WINTER Courses 2008
20th Century Italian Fiction
Professor Patrick Rumble, Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
4 credits
This course presents a survey of 20th-century Italian fiction in historical and cultural context. During the course, students will read and discuss several novels or short stories by Italy’s most important modern authors, including Luigi Pirandello, Aldo Palazzeschi, Carlo Levi, Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Dacia Maraini, and others. Students are introduced to important concepts and developments in Italian literary history, and they are offered a broad understanding of Italian culture and history since the Unification of Italy in the late 1860s, with units on the rise of fascism, World War II and the Italian Resistance, the Southern Question, post-war reconstruction and the Italian “economic boom,” the literary avant-gardes since the 1960s, and new social movements and feminism since the 1970s.
The Anthropology of Italy (and the Mediterranean): An Anthropological Approach
Professor Conrad Kottak, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
4 credits
Anthropology’s four subfields are biological, archaeological, sociocultural, and linguistic anthropology. This course will survey Italy and related parts of the Mediterranean area from the perspective of those subfields. Shedding light on human origins and the first colonization of Europe are fossil finds such as Oreopithecus bamboli (an ancient ape) and the Ceprano Homo erectus fragment. Archaeologists, geneticists, and historical linguists have examined the ancient peopling of the region, from the spread of farming (illustrated by Ötzi, the Neolithic Iceman) through the Roman Empire. Also to be considered, historically and anthropologically, are the various groups, ethnic and otherwise, that have contributed to Italian unity and diversity. The course also will include regional ethnographic and community studies, as well as urban research and the anthropology of tourism. Finally we’ll consider unity and diversity in the Italian language and what that tells us about social differentiation and regional and class consciousness.
Experiencing and Understanding Culture, with a Focus on Italy
Professor Conrad Kottak, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan
4 credit
Students and professor simultaneously will be learning about a new culture (Italian culture) and experiencing and participating in it in various ways. We’ll share our reflections on, and accounts of, that experience throughout the course. Influencing our initial perceptions will be images, stereotypes, and narratives about Italy that we bring with us from the United States, a country with significant Italian immigration. No American can have escaped media images and stereotypes about Italy and Italians. This cultural anthropology course will explore, both systematically and experientially, how one understands other cultures, with a focus on Italy. The course will invoke the concept of levels of culture, including national culture, regional culture, local culture, and popular culture, as they apply to Italy and more generally. We will examine unity and diversity in Italian culture and society, in relation to such institutions as church, family, politics, and memory, and in the context of regional and class-based variation. The important contrast between north and south will provide students with exposure to the writing of Antonio Gramsci, routinely read internationally as a social theorist, as it pertains to what many Italians perceive as a major regional and cultural divide (North/South). We’ll see, too, that the popular culture produced and consumed in Italy has local, regional, national, and international dimensions.
Florentine Renaissance Art: From Lorenzo il Magnifico to Cosimo I: 1469-1539
Professor Josephine Rogers Mariotti, Florence Faculty, University of Michigan
4 credits, 2 sections
The course proposes to survey the development of the arts in Florence from the time of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (the Magnificent) to the reign of Cosimo I, the second Duke and the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. We will begin with a survey of the major workshops of late 15th century Florence: Pollaiolo, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio, whose culture and activities constitute the training ground of the masters of the High Renaissance. These include Leonardo, Raphael, Filippino Lippi, Fra Bartolomeo, Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, whose life-span covers the entire period under exam, and whose art will serve as a guideline throughout the course: Michelangelo’s early activity in Florence, his decorative cycles in the Vatican in Rome, and his later activity. The ‘rival’ prince of the papal court, Raphael Sanzio, will likewise be our focus, as both become paragons of a ‘golden age’ of classicism, dramatically interrupted by the ‘Sack of Rome’ of 1527.
The ‘post-peak’ era to follow begins with the experimental and expressively charged art of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and other Tuscan masters who, along with the followers of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome, are the protagonists of a transformation in style and content termed as ‘Mannerism’ or ‘Maniera,’ a label we will endeavor to define. The development of a self-conscious ‘stylish style’ in the 16th century brings us to admire the ‘court art’ of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, whose artists include some of the epoch greatest protagonists: Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Salviati, Parmigianino and Giambologna. More than monographic coverage of each artistic persona, our goal will be to reconstruct the stylistic and cultural interactions and environment in which the artists and patrons operated.
In-class sessions will alternate with visits to monuments and museums in and around Florence, allowing students to integrate their academic studies with direct experience of the works and artists under study.
Gender and Music
Professor Naomi Andre, Program in Women's Studies, University of Michigan
4 credits
This course explores how gender relates to music. Can music be masculine or feminine? Is there a gendered voice in music? What is at stake in thinking about music and gender? The course materials will incorporate different genres and styles of music from “classical” (e.g., opera and symphony) to “popular” (e.g., jazz and blues, rock and hip-hop). We will also discuss how gender and music interact in literature (readings include Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo and the poetry of Langston Hughes and Shakespeare). Several case studies will explore gender in opera from the representation of madness (famous “mad scenes”), exploring Balzac’s novella Sarrasine about an 18th-century Frenchman in Rome experiencing opera for the first time, and the roles for voices of women and the castrati in early 19th-century opera, In each analysis of opera in the past, we will also address how these operas still produce meaning for us today. While gender and music will be the focus of this seminar, we will also consider how this topic intersects with sexuality, race, class and ethnicity.
No previous musical background is required except that you be passionate about some type (any style or genre) of music. Grades will be based on class participation (discussion and short presentations), quizzes and papers.
Italian Opera: History, Literature, and Florence
Professor Naomi Andre, Program in Women's Studies, University of Michigan
4 credits
Unlike most other musical forms, opera is a genre that was deliberately invented; and this happened in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century by a group of intellectuals, who have become known as the “Florentine Camarata.” This course will cover topics in Italian opera from its earliest beginnings in Florence, through its flowering in the eighteenth century, full glory in “grand opera” of the nineteenth century, and the culmination of this tradition with Puccini’s operas in the early twentieth century. The five featured operas will be: Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Rossini’s Il barbiere di Seviglia (1816), Verdi’s Macbeth (1847) and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1918).
The overarching themes throughout the course will trace a historical trajectory of Italian opera from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, the development of Italian opera as a genre through comic and tragic plot lines, and the characterization of the singers’ voices that created the leading roles. A featured thread of this course is the centrality of Italy—and specifically Florence—in the selected operas. From the position of Italy as the leading operatic center for composers and singers, to it being a training ground for foreign composers (such as Mozart), this course will also examine how Italians treated Italian sources for plots (Ovid and Virgil for L’Orfeo and Gianni Schicchi from Dante’s Inferno) as well as foreign sources (Frenchman Beaumarchais for the two Figaro operas by Mozart and Rossini, and Shakespeare for Verdi’s Macbeth). Lectures will trace the history and development of Italian opera while focusing on a few specific operas that will be examined and analyzed in more depth. No musical prerequisites are required; all discussion of the music will be thoroughly explained in class. Grades will be based on class participation (discussion and short presentations), quizzes, and papers.
Shakespeare’s Italy
Prof. Enoch Brater, Department of English Literature, University of Michigan
4 credits
This course is designed to explore the profound influence Italy and Italian sources have had on the shape of Shakespeare’s dramatic accomplishment. In order to do so, the class will focus on five central concerns: The “reinvention” of Rome based on Shakespeare’s re-reading of Plutarch and Seutonius in Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus; the direct borrowings from Italian romance writers, such as Cinthio, from whom Shakespeare derives several narratives; the incorporation of additional sites and sources in comedies, tragedies and romances such as Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest; the idea of the Italian “renaissance” as embodied in Hamlet; and the development of a new lyrical language for drama and poetry (Shakespeare’s sonnets) based on the “dolce stile nuovo” of Dante and Petrarch.
Students in this course will be encouraged to visit the sites where these plays are said to have taken place (we will include this on the program’s trip to Rome) and consider as well other representations of the figures who appear in Shakespeare’s writing (Brutus and Lucrezia, for example) as they have been imagined by other artists in the sculpture and painting of the period. The course will conclude
with students performing scenes from the plays we have studied on the outdoor theater space on the villa lawn.
Writing Italy
Prof. Enoch Brater, Department of English Literature, University of Michigan
4 credits
This class focuses on the way in which authors from abroad have used Italy as a basis for their own writings. In doing so, we will focus our attention on a variety of works selected from a list that includes the poems of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning; Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View; selections form George Eliot and Henry James; Tim Parks’s An Italian Education and A Year with Verona; William Trevor’s My House in Umbria; and Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun. In order to take advantage of being “on site,” so to speak, student assignments will be based on their own encounters with Italy, in part traversing the same ground as the authors they are reading: writing about their reactions to the works of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi, two figures in Browning’s dramatic monologues; attending a soccer match; visiting the places where Eliot and James lived while in Florence; investigating the English Protestant cemetery, where several important writers about Italy are buried; and observing the Venice Mann imagined during our trip to that city. The course will begin with a “literary tour” of the city of Florence. Students will also be asked to keep a journal throughout the semester as a record of their own “writing Italy.”
Italian Cinema: Masterworks from Neorealism to the Present
Professor Stefano Socci, Theatre and Film History, Fine arts Academy of Brera, Milan, and Fine Arts Academy of Florence
4 credits
This course examines the historical, social and cultural roots of Italian Cinema, starting with the silent movies (Cabiria, 1913), and traces its development from Neorealism to the present. The course covers leading directors as Antonioni, Bertolucci, De Santis, De Sica, Fellini, Leone, Moretti, Pasolini, Rossellini, Taviani, Visconti. The course also offers an outline of main genres in Italian Cinema: drama, melodrama, comedy, spaghetti western, peplum (sandal movie). The main purposes of this course are: (1) to introduce students to major Italian movies from Neorealism to the present; (2) to examine some of the basic principles of film criticism; and (3) to show how Italian history is described by Italian directors.
Italian Language
Previous study of Italian is not required in order to apply for the program, as all non-language courses are taught in English. All program participants will be required to take one Italian language course and they are encouraged to study Italian prior to their participation in the program in order to facilitate their integration into Italian culture.
First Semester Italian
Professor Silvia Sammicheli
4 credits
Second Semester Italian
Professor Silvia Sammicheli
4 credits
Third Semester Italian
Professor Lucrezia Sarcinelli
4 credits
Fourth Semester Italian
Professor Lucrezia Sarcinelli
4 credits
Advanced Italian
Professor Lucrezia Sarcinelli
3 credits
 |
