ITAL 2900 - [Perspectives in Italian Culture]

(ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Fall. Not offered: 2024-2025. Next offered: 2025-2026. 3 credits. Student option grading.

“Core course” for the Italian major and the Italian minor, offered every year. Conducted in English with discussion section in Italian.

T. Campbell.

This course serves as an introduction to the close reading of, and critical engagement with, a range of sources from various periods of Italian literary and cultural history. In fact, since Italy doesn’t really cohere as a political entity until late in the nineteenth century, this course could just as easily be called Perspectives in Pre-Italian Culture. The questions of perspective-of who’s looking, what’s being looked at, and what we’re looking through-will haunt our readings from sources as varied as Dante’s Commedia, the reception history of St. Francis of Assisi, medieval visionary women, Michelangelo’s love lyrics, the novel (e.g. Moravia), the short story (e.g. Celati), film, and political philosophy. We’ll pay special attention to the way in which desire, pleasure, excess, and resistance structure the articulation of Italian-or more local, frequently urban-identities, and we’ll attempt too grapple with how, even as we get a kind of perspective on Italy, Italy always looks back at us with questions, desires, and a gaze of its own.