ITALIAN

ITALIAN (ITAL)

Basic Language Courses

SM 110. Elementary Italian I. (C)

For students who have never studied Italian or who have had very little exposure to the language. Students who have already studied Italian are required to take the placement test. Class work emphasizes the development of speaking and listening comprehension, reinforced by work in reading and writing. Course includes an introduction to aspects of Italian culture. Out-of-class homework requires work with the Internet, audio and video materials.

SM 112. Accelerated Elementary Italian. (C) Prerequisite(s): Proficiency in another foreign language.

An intensive two-credit course covering the first and second semester of the elementary year. See descriptions of Italian 110 and 120. Students must have departmental permit to register.

SM 120. Elementary Italian II. (C) Prerequisite(s): Completion of Italian 110 or placement into 2nd semester Italian.

Continuation of Italian 110.

SM 130. Intermediate Italian I. (C) Prerequisite(s): Completion of Italian 120 at Penn or a placement score between 450 and 540 on the Achievement Exam (SAT II).

Italian 130 is the first half of a two-semester intermediate sequence designed to help you attain a level of proficiency that will allow you to function comfortably in an Italian-speaking environment. The course will build on your existing skills in Italian, increase your confidence and your ability to read, write, speak and understand the language, and introduce you to more refined lexical items, more complex grammatical structures, and more challenging cultural material. You are expected to have already learned the most basic grammatical structures in elementary Italian and to review these. The course textbook, together with all supplementary materials, will allow you to explore culturally relevant topics and to develop cross-cultural skills through the exploration of similarities and differences between your native culture and the Italian world. As in other Italian courses at Penn, class will be conducted entirely in Italian. Your attendance and participation is of the utmost importance because you will work collaboratively with your classmates and your instructor towards increased linguistic competence and a more complex understanding of Italian culture. You will be expected to complete homework exercises for class. Written and oral assignments will provide structured practice of linguistic forms, while also challenging your creative skills.

SM 134. Accelerated Intermediate Italian. (C) Prerequisite(s): Italian 112 or permission of the instructor; proficiency in another foreign language.

An intensive two-credit course covering the first and second semester of the intermediate year. See descriptions of Italian130 and 140. Students must have departmental permit to register. Also offered in the summer Penn-in-Florence program in Italy.

SM 140. Intermediate Italian. (C) Prerequisite(s): Completion of Italian 130 or placement into fourth-semester Italian.

The continuation of Italian 130.

SM 180. Italian Conversation in Residence. (E) Must be resident of the Modern Languages College House.

One credit may be granted to students who live at the Casa Italiana for an entire year and who, by special arrangement with the Italian Resident Advisor of the Modern Languages College House, complete an agreed upon project and demonstrate satisfactory performance on an oral examination.

Undergraduate-Level Courses

SM 080. (CINE240, COML080) Introduction to Italian Cinema. (C) Arts & Letters Sector. All Classes.

Italian national cinema from the Golden Age of silent film and classics of Neorealism to present, covering work of a dozen major directors. Films discussed in context of history from the Unification, national vs. regional identity, gender roles, contemporary politics. Readings in Italian history, Italian film history, and theory of cinema. Taught in English.

SM 200. Medieval Culture. (M)

Topics will vary.

SM 202. Advanced Italian. (C) Prerequisite(s): Open to students who have completed the language requirement.

This course aims at developing and deepening language abilities acquired in the first two years of study; it also prepares students for upper-level courses in literature, culture or cinema. Students will increase their vocabulary and speaking skills through the reading, analysis and discussion of Niccolo Amanniti's best-selling novel Io non ho paura. Other reading materials will open windows onto aspects of contemporary Italian culture and society. We will place special emphasis on a thorough review of advanced grammar. Short weekly compositions and a final project will develop writing skills. This course is a prerequisite for other 200-level courses.

SM 208. Business Italian I. (M)

The major purpose of the course, which is conducted entirely in Italian and therefore requires an intermediate/high, to advanced level of the language, is to enable students to acquire language proficiency in the area of the current Italian labor world, so that they can read and comprehend business publications, write and compose business texts, and participate in business-related conversations. Business terminology will be placed within the framework of many different international work situations and practices, such as industry, trade, insurance, banking, agriculture, communications, etc. Classes will also include lectures on current political, economic, and labor developments in Italy as well as an examination of various Italian views on the creation of the European Internal Market. The course will emphasize, through Italian newspapers and magazine articles, the differences between Italian and American business practices and cultural differences, such as the attitude of the Italian towards money, work, leisure, and consumerism, which will help students to understand the specific nature of the Italian world.

SM 213. (CINE240, COML214) Contemporary Italy Through Film. (M) Arts & Letters Sector. All Classes.

Topics will vary. Course may be co-taught.

SM 220. Cultura E Letteratura. (C) Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only.

Taught in Florence.

SM 222. Topics in Italian Cinema. (C)

SM 232. (COML234) The World of Dante. (M)

Dante's masterpiece in context of 14th century culture. Selected cantos will connect with such topics as books and readers in the manuscript era, life in society dominated by the Catholic church (sinners vs. saints, Christian pilgrimage routes, the great Franciscan and Dominican orders), Dante's politics as a Florentine exile (power struggles between Pope and Emperor), his classical and Biblical literary models, his genius as a poet in the medieval structures of allegory, symbolism, and numerology. Field trip to University of Pennsylvania Rare Book Collection. Text in Italian with facing English translation.

SM 260. Worldviews in Collision. (M) Distribution Course in Hist & Tradition. Class of 2009 & prior only.

This course explores the radical conflicts that developed in the 16th and 17th century Europe when Protestant reformers, scientific discoveries, and geographical explorations challenged a long-held Medieval worldview and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. These historical developments will be studied in comparison with parallel modern issues, such as Darwinism, separation of church and state, multicultural religious conflicts. Historical readings: Machiavelli's comic play Mandragola, the vitriolic polemic involving Martin Luther, Thomas More, and King Henry VII; Thomas Campanella's Utopian dialogue The City of the Sun, selections from the scientists Copernicus and Galileo, and from The History of the Council of Trent by the Venetian Paolo Sarpi. Modern texts: Osborne's Luther, Brecht's Galileo, and a classic Hollywood film Utopia, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon. In introductory and final units, we shall consider how 16th and 17th century poetry and visual arts mirrored their turbulent times, with an attention to the Petrarchan tradition (Vittoria Colonna, Marino) and stylistic changes in Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture from Renaissance to Mannerist to Baroque.

SM 280. Films From Literature. (M) Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only.

Topics vary.

SM 288. Modern Italian Culture. (M)

Topics will vary.

SM 300. (CINE340, COML300, HIST322) Topics in Italian History, Literature, and Culture. (M) Distribution Course in Hist & Tradition. Class of 2009 & prior only. Topics will vary.

SM 310. (COML310, GSOC310) The Medieval Reader. (M) May be counted as a General Requirement Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only.

Through a range of authors including Augustine, Dante, Petrarch, Galileo, and Umberto Eco, this course will explore the world of the book in the manuscript era. We will consider 1) readers in fiction-male and female, good and bad; 2) books as material objects produced in monasteries and their subsequent role in the rise of the universities; 3) medieval women readers and writers; 4) medieval ideas of the book as a symbol (e.g., the notion of the world as God's book); 5) changes in book culture brought about by printing and electronicmedia. Lectures with discussion in English, to be supplemented by slide presentations and a field trip to the Rare Book Room in Van Pelt Library. No prerequisites. Readings available either in Italian or English.

SM 322. (COML280, CINE240) Italian Cinema. (M) Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only.

The course will consist of a broad and varied sampling of classic Italian films from WWII to the present. The curriculum will be divided into four units: (1) The Neorealist Revolution, (2) Metacinema, (3) Fascism and War Revisited, and (4) Postmodernism or the Death of the Cinema. One of the aims of the course will be to develop a sense of "cinematic literacy"--to develop critical techniques that will make us active interpretators of the cinematic image by challenging the expectations that Hollywood has implanted in us: that films be action-packed wish-fulfillment fantasies. Italian cinema will invite us to re-examine and revise the very narrow conception that we Americans have of the medium. We will also use the films as a means to explore the postwar Italian culture so powerfully reflected, and in turn, shaped, by its national cinema. Classes will include close visual analysis of films using video clips and slides. The films will be in Italian with English subtitles and will include works of Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini, Wertuller, Rossellini, Rossellini, Bertolucci and Moretti.

Students will be asked actively to participate in class discussion, and to write a series of critical papers keyed to the units around which the course will be organized. Substantial Writing Component.

SM 333. (COML333, ENGL223, ENGL323) Dante's Divine Comedy. (M) Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only. Prerequisite(s): Proficiency in Italian. When crosslisted with ENGL 332, this is a Benjamin Franklin Seminar.

In this course we will read the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, focusing on a series of interrelated problems raised by the poem: authority, fiction, history, politics and language. Particular attention will be given to how the Commedia presents itself as Dante's autobiography, and to how the autobiographical narrative serves as a unifying thread for this supremely rich literary text. Supplementary readings will include Virgil's Aeneid and selections from Ovid's Metamorphoses. All readings and written work will be in English. Italian or Italian Studies credit will require reading Italian text the original language and writing about their themes in Italian. This course may be taken for graduate credit, but additional work and meetings with the instructor will be required.

SM 335. Medieval and Renaissance Literature. (M) Taught in Florence.

This course will involve close study of the two major narrative works to emerge from medieval Florence. We will take advantage of the study-abroad experience to relate our readings closely to the city and region in which we are living, with visits to neighborhoods and monuments important to the authors or illustrative of the cultural forces that shaped their texts, as well as to the Casa di Dante in central Florence, and the residence of Boccaccio in the Tuscan hill-town of Certaldo. The classes will be dedicated to in-depth interpretation of Dante's "Inferno", of Boccaccio's "Decameron", and the relationship between their vastly different, yet kindred views of the human condition. The course will be given in English. This course may be taken for Italian language credit provided students do reading and writing assignments in Italian. It may also be taken for graduate credit, but additional work and meetings with instructors will be required.

SM 340. (HIST338) Topics in the Renaissance. (M)

Content Varies. Possible contents may be: Renaissance Women Writers, Love and Sexuality in the Renaissance.

SM 351. Mad Love. (M)

The history of an emotion and how it emerges in Italian literature, music and film.

SM 380. (CINE340) Italian Literature of the 20th Century. (M) Distribution Course in Arts & Letters. Class of 2009 & prior only.

Topics vary, covering a range of genres and authors.

The reading material and the bibliographical references will be provided in a course reader. Further material will be presented in class. Requirements include class attendance, preparation, and participation, a series of oral responses, and a final oral presentation.

SM 383. 20th-Century Italian Novel. (M)

SM 385. Modern Theater. (M)

A study of theater in Italian, beginning with Pirandello.

398. Honors Thesis. (C)

399. Independent Study. (C)

499. Independent Study. (A)

Graduate-Level Courses

SM 501. Italian Literary Theory. (M) Taught occasionally. This requirement is normally satisfied by taking the Comparative Literature course in literary theory.

Basic issues in literary theory.

SM 520. (COML520) Medieval "Autobiography": Augustine to Petrarch. (M) Brownlee.

The development of a new authorial subject in Medieval and Early Modern first-person narrative.

SM 530. (COML531) Medieval Italian Literature. (M)

Medieval Italian society, art, intellectual and political history.

SM 531. (COML533, ITAL333) Divina Commedia I. (M) This course may sometimes be taught as the first part of a two-semester sequence.

"Divine Comedy" in the context of Dante's medieval worldview and culture.

SM 532. (COML532) Divina Commedia II. (M) Prerequisite(s): Italian 531.

"Divine Comedy" in the context of Dante's medieval worldview and culture.

SM 534. (COML534, WSTD534) Women in Poetry. (M) Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of Italian.

Poetry by women and about women.

SM 535. (COML524) Petrarch. (M)

Petrarch's life and work in the context of Italian and European culture and society.

SM 539. (COML539) Numerology and Literature. (M)

Traditions of Western number symbolism.

SM 540. (COML540, ENGL540, SPAN540) Topics: Renaissance Culture. (M)

Renaissance Italian society, art, intellectual and political history.

SM 562. (COML508) World Views in Collision. (M)

The impact of paradigm shifts on Italian and European culture.

SM 588. (ARTH583, CINE548, COML587) Cinema and the Sister Arts. (M)

Cinema as a pan-generic system constructed of other art forms, including fiction, theater, painting, photography, music and dance.

SM 601. Italian Literary Theory. (M)

Issues in Literary Theory. Advanced level course.

SM 602. Tools of the Trade. (M)

Theoretical and practical aspects of academic research.

SM 630. (COML630, FREN630) Medieval Italian Lierature. (M)

Medieval Italian society, art, intellectual and political history. Advanced level course.

SM 631. (COML632) Dante's Commedia. (M)

"Divine Comedy" in the context of Dante's medieval worldview and culture. Advanced level course.

SM 634. Woman's Place. (M)

Poetry by women and about women. Advanced level course.

SM 640. (COML641) Studies in the Italian Renaissance. (M)

Renaissance Italian society, art, intellectual and political history. Advanced level course.

SM 660. 18th Century Italian Culture. (M)

18th century Italian society, art, intellectual and political history.

SM 672. Narrativa '800-'900. (M)

Modern and contemporary Italian fiction.

SM 684. 20th-Century Novel. (M)

Contemporary Italian fiction

990. Masters Thesis. (C)

995. Dissertation. (C)

998. Tutorial. (C)

999. Independent Study. (C)