Italian Language and Literature

82-90 Wall Street, 432.0595
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Giuseppe Mazzotta

Director of Graduate Studies
Giuseppe Mazzotta [F] (82-90 Wall, Rm 404, 432.0598, giuseppe.mazzotta@yale.edu)
Olivia Holmes [Sp] (Silliman 1837, 432.8299, olivia.holmes@yale.edu)

Professors
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Salvatore Nigro (Visiting [F]), Paolo Valesio

Assistant Professors
Francesca Cadel, Olivia Holmes, Kristin Phillips

Senior Lector and Language Program Director
Risa Sodi

Visiting faculty from other universities are regularly invited to teach courses in the department.

Fields of Study
The Italian department brings together several disciplines for the study of the Italian language and its literature. Although the primary emphasis is on a knowledge of the subject throughout the major historical periods, the department welcomes applicants who seek to integrate their interests in Italian with wider methodological concerns and discourses, like history, rhetoric and critical theories, comparison with other literatures, the figurative arts, religious and philosophical studies, medieval, Renaissance, and modern studies, and the contemporary state of Italian writing. Interdepartmental work is therefore encouraged and students are accordingly given considerable freedom in planning individual courses of study, once they have acquired a broad general knowledge of the field through course work and supplementary independent study.

Special Admissions Requirements
The department recognizes that good preparation in Italian literature is unusual at the college level and so suggests that applicants begin as soon as possible to acquire a broad general knowledge of the field through outside reading. At the end of the first year, the progress of beginning students is analyzed in an evaluative colloquium, in order to determine the extent to which an adequate background has been acquired. Applicants who have had little or no experience in Italy are generally urged to do a year's work abroad during the course of their graduate program. During this year they remain registered as graduate students. For all students of Italian, a reading knowledge of Latin is essential. This may be acquired during the course of the first year, but applicants are reminded that it is difficult to schedule beginning language courses in addition to a normal graduate program. Students are advised to acquire proficiency in the languages required for the doctoral program before matriculation.

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Candidates must demonstrate a reading knowledge of a second Romance language, Latin, and a non-Romance language (German recommended). The Latin examination must be passed, usually before the beginning of the third term of study, and all language requirements must be fulfilled before the Ph.D. qualifying examination. Students are required to take two years of course work (as a rule sixteen courses) including two graduate-level term courses other than Italian. The comprehensive qualifying examination must take place during the third year of residence. It is designed to demonstrate the student's mastery of the language and acquaintance with the literature. The examination, which is both written and oral, will be devised in consultation with members of the department. After the qualifying examination, and in any case no later than the seventh term, the student will discuss, in a session with the departmental faculty, a prospectus describing the subject and aims of the dissertation. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. Admission to candidacy must take place by the end of the seventh term.

Teaching is considered to be an important component of the doctoral program in Italian. The department expects students to teach, usually in the third and fourth years of study. Guidance in teaching is provided by the faculty of the department and specifically by the director of language instruction.

Combined Ph.D. Programs

Italian and African American Studies
The Department of Italian also offers, in conjunction with the Program in African American Studies, a combined Ph.D. in Italian and African American Studies. For further details, see African American Studies.

Italian and Renaissance Studies
The Department of Italian also offers, in conjunction with the Renaissance Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in Italian and Renaissance Studies. For further details, see Renaissance Studies.

Master's Degrees
Only candidates for the Ph.D. degree will be admitted to the program, but the department will, upon request, offer the M.A. and the M.Phil. degrees to students who have completed the general Graduate School requirements for those degrees. Alternatively, the Department of Italian Language and Literature offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. For further details, see Medieval Studies.

Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies, Italian Language and Literature, Yale University, PO Box 208311, New Haven CT 06520-8311.

Courses
ITAL 501bu, The Poetry of the Troubadours. Olivia Holmes. Monday 4-5.50
An introduction to the grammar of Old Occitan (or Old Provençal) through reading, translating, and discussing the poetry of the troubadours. The texts are considered not only as printed poetry, but also as song and hand-written artifact, and within the general historical setting of the cultural shift in the late Middle Ages from orality to writing. Special attention to the impact of these texts on the Italian literary tradition.

ITAL 533au, Boccaccio: The World at Play. Giuseppe Mazzotta. Tuesday 3.30-5.20
This course examines a number of texts from Boccaccio's early experiments (Filostrato, Ninfale fiesolano, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta) to his mature works (Decameron, Geneology of the Gentile Gods, and Commentary on Dante). Its aim is to show the radical innovations of his art in terms of form, redefinition of moral values, and general sense of medieval traditions of Provençal poetry (conventions of ethics, nature, and love, the place of women, etc.).

ITAL 635a, Italian Renaissance Theater. Kristin Phillips. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Development, modes, and structures in Italian Renaissance theater. Analyses of language, prototypes, modes, and structures that invest the erudite theatrical text, sacred theater, erudite and improvised theater in relation to history, politics, visual art, individual performance, and spectacle; court society and "self-fashioning"; scenography and perspective, with an eye to aesthetic debates surrounding the theatrical text that disrupt the notion of a singular "semiotics" of theater.

ITAL 700bu, The New Map of the World: Vico's Poetic Philosophy. Giuseppe Mazzotta. Tuesday 3.30-5.20
Examination of Vico's thought globally and in the historical context of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Starting with Vico's Autobiography, working to his University Inaugural Orations, On the Study of Methods of Our Time, the seminar delves into his juridical-political texts and submits the second New Science (1744) to a detailed analysis. Some attention is given to Vico's poetic production and the encomia he wrote. The overarching idea of the seminar is the definition of Vico's new discourse for the modern age. To this end, discussion deals prominently with issues such as Baroque encyclopedic representations, the heroic imagination, the senses of "discovery," the redefinition of "science," reversal of neo-Aristotelian and neo- Platonic poetics, the crisis of the Renaissance, and the role of the myth. Also CPLT 706bu.

ITAL 751a, The Illustrated Novel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the Case of Manzoni. Salvatore Nigro. Monday 3.30-5.20
Manzoni, after writing The Betrothed, started work on a stage version of his own novel. The course illustrates the "dialogue" between the tradition of European "illustrations" and Manzoni's "visual writing."

ITAL 765b, Jewish Italy in Literature and Film. Risa Sodi. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
An examination of Jewish identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy: Jewish self-identification and expression as well as explorations by non-Jewish Italian figures. Various media are considered, including writing by Italian Jewish authors and non-Jews (with significant Jewish themes); interviews; films and documentaries; and survivor testimonies. Significant attention to representations of the Holocaust in Italian literature and film. Readings include work by Bassani, Ginzburg, Levi, Saba, and others. Films may include Life is Beautiful, Jonah Who Lived in the Whale, Seven Beauties, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and the documentaries Il coraggio e la pietà and The Righteous Enemy.

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