Our department offers a wide variety of courses that will pique your interest regardless of your background. Where else can you learn about bodies and machines in the French baroque theater, how languages in close geographic proximity change each other, and the strategies for carrying on a 36-year tradition of one of the most beloved Italian graphic novels ever?
This course will examine the impact of the counterculture of 1968 on Italian pop-music, both then and now. Students will analyze authors and musicians who openly took part in the cultural changes proposed at the time, as well as authors who mediated between traditional music and more socially committed music. Our material will include music, videos, documentaries, historical and cultural documents.
We will explore the concept of "Neo-Baroque" as defined by Calabrese, Ndalianis, and other contemporary thinkers, including examples of Neo-Baroque culture from contemporary literature, film, TV shows, games, interactive fiction, and social media. Includes sociological, aesthetic, and semiotic considerations. We will focus on Italian production, but with an ample comparative and interdisciplinary approach.
This course will focus on "internal" developments in the language while setting these against an "external"—historical and social—backdrop. We will investigate the evolution of the sound system (phonology), word formation (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and vocabulary, placing these developments within contemporary approaches to variation and change.
The study of the contact languages known as pidgins and creoles is fraught with controversy, which we will explore. First, we will observe many linguistic structures commonly associated with creole languages such as preverbal tense-mood-aspect (TMA) markers, aspect prominence, serial verbs, bimorphemic interrogatives, predicate clefting and ideophones.
We will explore the poetry and poetics of the French Renaissance from the Rhétoriqueurs to D’Aubigné and the Baroque poets. We will begin with Jean Molinet’s Art de rhétorique from the very end of the fifteenth century, which is both a treatise on poetry and an anthology of poems. Next we will read and discuss works ranging from Clément Marot and Marguerite de Navarre to the Pléiade (Ronsard, Du Bellay) and beyond.
Many literary works that are now considered canonical were once censored, or they were subjected to memorable trials. We will study both famous examples (Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal) and lesser-known censored works. At the crossroads between literary analysis, legal history, and the history of the book, this seminar aims to situate texts in their historical and political context.
You must gain permission to register in Individual Readings courses. Please download and complete the Permission for Individual Readings Form for permission to register for the following:
The College of Arts