Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Bulletin of Yale University
 
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Italian Language and Literature

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

Chair
Giuseppe Mazzotta

Director of Graduate Studies
Olivia Holmes (82–90 Wall, Rm 411, 432.8299, olivia.holmes@yale.edu)

Professors
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Francesco Casetti (Visiting [Sp])

Associate Professor
Olivia Holmes

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. Additionally, students in Italian are eligible to pursue a supplemental M.Phil. degree in Medieval Studies. 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 505b, Literary Criticism and Rhetoric from Plato to Vico.  Olivia Holmes.
M 1.30–3.20
A survey of major works about literature and rhetoric, with special concentration on the classical and Italian traditions. Critics have tried to answer such basic questions as what literature is, what purposes it serves, and whether it is a good thing. We examine alternating attitudes toward figurative language, which has been seen over time as a dangerous seduction, a tool for teaching ethics, and a necessary first step in understanding reality. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, St. Augustine, Boccaccio, Sidney, and Vico. Also CPLT 584bu.

ITAL 509a, The Sacred and the Profane in Italian Medieval Literature.  Olivia Holmes.
M 3.30–5.20
The realms of the sacred and the profane can never be readily or entirely separated in medieval literature. The sensual imagery of the Song of Songs permeates courtly love poetry, for instance, while the language of human lovers is echoed by Christian mysticism. We explore the divergence and intersection of these registers in a number of representative vernacular texts (in both prose and verse), mostly concentrating on authors usually considered “minor”: the poets of the Duecento, Brunetto Latini, Marco Polo, the anonymous authors of the “Novellino” and “Fioretti di San Francesco,” Saint Catherine of Siena.

ITAL 597bu, European Cinema in the Wake of Italian Neorealism.  Francesco Casetti.
W 3.30–5.20
World War II saw modernism enter cinema via Italian neorealism, leading to New Waves in France, England, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Famous auteurs exploited both the “realism” and the “reflexivity” of the medium. This seminar examines strategies of narration through a cultural approach. Also CPLT 927bu, FILM 731bu.

ITAL 634a, Baroque Bridges: Literature and Art of Transformation, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.  Kristin Phillips-Court.
W 2.30–4.20
This reading course looks at transformation in poetry, drama, literature, and art through the paradigms of perspective and spectacle. We consider how diverse forms of representation usher into the visual world significant philosophical, theological, and historical shifts normally associated with “Renaissance,” “Mannerism,” and “Baroque.” Organized around questions of continuity and change, topics include the performative nature of text as play, literature and ideology, perspective in painting and poetry, drama and mimesis, philosophical dialogue, the commedia dell'arte and “maraviglia,” and the synthesis of the arts in lyric opera. Authors include Machiavelli, Ariosto, Ruzante, Trissino, Tasso, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Guarini, Bruno, Campanella, Galileo, Della Valle.

ITAL 640b, Renaissance Epic.  Giuseppe Mazzotta.
T 3.30–5.20
A study in some detail of three outstanding epics of the Italian Renaissance (Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso). The course stresses such issues as the clashes between Christians and Moslems, the continuity of the epic tradition, the re-creation of medieval chivalric material, Renaissance theories of comedy, perspectivism. Guiding idea is the examination of the specific ways in which the three poets represent history, theology, and politics in their texts. The course also investigates the impact of the intellectual, historical, and political events of fifteenth-century Italy on the construction of the poems.

ITAL 685a, Power and Play in the Renaissance.  Giuseppe Mazzotta.
T 3.30–5.20
The seminar probes the constant interaction between the two principles of power and play as defining foci of the Renaissance. After a brief survey of medieval forms of theology of play, the seminar examines the Florentine Neoplatonic circle and moves on to read some Renaissance plays, tractates, and Marino's Adone, as well as utopian texts. The seminar ends with a discussion of the scientific-utopian discourses developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century and their relation to theology.

ITAL 691a or b, Directed Reading.
By arrangement with faculty.

ITAL 810b, Cinema as Art, Institution, Discipline.  Francesco Casetti.
M 3.30–5.20
Because cinema's status as an artform depends on the functions it serves in cultural contexts, it is also an institution with which spectators negotiate in a complex act of rhetorical communication. This seminar studies how cinema disciplined specific forms of viewing which shaped a gaze. This gaze adapted itself to cultural cues (the desire for a “total vision,” the presence of individual perspective, the desire for heightened perception, the requirement of an organized look, etc.). Texts and films from 1910s to the 1960s are examined. Also CPLT 932b, FILM 801b.

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