Italian Language and Literature
82-90 Wall Street, 432.0595
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Giuseppe Mazzotta
Director of Graduate Studies
Kristin Phillips-Court (82–90 Wall, Rm 407, 432.0597,
kristin.phillips-court@yale.edu)
Professors
Giuseppe Mazzotta (on leave [F]), Paolo Valesio, Sergio Zatti
(University of Pisa, Visiting
[F])
Associate Professor
Olivia Holmes (on leave [F])
Assistant Professors
Francesca Cadel, Kristin Phillips-Court
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, such as
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. Applicants who have
had little or no experience in Italy are generally urged to
do some work abroad during the course of their graduate program.
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 outside the Italian department.
Students who join the graduate program with an M.A. in hand,
after consultation with the DGS, may get some courses waived.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, 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 normally occurs by the end of the sixth
term.
Teaching is considered to be an important component of the
doctoral program in Italian. Students will be appointed as
teaching fellows 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 Film Studies
The Department of Italian also offers, in conjunction
with the Program in Film Studies, a joint Ph.D. in Italian
and Film Studies. For further details, see Film
Studies. Applicants to the joint program must indicate
on their application that they are applying both to Film Studies
and to Italian. All documentation within the application should
include this information.
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 633b, Topics in the Divine Comedy. Olivia
Holmes. M 3.30–5.20
An exploration of Dante’s magnum opus, with special
attention to representations and discussions of the issues
of free will and ethical choice. Attention is also paid to
the development of this topic in Dante’s epistles, Vita
Nuova, Convivio, and Monarchia. In English.
ITAL 640a, Topics in Renaissance Epic. Sergio
Zatti. M 3.30–5.20
This course studies in some detail the two outstanding
epics of the Italian Renaissance: Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.
It stresses issues such as the continuity of the epic tradition
(Vergil, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, etc.), the re-creation of
medieval chivalric and lyrical traditions, and Renaissance
literary theory. Its guiding idea is the examination of the
question of representation and its impact on the intellectual,
historical, and political history of Renaissance Italy.
ITAL 691, Directed Reading. Staff. HTBA
ITAL 801b, Poetry, Poetics, and Contemporary Society,
1945–Present. Paolo Valesio.
W 3.30–5.20
Italian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century
from the end of the war to our days gives life to one of the
most remarkable poetic cultures in international literature.The
course studies the relationships that poetic texts entertain
with their author’s ideas about poetry (their poetics)
on the one hand and developments in society at large on the
other hand. We begin with the poetry of Cesare Pavese, and
we go on to a study of poetic currents as well as of important
individual figures. We thus examine among other movements
the Neo-avant-garde and Neo-realism, and the poems that we
analyze include texts by Attilio Bertolucci, Margherita Guidacci,
Mario Luzi, the Novissimi poets, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Amelia
Rosselli, Giovanni Testori, David Maria Turoldo, and Andrea
Zanzotto.
ITAL 904a, Futurism and Beyond: T. F. Marinetti’s
Poetry, Narrative, and Drama. Paolo Valesio. W 3.30–5.20
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of Futurism (arguably
the first great avant-garde movement in modern European literature),
is also one of the most remarkable writers of the Italian
twentieth century in his own terms. The course explores Marinetti’s
basic contribution to modern Italian literature, which is
a poetical one, studying both his experimental and his more
traditional poems as well as his brilliantly original novels
and plays. The course uses available editions, but also unpublished
materials in the Beinecke archives and the typescripts of
forthcoming books. Marinetti’s epoch-making contribution
is also studied in a comparative European and American context,
with particular attention to the relationship between the
Italian texts and their French and English versions.
ITAL 920b, Petrarch’s Worlds. Giuseppe
Mazzotta. T 3.30–5.20
At the center of Petrarch’s vision, announcing a
new way of seeing the world, was the individual, a sense of
the self that would one day become the center of modernity
as well. This self, however, seemed to be fragmented, divided
among the works of philosophy, faith, love of the classics,
politics, art, religion, and of Italy, France, Greece, and
Rome. This course shows how all these fragmentary worlds relate
to each other, how these separate worlds are part of a common
vision. By pursuing an “encyclopedic” approach
and by showing the conversation Petrarch enacts between the
arts and sciences, the course focuses on Petrarch’s
new understanding of culture and self for the modern age.
Texts to be examined include the Canzoniere, the Trionfi,
Secretum, Invective Against a Physician, On His Own
Ignorance, and letters (selections from the Familiares
and Seniles).
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