These graduate courses are being taught during the spring 2025 semester
Walking in the City 16:560:691:01
Taught by Professor Andrea Baldi on Tuesdays from 430pm - 710pm in ABW 5050 - Rutgers Academic Building
The seminar addresses the representation of walking in modern European culture, with special emphasis on Italian texts. Rooted in the everyday, in ordinary gestures, the experience of walking is pivotal to the shaping of our experience of place. Strolling relates to our most immediate way of staying in the world, examining and describing it. In the wake of modernity, the new urban subjects have fashioned walking as a style of apprehension and appropriation of their surroundings. Through their “rhetoric of walking,” their choices of itineraries, passers-by devise their own maps of the city, appropriating its spaces. Walking has been prominently recorded in literature as a paradigm of a dynamic relationship with the outside world, often leading to detachment from the mundane sphere, and prompting reflection and introspection. This observation of our living space is culturally encoded and, with its shifts and transformations in the course of time, reflects changing attitudes and customs, highly influenced by social and economic factors. Walking through the city is also, and foremost, codified by gender, as illustrated by various models of flânerie, in which the identity of the passer-by shapes the observation of urban space. We will discuss texts by Baudelaire, Poe, Serao, Benjamin, Simmel, Mansfield, Hessel, Woolf, Calvino, Ortese, and Scego, and films by Vidor, De Sica, Rossellini, Monicelli, and others. This seminar is Taught in Italian.
Language & Nation in Italian Thought 16:560:640:01
Taught by Professor Paola Gambarota on Wednesdays from 430pm-710pm in ABW 5050 - Rutgers Academic Building
In this seminar we explore essential notions and rhetorical strategies adopted by Italian intellectuals to link the notion of language to national identity. We focus on definitions of national language (Dante, Trissino, Manzoni, Gramsci, Pasolini), explanations of language diversity, issues of syntax and etymology (Vico), the translatability of the “genius of the nation” and reflections on national character (Cesarotti, Condillac, Leopardi). Reading knowledge of Italian is required.