ITAL 830

Professor Maggie Fritz-Morkin
Th 9:30-12:00
Dey 208

This comparative course theorizes textual claustrophobia across a variety of literary genres and epochs, with special attention to premodern Italian texts, including works by Francesco Petrarca, Torquato Accetto, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Maria Celeste Galilei, with further consideration of modern works by Alba de Cespedes, Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, and Chris Kraus. Students will develop analytic skills in codicology and philology, become familiar with issues in the production and circulation of early print works, and practice comparative reading. Contemporary critical and theoretical works by Laurent Berlant, Elizabeth Freeman, Giorgio Agamben, Fred Moten, and others will suggest frameworks for studying the subjective experiences of time and space that lock us into perceptions, perspectives, identities, and regimes of power.

Accessible in Italian and English.

Repeat rules: May be repeated for credit; may be repeated in the same term for different topics; 9 total credits. 3 total completions.

Tu 2:00-4:30, Dey 209

Prof. Serenella Iovino (serenella.iovino@unc.edu)

Pier Paolo Pasolini è uno degli intellettuali più importanti e prolifici del XX secolo. La sua produzione spazia dalla poesia alla letteratura, dal cinema alla critica culturale e sociale. In tutti questi campi è stato portatore di una visione engagée, potente e originale, capace di infrangere ogni luogo comune. E soprattutto, è stato capace di pensare e poetare attraverso il corpo: il proprio, quello altrui, e il corpo politico dell’Italia.

In occasione del centenario della nascita del poeta, questo corso esamina il nesso tra corpi, luoghi e paesaggi nella sua opera. Dalla Bologna delle sue prime esperienze culturali allo scenario apocalittico di Salò, set del suo ultimo film, leggeremo insieme poesie, articoli, opere narrative, film e altri documenti per conoscere meglio un protagonista assoluto della cultura italiana e il suo tempo.

Dr. Maggie Fritz-Morkin

In the century before Dante finalized his Divine Comedy, experimental poetic communities flourished first in Sicily’s imperial court and then in the municipalities of Tuscany and northern Italy. This seminar traces the origins of literature written in Italian vernaculars, with emphasis on the topics of court culture, multiethnic Sicily, Christian and Jewish religious poetry, genre formation, tenzoni and public debate, puzzles and riddles, satire, and the philosophical turn of the Dolce stil novo. Students will also
acquire familiarity with issues in manuscript culture, paleography, and the textual transmission of Italy’s early lyric tradition. Taught in Italian and English; students must have reading and listening competency in both languages, but may speak and write in
either.

Taught Thursday from 2-4:30.

Dr. Jennifer Mackenzie

jennifer.mackenzie@unc.edu

This course examines the theory of the “birth of the individual” in the Renaissance; the theory that the individual’s emancipation from the pressures of genealogical relationships began in some crucial ways at this historical juncture. This commonplace in Renaissance Studies, which evolved from Jacob Burckhardt to Stephen Greenblatt, has been made to bear new weight in recent years: with Peter Sloterdijk’s positioning of the “bastard” at the heart of modernity’s illusions and crises (Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit: über das anti-genealogische Experiment der Moderne, 2015); anthropological and literary studies exposing the surprising persistence of concepts like “dynasty” and “genealogy” in modern contexts; and a contemporary culture that is
yoking identity with ancestry more often, in tandem with reckonings around indigeneity and race, and discomforts with classical liberalism.

After framing the problem, this course returns to Renaissance sources that illuminate what happened there to notions of individuality and kin. We begin with the so-called nobility debates of the late Middle Ages, and the “virtue politics” of the humanist positions that shifted nobility from the bloodline to the inner life and its public expressions. Other topics may include the incredible genealogies of the early modern dynasties and their surprising contributions to modern historiographical norms; women and homosexuality in genealogical discourses; the struggles and triumphs of illegitimacy and bastardy in the Renaissance; the migration of the metaphors and tools of genealogy into other domains such as philology, linguistics, and critique; and the construction of alternative families – spiritual, artistic, intellectual – towards the formation of local and proto-national communities.

Our early modern sources will include canonical and lesser-known figures, mostly but not exclusively from the Italian peninsula: Boccaccio, Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Ariosto, Tasso, Giorgio Vasari, Erasmus, hakespeare. We will also navigate an interdisciplinary secondary bibliography, in social and legal history, women’s studies, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. The course may serve as an introduction to the Italian Renaissance and Renaissance humanism, for early modernists and modernists alike in Romance Studies and adjacent departments. We will conduct our discussions in English, around primary texts typically in Italian or Latin, with the support of English-language translations where possible and alternate readings otherwise.

Tuesdays 2-4:30pm

Fall 2021: Calvino e l’ambiente

Prof. Serenella Iovino (serenella.iovino@unc.edu)

Pochi scrittori hanno tanto ambiente nelle loro opere come Italo Calvino. Ne scrive per tutta la vita sui giornali, a cominciare da quando, nel 1946, si lamenta del degrado nel centro storico di Sanremo sul Politecnico, e un anno dopo, sull’Unità, si chiede che cosa abbiano pensato le capre sacrificate negli esperimenti atomici statunitensi al largo dell’atollo di Bikini.

Ma Calvino non parla di ambiente solo negli articoli che pubblica sui quotidiani. Il suo ambientalismo è nelle sue opere: nella sua fiction, nei suoi saggi. Ed è una questione di luoghi e di radici, di paesaggi che scompaiono sotto il cemento e di industrie che inquinano l’aria, i pensieri e l’informazione. È una questione di uomini spersi nella grande città alla ricerca di un albero o di aria buona, di operai che ieri erano contadini e ora sono alla catena di montaggio, di lavoratori che muoiono nelle cave di amianto, appena fuori Torino. L’ambientalismo di Calvino è nelle città immaginate che rincorrono o anticipano l’immaginario dell’abitare, con i suoi problemi di sostenibilità, sovrappopolazione, globalizzazione, e la memoria che di tutto ciò si genera e si perde. È la libertà di uno sguardo che si stacca dall’umano e si perde nel volo degli uccelli o negli amori estivi delle tartarughe. È l’attenzione all’altro chiuso nelle gabbie degli zoo e nei laboratori, ed è l’attenzione all’altro umano: per esempio, quello che abita nell’“ultima città dell’imperfezione” del Cottolengo, quasi un clandestino nel perimetro politico dell’umanità.  Infine, ambiente in Calvino è l’avventura evolutiva dell’universo che guarda se stesso crescere e giocare, e si racconta, un po’ dispettoso ma fedele alla sua natura di non avere mai un centro.

In questo seminario esamineremo l’ambientalismo di Italo Calvino nella chiave delle environmental humanities. Attraverso uno studio sistematico di tutte le sue opere maggiori—Il barone rampante, La speculazione edilizia, La nuvola di smog, Marcovaldo, La giornata d’uno scrutatore, Le città invisibili, Palomar, Le cosmicomiche—procederemo a un’esplorazione che, attraverso Calvino, guarda anche al mondo fuori di lui, e alle questioni ecologiche che in questo mondo hanno le loro radici, incluso il famigerato Antropocene.

Spring 2021: Lives and Afterlives of the Decameron.

This comparative course begins with a critical reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron in the context of the 14th c. global plague pandemic. Special focus on collective trauma and the body politic, premodern medicine, legal culture, and post-pandemic creativity. Additional attention to medieval theories of authorship, manuscript culture, epistemology, translation, and censorship. The second part of the course combines a broad survey of the myriad Covid-19-era creative projects inspired directly by the Decameron with theoretical readings on the politics, semiotics, and aesthetics of contagion.

The seminar will be taught in English and can accommodate learners of English and Italian. Students with reading/ speaking knowledge of Italian are encouraged to work in the original language, and coursework may be written in either language. Thursdays, 9:30-12:00, taught remotely via Zoom.

Spring 2021: Humanism and Anthropology.

This course explores intellectual histories that link Renaissance humanism and antiquarianism to the modern disciplines of ethnography and anthropology. The semester will begin with topics in the study of the Renaissance: the discovery of classical antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of historical distance; princely and private collecting; the use of images and objects as evidence. Our guides are fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists such as Petrarch, Alberti, Biondo, and Budé, together with scholarship that has grappled profoundly with their achievements. With figures like Montaigne and the Paduan proto-Egyptologist Lorenzo Pignoria, we will consider next how humanist methods were applied to the so-called New Worlds opened to geographical explorations and imperial ambitions in Early Modernity. The last part of the course explores the constitution of Renaissance studies and anthropology as academic disciplines. Two intellectuals especially come into focus here: Aby Warburg (1866-1929), “father” of a Renaissance art history haunted and energized by a fledgling anthropology; and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), the “father” of a structural anthropology haunted and energized by its humanist past.

Discussions will be conducted primarily in English with sources available in English translations and their original languages (Italian, Latin, French, German) whenever possible. The course is for advanced undergraduates and graduate students from a range of departments.

Fall 2020: Emergencies: From Pandemics to Climate Change.

This seminar analyzes in a comparative perspective the ways literature and other arts interpret traumatic exposure to viruses and try to respond to the challenges of global warming. Texts include classics like Boccaccio, Defoe, Manzoni, and Camus as well as contemporary sci-fi and cli-fi.

Taught in English. Open to Undergraduate Students.

Fall 2020: Romance/Romanzo: Philological Histories of a Literary Genre

This seminar positions romance alongside many of the textual practices that have been associated in modernity with the discipline of philology: editing, correcting, commentating, and interpreting. At the center of the course are canonical narrative poems by Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso that became decisive for the definition of romance as a genre in the sixteenth century. Alongside selected readings from these poems, we explore how they were read, printed, and packaged for different reading publics, both by their authors, and in the decades and centuries following their composition, while embedded in debates and power-plays about vernacular languages, literary canons, genres, authorship, and the printed book. This means that we read from multiple editions of the romances in question; from the paratextual apparatuses and commentaries produced by some of their editors, translators, supporters, and critics; and from scholarship dedicated to these poems, both Italian and Anglo-American, that has variously laid their philological histories in the background and in the foreground of its inquiries. With these diverse sources, we consider how the authorship, textual histories, study, and even enjoyment of romance is and has been intertwined. In the background, we will be exploring how the much-neglected practice(s) of philology in the contemporary humanities represent not only a conglomerate of scholarly skills and techniques (i.e. skills which a professional would use to create a critical edition, for example), but also possible subjects of scholarly inquiry and experience, connected as much with literary criticism and “reading for pleasure” as with cultural studies and the history of the book.

Reading knowledge of Italian is recommended but not required, while English is the primary language of discussion in class. Participants primarily working in adjacent linguistic and literary traditions such as French, Spanish, and English are invited to follow along with English translations (provided), and to explore connections relevant to their research in written and in-class contributions. All will be guided to work with UNC’s special collections. It is recommended that participants read some of the Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso and/or Gerusalemme Liberata before the seminar begins, in an edition of choice.

Spring 2020: Ecocriticism: Major Theoretical Trends in Conversation with Italian Literature.

This course provides an in-depth introduction to the most relevant theories and methods of environmental literary criticism (e.g. animal humanities, biosemiotics, new materialisms, environmental justice, ecofeminism, posthumanism, postcolonial studies, multispecies ethnography). Students will read authors such as Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, and others, through these lenses and by using a comparative perspective. Taught in English.

Fall 2019: Italy’s Landscapes of Resistance: Cultivating Creativity in Critical Environments.

Naples and the landscapes of ecomafia and volcanic eruptions; death in Venice as a literary trope and a petrochemical curse; the slow pace of wine, food and environmental violence in Piedmont: these are some of the landscapes that this course will analyses. Using the trans-disciplinary methodology of the environmental humanities, we will heed the forces, wounds, and messages of creativity dispersed on Italy’s body, arguing that a literature, an art, and a criticism that are able to transform these unexpressed voices into stories are not only ways to resist, but also a practice of liberation.

Fall 2019: Ante Dante: The Origins of Vernacular Italian Literature.

In the century before Dante finalized his Divine Comedy, experimental poetic communities flourished first in Sicily’s Imperial court and then in the municipalities of Tuscany and northern Italy. This seminar traces the origins of literature written in Italian vernaculars, with emphasis on the topics of courtly love, religious poetry, genre formation, tenzoni and public debate, puzzles and riddles, satire, and the philosophical turn of the Dolce stil novo. Students will also acquire familiarity with issues in manuscript culture and premodern textual transmission. Taught in Italian and English; students must have reading and listening competency in both languages, but may speak and write in either.

Spring 2019: Layers of the Anthropocene: Calvino and Italy/ Strati dell’Antropocene: Calvino e l’Italia.

Since the beginning of the new Millennium, a suspicion has troubled geologists: what if the Holocene has come to an end? The epoch of relative climatic stability which saw the emergence of agriculture, writing, cultural practices and industrial processes, geographic explorations and demographic growth, Master Narratives and Great Acceleration, might indeed be over. In its place, a new epoch could have already begun, characterized by the trace left by humans on the planet and all its living systems. The “Anthropocene” is the name given to this epoch, which is attracting literary scholars for its very narrative power. Like never before, a geological paradigm is able to unify in a single framework apparently disconnected phenomena, such as global warming, mass extinction, the dramatic changes that affect both the surface and depths of our planet, oceanic pollution, social injustice, and genetic drift.

This course undertakes a literary exploration across the layers of the Anthropocene, using Italy as a privileged observatory and Italo Calvino’s works as a “geo-narrative sensor.” Besides being famous for systematically bridging literature and science, Calvino is the first Italian author to have inadvertently mirrored the parable of the Great Acceleration in his works.

Consistent with the geological paradigm, we will follow the Anthropocene’s layers as they are revealed through Calvino’s oeuvre: atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, sociosphere, and technosphere. The texts we will examine are both literary and material texts: on the one hand, Calvino’s writings from the late 1940s to the posthumous Six Memos for the Next Millennium, on the other hand, places and bodies, landscapes and cells, stones and ants, clouds of smog and clouds of data. As our theoretical background, we will use the most advanced environmental humanities discourses as well as exemplary texts of trans-disciplinary criticism. Constantly keeping in mind the vaster planetary dynamics, our look will eventually zoom in on one point: Italy.

For more details, please see the full course syllabus.

Fall 2018: Boccaccio’s Cities

This seminar will cover Boccaccio’s Decameron and some of his minor works in their critical traditions. Special attention will be paid to the contrasting civic cultures of Naples and Florence, and to Boccaccio’s representation of women in these two cities. Students must have reading and aural comprehension of Italian, but may opt to speak and write in English in consultation with the professor.

Fall 2017: Primo Levi

Primo Levi’s literary production is associated with the experience of the Holocaust and the act of witnessing. We will explore the nature of Levi’s writing and its unique position within Italian literary history. We will also address Levi’s work in relation to contemporary debates on non-human actants and the camp as a biopolitical paradigm. In addition to the weekly readings and active class participation, students will write one article-length research paper and make class presentations of critical works. Course taught in Italian, with materials in Italian and English.

Reading List (more texts available on Sakai)

• Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (1998)
• Mario Barenghi, Perché crediamo a Primo Levi?- Why do we believe Primo Levi? (2013)
• Marco Belpoliti, Primo Levi. Di fronte e di profilo (2015)
• Jonathan Druker, Primo Levi and Humanism after Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections (2009)
• Primo Levi, Opere complete (2016) [or selected novels and short stories]

Spring 2017: Petrarch’s Many Tongues

While Contini famously described Petrarch’s vernacular lyric as “monolinguistic” for its unity of style and lexicon, the poet’s Latin works show his experimentation with classical aesthetics of mordant satire and invective. Petrarch obsessively revisited and revised his Canzoniere over several decades until his death, while concurrently composing Latin speeches, epistles, treatises, dialogue, and epic; consideration of his literary self-fashioning must therefore consider his production in both languages.

This course will examine the critical traditions of Petrarch’s lyric production and his protohumanist engagement with Ciceronian style and genres. Students will practice tailoring critical and research methods to the particular exigencies of different kinds of texts. Knowledge of Italian and English is essential, and reading knowledge of Latin is a major asset.

Students must have reading and aural comprehension of Italian, but they may speak and write in English if they prefer.

Fall 2016: War, Tourism and the Gendering of Allied-Occupied Italy

Italy is a woman.

Historians, literary scholars, anthropologists agree that Europe’s internal other has long been rhetorically gendered female. An outgrowth of Enlightenment environmental determinism, Italy’s feminization is crucial in understanding Anglo-Italian dynamics as seen in foreign diplomacy, cultural production and consumption, and tourist practices. Structured dualistically, feminized Italy is privileged as the ultimate object of the travelers’ desire and the focus of their pen, while also represented from within and across its borders as a ‘fallen’ woman, having failed to live up to its illustrious Roman origins. Starting from a consideration of Italy’s feminization in political rhetoric, travel writing and tourism, this class examines the gendering of Italy precisely during the watershed moment of Anglo-Italian relations: the Allied occupation during World War II, a time when Italy-as-whore acquired newfound resonance. After allying itself with Nazi Germany, the Italian government signed the September 8^th armistice with the Allies; the view that Italy “betrayed” Germany and “prostituted” herself to the Allies was substantiated by an explosion of street prostitution in the Allied-occupied cities, confirming—in the eyes of many—the weak, feminine Italian character exhibited in the Armistice.

We will consider a range of texts, produced by both Anglo-Americans and Italians, including novels, films, diaries, and military guide books. Course taught in English, with materials in English and Italian (translations/accommodations provided for students from other departments who are not proficient in Italian).

Fall 2015: Italian Detective Novel

We will read some of the most significant crime and detective novels of modern Italian literature, including works by Italo Svevo, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Leonardo Sciascia. We will also explore comparatively the origins and margins of this literary genre, from Edgar Allan Poe and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño, and discuss its contemporary appeal and transformations. Critical theory addressing detective fiction and notions of truth and evidence will be a significant part of class work. Also film adaptations will be part of the course.

Spring 2015: Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s multifaceted, provocative, and visionary production as a poet and novelist, filmmaker and essayist, semiotician and playwright is still a mysterious and largely misunderstood object. The course will focus on the decolonial, primitivist, non-modern, and exoticist motifs of Pasolini’s work. We will watch some of Pasolini’s films – such as Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana and Medea – and read a selection of his poems, novels, and essays including Petrolio, Le ceneri di Gramsci and Scritti corsari. We will also read critical texts on Pasolini and aesthetics and postcoloniality by Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, Frantz Fanon, and Bruno Latour.

Spring 2013: Italian Theory

Taking as a point of departure Roberto Esposito’s  Pensiero vivente. Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana (2010) – which represents one of the most significant attempts to grasp the specicifity of the “Italian difference” – the course will explore the naturalistic and vitalistic dimensions of Italiain thought. Guided by Esposito’s book chapters and other critical essays, we will read and discuss texts by Machiavelli, Bruno, Vico, Cuoco, Leopardi, De Sanctis, Beccaria, Gramsci, Pasolini, Negri, Muraro and other Italian writers and thinkers.

Fall 2010: Italian Biopolitical Thought

Taking as a point of departure the post-structuralist debate about “immanent life” and “bio-power”, the course will explore the radical politics of life emerged in contemporary Italian philosophy, literature, and cultural theory. In particular, we will discuss the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, as seen through the lenses of Italian biopolitics.

Spring 2010: Luigi Pirandello

What is the difference between Pirandello and “pirandellismo”? What happens to the bourgeois conceptions of subjectivity once they enter the “Pirandellian writing machine”? By reading and commenting together some of Pirandello’s classic texts we will try to answer to these (and many other) questions.