinascimento but many Rinascimenti. In particular we will focus on aspects which are central to the cultural imagination of the Italian Renaissance, such as the donna angelicata and the poet, the cortegiano and the peasant, the prince and the artist.
The course will give students a solid introduction to the literature of the period and provide them with a theoretical framework for a thorough discussion of the material. Readings will include poems, essays and plays by classic Italian writers Francesco Petrarca, Baldessar Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, as well as works by other significant writers, such as Lorenzo de' Medici, Ruzante, and Gaspara Stampa.

ITAS 320 – THE LANDSCAPE OF ITALIAN POETRY

The course is dedicated to the representation and exploration of landscape in the Italian poetic tradition. By studying how the varied and beautiful Italian landscape found expression in the literary works of major poets, students will be exposed to a rich body of work and the tradition it both follows and renews. In particular, the course will focus on a series of specific themes giving special attention to language and style: these will include the opposition between rural and urban landscapes; the tension between dialects and the national language; the complex dynamics of tradition and innovation. Through initial exposure to selected classical poets, including Dante and Petrarch, students will gain in-depth knowledge of the main formal structures of Italian poetry, from the classical sonnet, going on to free verse. In addition, we will read poems by the Italian greats of the twentieth century, namely Ungaretti, Saba and Montale; as well as works by contemporary poets such as Caproni, Sereni and Valduga.