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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.