Results for ITALIAN

How do AI language models work and what is their impact on education? In this course we will: Experiment with translation; Experiment with textual analysis of specific texts from different contexts and historical periods and cultures; Experiment with large data questions that are very hard to do by a single person; Experiment with ways to fact-check an AI generated work: we know AI creates false assertions, and backs them up with false references; Experiment with collaborating with AI to write a final paper, a blog, a newspaper article, etc.

Controlling people's minds through propaganda is an integral part of fascist regimes' totalitarianism. In the interwar, cinema, a relatively recent mass media, was immediately seized upon by fascist regimes to produce aggrandizing national narratives, justify their expansionist and extermination policies, celebrate the myth of the "Leader," and indoctrinate the people. Yet film makers under these regimes (Rossellini, Renoir) or just after their fall, used the same media to explore and expose how they manufactured conformism, obedience, and mass murder and to interrogate fascism. We will watch films produced by or under European fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, Greece's Regime of the Colonels) but also against them. The seminar introduces key film analysis tools and concepts, while offering insights into the history of propaganda and cinema. Taught in English.

Classical Italy attracted thousands of travelers throughout the 1700s. Referring to their journey as the "Grand Tour," travelers pursued intellectual passions, promoted careers, and satisfied wanderlust, all while collecting antiquities to fill museums and estates back home. What can computational approaches tell us about who traveled, where and why? We will read travel accounts; experiment with parsing; and visualize historical data. Final projects to form credited contributions to the Grand Tour Project, a cutting-edge digital platform. No prior programming experience necessary.

Medical Humanities is a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to medicine. It explores the experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (painting, music, literature), across historical periods and in different cultures, as interpreted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well as in medicine and policy. Its goal is to give students an opportunity to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It investigates how medicine is an art form as well as a science, and the way institutions and culture shape the way illness is identified, experienced and treated.

Why have the Italian poets Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) been conventionally considered the three foundational authorities of the Italian literary tradition? What was their role in the formation of the Italian vernacular language, which is at the core of Italy's linguistic identity? What is the ideological significance of the grouping of these Three Crowns (tre corone), and how does it impact our critical understanding of the origins of Italian literature, as well as of the process of constructing Italy's cultural identity? To what extent has the intellectual legacy of the Three Italian Crowns contributed to shaping the formation of the literary canons of the main European nations? In order to address these and other questions, this course will explore the major works of these three authors within the context of medieval Italian literature and culture by focusing on the stylistic and critical analyses of specific genres: lyric poetry (the Sicilian school, the Dolce Stil Novo, Dante's early poetry, Petrarch's Canzoniere), long narrative poetry (Dante's Commedia), and short story or novella (Boccaccio's Decameron, its antecedent, Il Novellino, and some of its late medieval epigoni). As a continuation of the study of the Italian language, this course will also aim at improving the students' level of reading, writing, and speaking through the discussion of complex theoretical topics, as well as through the formulation and defense of critical arguments at an advanced linguistic level. For this reason, the course is taught in Italian and all class discussion, reading, and writing will be in Italian; the selected primary texts in medieval vernacular will be accompanied by paraphrases in modern Italian and by an exhaustive apparatus of critical and explanatory notes.

Are humans free and self-determining agents possessed of infinite potential or limited beings subject to the vagaries of fortune? What is the relationship between love and beauty? Is it better for a leader to inspire love or fear? These are the kind of questions Renaissance thinkers asked and we will pursue in our study of the literature, art, and history of Italy from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In this course, you will become acquainted with major writers, thinkers, and artists, and key ideas, innovations, and movements. Examining masterpieces of literature (poetry and prose), art (painting, drawing and sculpture), theater and music, including works of the High Renaissance, we will explore such topics as love, power, faith, reason, and contingency in human affairs. With the themes of discovery, invention and adaption as our guide, we will reflect on perennial tensions between imitation and inspiration, tradition and innovation, and conformity and transgression in Renaissance and early modern Italy. Taught in Italian. Recommended: ITALLANG 22A or equivalent (2 years of Italian). This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.

Ancient, yet new; united, yet fractured; central, yet marginal; imperial subject, aspirant empire: what historical, political, and social dynamics have shaped the Italian nation over the course of the last two centuries? How do we make sense of this Italy - at once monolithic and multitudinous, longstanding and newborn? Through the study of literary, filmic, and musical works from the period of Italian unification to the turn of the 21st century, students will reflect on how artists, writers, cultural and political movements expressed, influenced, and encoded Italy¿s many, paradoxical modernities. The course is an introduction to modern Italian literature and culture and a continuation of the study of the Italian language. All class discussions, reading, and writing will be in Italian. Please do not hesitate to contact the instructor should you have doubts about your language level.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccol¿ Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. In 2023-24, this course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities at different moments in time, including Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, colonial Mexico City, imperial Beijing, Enlightenment and romantic Paris, existential and revolutionary St. Petersburg, roaring Berlin, modernist Vienna, and transnational Accra. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation).

Can novels make us better people? Can movies challenge our assumptions? Can poems help us become who we are? We'll think about these and other questions with the help of writers like Toni Morrison, Marcel Proust, Jordan Peele, Charlie Kaufman, Rachel Cusk, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Beckett, plus thinkers like Nehamas, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Plato, and Sartre. We'll also ask whether a disenchanted world can be re-enchanted; when, if ever, the truth stops being the most important thing; why we sometimes choose to read sad stories; whether we ever love someone for who they are; who could possibly want to live their same life over and over again; what it takes to make ourselves fully moral; whether it's ever good to be conflicted; how we can pull ourselves together; and how we can take ourselves apart. (This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.)

Writing about various topics in Italian Studies. Topics based on student interests: current politics, economics, European affairs, or cultural and literary history, medieval to modern, in Italy. Intensive focus on writing. Students may write on their experience at Stanford in Florence. Fulfills the WIM requirement for Italian majors.

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Lecture series and seminar on Italian literature, cinema, and culture. We invite 3-6 speakers per year to address us about their recent work or work in progress, so as to get a better knowledge of very recent trends in the field of Italian studies, both in the US and abroad. Seminar meetings, when speakers are not invited, are for the following: (a) preparation and follow-up discussion of speakers' work; (b) presentation of students' current research; or (c) presentation of recent work in the field. May be repeated for credit.

Women have been historically marginalized ? when not systematically excluded ? from participation in both the social sphere and the process of cultural production since the origin of the Italian literary tradition. And yet, well-educated, creative, literary Italian women throughout history have been able to reformulate the canonical language, style, and themes of the male-centered tradition in a continuous attempt to give voice to their unique identity and redeem their historically weak social agency. Starting with the study of classical, late-antique, and medieval misogynistic works that established authoritative misconceptions on women'fres moral and biological identities (the legacy of which is still evident in modern-day society), this course intends to revise the Italian literary canon to fully include women as pivotal agents in the historical formation of the national cultural identity. As the work of these writers often emerged through a constant, fruitful dialogue with their contemporary male counterparts, our investigations will apply an integral definition of gender, which simultaneously defends the equal dignity and acknowledges the differences of the sexes. Course materials will include a wide range of cross-medial genres and works by or about Italian women (poetry, novels, short stories, drama, non-fictional narrative, visual arts and films) dealing with issues of identity, emotional life, politics, and social justice. All the readings will be in English translation; there are no prerequisites or language requirements. Students will be occasionally allowed to select their own primary readings and are expected to produce a research essay on an elective topic, as well as several informal writing assignments.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

Intensive reading of Dante's "Inferno" (the first canticle of his three canticle poem The Divine Comedy). Main objective: to learn how to read the Inferno in detail and in depth, which entails both close textual analysis as well as a systematic reconstruction of the Christian doctrines that subtend the poem. The other main objective is to understand how Dante's civic and political identity as a Florentine, and especially his exile from Florence, determined his literary career and turned him into the author of the poem. Special emphasis on Dante's moral world view and his representation of character. Taught in English.

Reading the second and third canticles of Dante's "Divine Comedy." Prerequisite: students must have read Dante's "Inferno" in a course or on their own. Taught in English. Recommended: reading knowledge of Italian.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccol¿ Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. In 2023-24, this course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

An intensive reading of novels by James Joyce, highlighting elements and motifs that recur across his body of work, including Finnegans Wake.

Lecture series and seminar on Italian literature, cinema, and culture. We invite 3-6 speakers per year to address us about their recent work or work in progress, so as to get a better knowledge of very recent trends in the field of Italian studies, both in the US and abroad. Seminar meetings, when speakers are not invited, are for the following: (a) preparation and follow-up discussion of speakers' work; (b) presentation of students' current research; or (c) presentation of recent work in the field. May be repeated for credit.

Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the Council of Trent (1545?63) and the attempt of the Catholic Church to reformulate its doctrines and regulate its disciplinary and spiritual renewal, Italian religious life and culture underwent remarkable transformations affecting all branches of human knowledge. As the nature of these transformations has long been the subject of scholarly debate, the literature and culture of the Counter-Reformation continue to be prejudicially neglected by scholars as products of a systematically repressive period. However, the complex cultural milieu of post-Tridentine Italy generated innovative and varied expressions of art, religion, science, and literature. This course intends to investigate a wide range of these cultural products, from lyric to epic poetry, from drama to non-fictional narrative, from visual arts to music. Works of this period are influenced by a uniquely syncretic religiosity and spirituality that reflect a profoundly interiorized experience of the Divine. With their unique blend of the pagan and Christian, literary and visual, marvelous and edifying, heroic and saintly, aesthetic and pious, theoretical and empirical, moral decorum and stylistic conceit, the cultural products of post-Tridentine Italy aim at triggering an emotional response in the mind of the devout reader. Due to the affective nature of the spirituality these works entail, male and female writers and artists highly value the relationship between devotion, creativity, and identity and act as self-aware agents of a complex cultural synergy, the nature of which is experiential rather than normative. A closer look at these neglected authors reveals the importance of the period's cultural shift, its intellectual and creative richness, and its enduring legacy. All the readings will be in English translation; there are no prerequisites or language requirements. Students will be occasionally allowed to select their own primary readings and are expected to produce a research essay on an elective topic, as well as several informal writing assignments.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

It is often said that "life is a narrative," or that "we live our lives in stories." But is this true? Do we always live our lives as narratives? Could we fail to live our lives as narratives? Could we choose not to live our lives as narratives? Even for those who do see their life as a story, will any old narrative do, or is there something special about the examples provided by the literary tradition? How does literary genre factor in? What is closure? And why are middles what they are? Readings from Appiah, Aristotle, Camus, Hume, Nietzsche, Simmel, G. Strawson, Velleman; Brooks, Woloch; Kahneman, Sacks; Shakespeare, Balzac, Sartre, Beckett, Calvino, Levi, Morrison. Films by Ephron, Kaufman, Polley. Taught in English.

Intensive reading of Dante's "Inferno" (the first canticle of his three canticle poem The Divine Comedy). Main objective: to learn how to read the Inferno in detail and in depth, which entails both close textual analysis as well as a systematic reconstruction of the Christian doctrines that subtend the poem. The other main objective is to understand how Dante's civic and political identity as a Florentine, and especially his exile from Florence, determined his literary career and turned him into the author of the poem. Special emphasis on Dante's moral world view and his representation of character. Taught in English.

Reading the second and third canticles of Dante's "Divine Comedy." Prerequisite: students must have read Dante's "Inferno" in a course or on their own. Taught in English. Recommended: reading knowledge of Italian.

An intensive reading of novels by James Joyce, highlighting elements and motifs that recur across his body of work, including Finnegans Wake.

A survey of how literary theory and other methods have been made institutional since the nineteenth century. The readings and conversation are designed for entering Ph.D. students in the national literature departments and comparative literature.

Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with Professor Robert Harrison is required. May be repeated for credit. Taught in English.

Enrollment is limited to French/Italian Ph.D. students. Course is designed for French/Italian Ph.D. students to prepare for department milestone exams.

Repeatable for Credit

CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Italian Ph.D. candidate.

TGR Project

Doctoral students who have been admitted to candidacy, completed all required courses and degree requirements other than the University oral exam and dissertation, completed 135 units or 10.5 quarters of residency (if under the old residency policy), and submitted a Doctoral Dissertation Reading Committee form, may request Terminal Graduate Registration status to complete their dissertations.