2023-2024 Academic Year

Fall 2023

ITAL 102 Elementary Italian
Intensive study of the fundamentals of Italian grammar, with a view to developing reading, writing, speaking, and understanding skills. Laboratory and other audiovisual techniques are used. Cultural elements are stressed as a context for the assimilation of the language.Prerequisite: 101 or the equivalent

ITAL 232 Reading/Performing Ital Texts
Designed to increase student's comprehension and command of spoken Italian, this course is also an initiation in everyday verbal transactions and cultural communication prevalent in contemporary Italy. Phonetics, oral comprehension, and verbal production are practiced through exposure to authentic documents usually of a non-literary nature, such as television news programs, documentaries, commercial advertisements, and excerpts from films. Two and a half hours classroom and one hour laboratory per week. Prerequisite: 201 or the equivalent.

Spring 2024

ITAL 231 Read/Writ Contemp Ital Culture
Designed to increase student's awareness of various rhetorical conventions and command of written Italian through analysis and imitation of model texts of a literary and non-literary nature. Two and a half hours classroom and one hour laboratory per week. Prerequisite: 201 or the equivalent.

ITAL 331 Ideas of Italy
In this course we study how Italian political thinkers, writers and intellectuals in different historical periods have constructed their own “idea” of Italy. We will analyze authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli, the forefather of modern political science, and Antonio Gramsci, an Italian philosopher and founder of the largest communist party in Western Europe. We also examine the role that film and literature played in the formation of a national consciousness, through selected readings by authors and directors such as Alessandro Manzoni, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Oriana Fallaci, Luchino Visconti and others. This course is taught in Italian. Prerequisites: 231 and 232, or permission of the instructor. Offered every two years.