Reading and composition course based on works by Italians and foreigners about Italy and its culture and by Italians about their distinctive experiences of other cultures as tourists and emigrants. Works studied will be primarily chosen from among fiction and non fiction narratives, both originally in English and translated into it. R5A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition Requirement and R5B satisfies the second half.

In this course we will explore the representation of the past, the present, and the future in literature. It is within and between these three basic regions of time that thought gives form and order to literary narrative, and we traverse them when we engage with literature and respond to what it means to us. Some literary texts reckon with the past by reviving its celebrated names and figures, making them bear witness to the state of the living, while others seek to suspend the word in the eternal present of the lyric now, while still others speculate on the limitless possibilities of an uncertain future. In order to think about this comprehensive theme in our own time (and in our time together), we will read and discuss selections from poems, novels, and other writings that engage with literary pasts, presents, and futures, accompanying them with readings from theoretical works that grapple with how literature imagines, demarcates, and entangles different chronologies and temporalities. This course is designed to prepare students for critical reading and writing at a college level. Assignments include three argumentative essays, smaller reflective assignments, and written discussion posts. All readings are provided in English in a digital format. Primary readings may include selections from: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Commedia, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Milton’s Paradise Lost; possible secondary readings will include selections from works by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Gérard Genette, Johannes Fabian, and others.

Requisites

• Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills