Introduction to the basic structures of the Hungarian language. Students with a schedule conflict should consult the instructor about the possibility of adjusting hours.
Same course as ITAL V1101-V1102.
Prerequisites: ITAL V1101 or the equivalent. Introduction to Italian grammar, with emphasis on reading, writing, listening and speaking skills.
An intensive course that covers two semesters of elementary Italian in one, and prepares students to move into Intermediate Italian. Students will develop their Italian communicative competence through listening, (interactive) speaking, reading and (interactive) writing. The Italian language will be used for real-world purposes and in meaningful contexts to promote intercultural understanding. This course is especially recommended for students who already know another Romance language. May be used toward fulfillment of the language requirement.
Prerequisites: ITAL W1112 or sufficient fluency to satisfy the instructor. Corequisites: Recommended: ITAL V1201-V/W1202 or ITAL W1201-W1202. Conversation courses may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or fulfill major or concentration requirements. Intensive practice in the spoken language, assigned topics for class discussions, and oral reports.
Prerequisites: ITAL W1222 or sufficient fluency to satisfy the instructor. Corequisites: Recommended: ITAL V3335x-V3336y. Conversation courses may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or fulfill major or concentration requirements. Practice in the spoken language through assigned topics on contemporary Italian culture.
Prerequisites: HNGR UN1101-UN1102 or the equivalent. Further develops a student's knowledge of the Hungarian language. With the instructor's permission the second term of this course may be taken without the first. Students with a schedule conflict should consult the instructor about the possibility of adjusting hours.
Prerequisites: ITAL V1102 or W1102, or the equivalent. If you did not take Elementary Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester.
Prerequisites: ITAL V1201 or W1201, or the equivalent. If you did not take Elementary Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester. A review of grammar, intensive reading, composition, and practice in conversation. Exploration of literary and cultural material. Lab: hours to be arranged. ITAL V1202 fulfils the basic foreign language requirement and prepares students for advanced study in Italian language and literature.
Prerequisites: Intermediate Italian II ITAL UN2102 or the equivalent. UN3334x-UN3333y is the basic course in Italian literature. UN3333: This course, entirely taught in Italian, introduces you to Medieval and early modern Italian literature. It will give you the opportunity to test your ability as a close-reader and discover unusual and fascinating texts that tell us about the polycentric richness of the Italian peninsula. We will read poems, tales, letters, fiction and non-fiction, travel writings and political pamphlets. The great “Three Crowns” - Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio - as well as renowned Renaissance authors such as Ludovico Ariosto and Niccolò Machiavelli, will show us the main path to discover Italian masterpieces and understand the European Renaissance. But we will also explore China with Marco Polo and the secrets of the Medieval soul diving into the mystical poems by Jacopone da Todi. We will study parody and laughter through the “poesia giocosa” (parodic poetry) by Cecco Angiolieri and the legacy of Humanism through the letters of Poggio Bracciolini. This first overview will allow you to explore Italian literature from its complex and multicultural beginnings to its diffusion across Europe during the Renaissance.
Prerequisites: ITALUN2102 or the equivalent. If you did not take Intermediate Italian at Columbia in the semester preceding the current one, you must take the placement test, offered by the Italian Department at the beginning of each semester. Written and oral self-expression in compositions and oral reports on a variety of topics; grammar review. Required for majors and concentrators.
Questo corso intende approfondire e perfezionare la conoscenza della lingua italiana attraverso la traduzione. I testi selezionati per il corso introdurranno inoltre gli studenti a diversi aspetti e linguaggi settoriali della lingua italiana. La traduzione dei testi sarà seguita da discussioni, brevi esercitazioni scritte e ricerche svolte sia individualmente che in gruppo. Tutti i testi indicati nel syllabus verranno forniti dall’insegnante così come le letture ed altro materiale didattico.
IN ITALIAN
This course explores the evolution of Italian Cinema from the pre-Fascist era to the millenium, and examines how films construct an image of Italy and the Italians. Special focus will be on the cinematic representations of gender. Films by major directors (Fellini, De Sica, Visconti) as well as by leading contemporaries (Moretti, Garrone, Rohrwacher) will be discussed.
Prerequisites: the faculty advisers permission. Senior thesis or tutorial project consisting of independent scholarly work in an area of study of the student’s choosing, under the supervision of a member of the faculty.
For graduate students and others who need to develop their reading knowledge of Italian. Open to undergraduate students as well, who want a compact survey/review of Italian structures and an approach to translation. Grammar, syntax, and vocabulary review; practice in reading and translating Italian texts of increasing complexity from a variety of fields, depending on the needs of the students. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Note: this course may not be used to satisfy the language requirement or to fulfill major or concentration requirements.
This seminar examines the many meanings of food in Italian culture and tradition; how values and peculiarities are transmitted, preserved, reinvented and rethought through a lens that is internationally known as ;Made in Italy;; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production, presentation, distribution, and consumption of food. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand the Italian taste through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how food can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary Italian society, in relation to the European context and a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. In English.
This course will offer an account of the multiple migrations out, in and through Italy since 1800. By combining history, literature, and film, and by approaching the topic through the lens of transnationalism, we will study different topics of Italian mobility, such as Exile and the Risorgimento, The Mediterranean in Motion, Migrants’ Experiences at Sea, The Great Italian “Exodus” to the Americas, Mobile Italy and its Colonies, The Lost Italian “Cosmopolitanisms” of the Middle East, Postwar Italian “National Refugees”, and Contemporary Migration to Italy. We will read masterpieces of Italian literature both by Italian-American authors and by contemporary migrants to Italy. We will watch some of the most important films and documentaries on these topics. And we will think about how such phenomena as Italian mass emigration in the long nineteenth century, Fascist colonialism and resettlement of populations in the twentieth century, postwar refugees, and contemporary immigrants to Italy are all intrinsically interconnected and make part of the same story. Overall, the aim of this course is to turn our gaze away from the territorially defined Italy, towards a view of Italy as a space on the move.
What does it mean to enter history through a life? This course will combine the Italian historiographical tradition of microstoria with the global turn in historical studies, in order to explore a series of microhistorical and biographical works. We will look at the biographies of people from the 15th to the 20th centuries who lived their lives on the move between empires and nation states and across continents and seas, and others who never left home but had something interesting to say about how their world went. We will read authors Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Linda Colley, Lucy Riall, Karl Jacoby, M’hamed Oualdi, Rebecca Solnit, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Victoria de Grazia, Javier Cercas, Colm Tóibín, and Lea Ypi, and we will learn about the adventures of a 16th-century French miller and his contemporary Muslim geographer Leo Africanus; an 18th-century Jamaican mixed-race woman who became part of world history; Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “Hero of the Two Worlds”; a 19th-century Texas slave who became a Mexican millionaire, and another who was enslaved as an Ottoman but died as an Italian; a late 1800s California pioneering photographer; an Ottoman Sephardic family through the 20th century; an Italian fascist and his jewish wife; a Spanish impostor who passed himself as a victim of Nazism; the contradictory life of Thomas Mann; and a woman who lived in communist and post-communist Albania. Through the micro-perspective of these individuals, the course will trace some of the big themes of the early modern and modern periods. Students will be invited to reflect on the possibilities opened up by ‘global microhistory’, on the prospects and limits of biography, and on how you can combine narrativity with scholarly argumentation. But, above all, we will enjoy the mere pleasure of reading
The course examines some of the most important novels that belong to Italys period of major social and economic transformations. Only after WWII Italy finally becomes a modern nation, i.e. a republic based on truly universal suffrage, and an industrialized country. Such accelerated progress, though,causes deep social instability and mobility which obviously results in heavy psychological pressures on the people: adaptation becomes crucial and inevitable. Fiction therefore resumes the task to represent such awkwardness of integration into a modern bourgeois society that, contrarily to its European and American counterpart, is extremely tentative and insecure per se, since its political identity has extremely precarious grounds. Among other authors, primary readings include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas The Leopard and Italo Calvinoss If on a Winters Night a Traveler. Primary Readings in Italian.
Mediterranean Humanities I explores the literatures of the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. We will read Boccaccio, and Cervantes, as well as Ottoman poetry, Iberian Muslim apocalyptic literature, and the Eurasian connected versions of the One Thousand and One Nights. We will dive into the travel of texts and people, stories and storytellers across the shores of the Middle Sea. Based on the reading of literary texts (love poetry, short stories, theater, and travel literature), as well as letters, biographies, memoirs, and other ego-documents produced and consumed in the Early Modern Mediterranean, we will discuss big themes as Orientalism, estrangement, forced mobility, connectivity, multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations. Also, following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and Erich Auerbach, we will reflect on the Mediterranean in the age of the first globalization as a laboratory of the modern global world and world literature.
Guided reading and research on a topic or in a field chosen by the student in consultation with a member of the faculty.