Courses

We tell stories for many reasons: to entertain; to seduce; to complain; to think. This course draws upon the literatures and cultures of the romance languages to explore the role of narrative in our construction and understanding of the world.

Full details for ROMS 1102 - FWS: The Craft of Storytelling

What is a culture, and how do we know one when we see it?  This course draws upon the histories and texts of French, Spanish, Italian, and/or Portuguese speaking worlds to discuss issues of identity, difference, politics, place, and community.

Full details for ROMS 1108 - FWS:Cultural Identities/Cultural Differences

What kind of information do images - in photography, painting, and/or film - convey?  What kind of impact do they have on the minds and the bodies of their audiences?  This course foregrounds the role of visual culture in the societies where Spanish, French, Portuguese, and/or Italian is spoken, and it asks students to dwell upon how visual material interacts with spoken and written language.

Full details for ROMS 1109 - FWS: Image and Imagination

Some of the most important and intriguing thinkers, from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, have done their thinking in the romance languages.  This course explores a body of work that would be called philosophical by some, theoretical by others, and that, beyond these names, struggles to articulate fundamental concepts, problems, discourses, and situations.

Full details for ROMS 1113 - FWS: Thinking and Thought

What allows us to make assumptions about people based on the way they speak or dress? How can we understand the deeper meaning of a fairy tale or an episode of The Simpsons? What does macaroni and cheese mean, and why is it not on the menu at most upscale Manhattan eateries? This seminar introduces semiotics, the study of signs and the meaning-bearing sign systems they form; sign systems that include not only human language but also literature, painting, sculpture, film, music, dance and also such aspects of popular culture as advertising, fashion, food, and television, to name just a few. The diversity of semiotic systems provides many possibilities for thinking and writing critically about the world we live in.

Full details for ROMS 1114 - FWS: Semiotics

In this class, students will learn about animal welfare and conservation through international films. We will discuss wildlife, companion and farm animals in conjunction with human cultures and politics. The course will cover various animal species, e.g. pangolins, dogs and sheep in fiction films, documentaries and animated movies. Students will learn how to compose film reviews, do research and write a research assignment. The class includes guest speakers, a visit to Cornell barn, library and museum. All films are available for streaming through Blackboard for students to watch them in their free time.

Full details for ROMS 1120 - FWS: Animals in Global Cinema: Human and Nonhuman

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Full details for ROMS 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for ROMS 3560 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for ROMS 4370 - The Holocaust and History Writing

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for ROMS 4715 - Labor and the Arts

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

Full details for ROMS 4948 - Pleasure and Neoliberalism

Focuses on language teaching as facilitation of learning, thus on the learner's processing of language acquisition and the promotion of reflective teaching. Pedagogical approaches will be addressed from a learner-centered perspective involving effective language learning strategies and analysis.

Full details for ROMS 5070 - Methodology of Romance Language Learning and Teaching

This practicum is designed to better enable the TAs to meet the needs of their students in the understanding and acquisition of the linguistic forms, notions, and functions covered in their course.

Full details for ROMS 5080 - Pedagogy Practicum

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for ROMS 6370 - The Holocaust and History Writing

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.  Daily preparations and active participation are required.

Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability; to establish a groundwork for correct writing; and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

This course is specifically designed for premed students and students at large with an interest in medical related topics who wish to be better equipped with language skills that will enable them to convey more empathy and multicultural sensitivity while communicating with diverse patient populations throughout the Francophone world.  This course aims as well to prepare students to engage in global health equity and promote awareness of language barriers in today's medical field, both domestically and abroad. This is a mid-intermediate level course, and as such, it will continue to develop and reinforce writing, reading, speaking, listening and presentational skills via an array of communicative tasks based on real-life situations.

Full details for FREN 2070 - Medical French

This intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world.  The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business.  Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

Full details for FREN 2080 - French for Business

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world.  It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis.  Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema.  Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works.  Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre.  The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism tets, and will be conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for FREN 3020 - French Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC)

This course is designed to teach ways of reading and understanding works created from the Romantic period to the present day, in their cultural context. A range of texts from various genres is presented, and students refine their analytical skills and their understanding of various methodologies of reading. Texts by authors such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Cixous, Duras, Genet, Mallarmé, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre.

Full details for FREN 3210 - Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture

This course is conceived as a critical introduction to a cultural and political debate that appeared in the years of Mitterrand's France and reached its climax in the last decade.  It will focus on a French society deeply shaped by immigration and globalization.  In which way do the youth of the "banlieue" - mostly formed by postcolonial Blacks and Muslims - create their own culture with the French culture?  How have literature, essays, movies, documentary films, "national identity" carried on by governments reacted to these transformations?  Selecting literary texts (by Maryse Condé, Zahia Rahmani, Adb El Malik) and other cultural productions, the course will explore the new expressions of France as an "imagined community".

Full details for FREN 3400 - French Identities: 21st Century Culture and Society in France

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for FREN 3560 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

This survey course will trace narratives of sea crossings in Francophone literature from Africa and its diaspora across the three bodies of water that surround the continent: the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. It will consider literary and cinematic depictions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sea trading in the Caribbean, nuclear experiments in the Chagos islands, and the shipwreck of clandestine migrants in Lampedusa. Through forced displacement or willful journeys, exile or exploration, we will study how these aesthetic works articulate a global consciousness, which has radically redefined what it means to be African, cosmopolitan, and modern, from negritude to créolité and coolitude. Authors include Aimé Césaire, Fatou Diome, Shenaz Patel, Salim Bachi, and others.

Full details for FREN 3580 - African Sea Routes

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, transgender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art.  Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

Full details for FREN 3975 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

Madness fascinates, mental illness frightens. They are realms of scholarship as well as objects of practical knowledge and representation for the arts and the social actors themselves. This seminar aims to explore the ways in which people who are affected by psychological disorders and strive to face them, are depicted in the 20th and 21st century popular culture. What relationship exists between the medical understanding of these disorders and their portrayals in literature, recovery narratives, cinema, TV series and documentaries? Do contemporary pictures of madness in fiction contribute to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do they reinforce negative stereotypes? Are there differences between French fictions and American ones? This seminar will examine each oeuvre as a case study with the resources of critical studies.

Full details for FREN 4070 - Madness Narratives and Pop Culture in 21st Century

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for FREN 4375 - The Holocaust and History Writing

How might philosophy respond to catastrophe? The Wars of Religion in France and throughout Europe offered continual violence, trauma, and social upheaval. The Essais of Michel de Montaigne responded to this context by elaborating a new form of skepticism, which creates a space for more humane ethics (including some of the earliest discussions of religious and racial tolerance) and for freedom of thought (a relatively new concept in the western world), by means of a radical questioning of the functioning of political, religious, and intellectual authority. What Montaigne offers is both a practical and intellectual model for coping with extreme and omnipresent violence and social conflict, a model that presents difference as a necessary condition of physical and psychic survival.

Full details for FREN 4540 - Montaigne and the Philosophy of Catastrophe

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for FREN 4715 - Labor and the Arts

Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest.

Full details for FREN 6300 - French Reading for Graduates

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for FREN 6375 - The Holocaust and History Writing

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar provides an opportunity to study aspects of the philosophical oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze. Our point of departure will be Deleuze's 1968 book Difference and Repetition.  We'll later consider some of Deleuze's key concepts and problems, as they unfolded in essays co-authored with Félix Guattari (including the two-volumne set on Capitalism and Schizophrenia), and beyond (such as the diptych devoted to Cinema).  Our goal is neither to provide a chronological overview of Deleuze's scholarship, nor to add his ideas to a putative "tool box" that we might opportunistically use without much concern for intellectual provenience.

Full details for FREN 6535 - Deleuze

Full details for FREN 6561 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

What does the term "normal" mean?  It is a modern invention, but one based on millennia of theories on what is natural or unnatural, regular or irregular, orderly or monstrous.  All of these terms are loaded with the histories of gender, racial, and ability-oriented differences.  This course, based on the work of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, will explore current theories of the normal in the domain of disability studies and queer studies, and return to the past of these concepts to examine their ancient origins.  Authors will include Shelly Tremain, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Robert McRuer, Elizabeth Beardon, and Jasbir Puar.

Full details for FREN 6730 - The Normal and the Pathological

This is a fast-paced, introductory course designed for students with some basic knowledge of the language.  This introductory course provides a thorough grounding in all language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with practice in small and large groups.  Interactive lectures cover grammar and cultural information.

Full details for ITAL 1202 - Italian II

The learning objectives of this course are, first, to introduce students to some of the crucial moments in the history of Italian figurative arts, architecture and fashion design, but also to a range of social issues relevant for understanding the more recent tendencies in art and design in modern Italy; second, to help students refine the way they speak and write about art, architecture and design through a review of the grammatical and lexical structures of Italian and a reinforcement of idiomatic expressions that will increase their ability to discuss, evaluate, analyze and compare issues of relevance to the field of art, architecture and desgn.

Full details for ITAL 1213 - Italian for Art, Architecture and Fashion Design

An intensive elementary Italian language course. This 6-credit course covers material presented in ITAL 1201 and ITAL 1202 in just one semester. It's offered to students who cannot study Italian in the Fall, but can only do it in the Spring semester.

Full details for ITAL 1401 - Intensive Elementary Italian

An intermediate-level course that aims to further develop intercultural, reading, listening, speaking, and writing abilities in ITAL 2201. Students will be guided in perfecting their communication skills, improving their cultural proficiency, and developing a critical eye toward printed and visual material drawn from literature, history, politics, science, and arts in the Italophone world. Conversation skills will be practiced in daily discussions and in individual or group projects and presentations. A variety of written assignments will help students increase the range, accuracy, and stylistic appropriateness of their writing. Review of select grammar topics is part of this course, as is reading a short contemporary novel.

Full details for ITAL 2202 - Italian IV

This course, which is at the core of the major and minor in Italian, is designed to give students a basic grounding in some of the most important facets of Italian culture, including cinema, literature, art, and food.  Students will trace the development of Italian national identity in literary and cinematic texts as well as across Italian photography and cuisine.  Readings will include selections from the works of Primo Levi, Roberto Saviano, and Leonardo Sciascia.  Students will also view films by directors such as Rossellini, de Sica, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Sergio Leone, becoming familiar along the way with genres in Italian national cinema.  By the end of the semester, students will have a working knowledge of the effects of geographic and national fragmentation on political life in post-Risorgimento Italy, understand the so-called Southern Question and the fraught relationship between the Italian South and wealthier Northern regions, and gain different perspectives on political life today in Italy.

Full details for ITAL 2204 - The Cinematic Eye of Italy

This course will introduce students to sustained study of one Italian masterpiece (a literary, philosophical, historical, or scientific work, or a major achievement in the visual, performance, or media arts). Topic for Spring 2021: Machiavelli's Mandragola.

Full details for ITAL 2240 - One Italian Masterpiece I

This course serves as an introduction to the close reading of, and critical engagement with, a range of sources from various periods of Italian literary and cultural history.  In fact, since Italy doesn't really cohere as a political entity until late in the nineteenth century, this course could just as easily be called Perspectives in Pre-Italian Culture.  The questions of perspective-of who's looking, what's being looked at, and what we're  looking through-will haunt our readings from sources as varied as Dante's Commedia, the reception history of St. Francis of Assisi, medieval visionary women, Michelangelo's love lyrics, the novel (e.g. Moravia), the short story (e.g. Celati), film, and political philosophy.  We'll pay special attention to the way in which desire, pleasure, excess, and resistance structure the articulation of Italian-or more local, frequently urban-identities, and we'll attempt too grapple with how, even as we get a kind of perspective on Italy, Italy always looks back at us with questions, desires, and a gaze of its own.

Full details for ITAL 2900 - Perspectives in Italian Culture

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, the mafia has been the subject of numerous films over the course of 70 years, so many in fact that one might well speak of a "mafia obsession" in American popular culture. Drawing upon a large number of American and Italian films, this course examines the cultural history of the mafia through film. We will explore issues related to the figure of the gangster, the gender and class assumptions that underpin it, and the portrayal-almost always stereotypical-of Italian-American immigrant experience that emerges from our viewings. The aim will be to enhance our understanding of the role of mafia plays in American and Italian culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Film screenings will include Little Caesar, Scarface, Shame of the Nation, The Godfather Parts I and II, Goodfellas, The Funeral, Donnie Brasco, episodes from The Sopranos, and Gomorrah.

Full details for ITAL 3010 - Screening Cosa Nostra: The Mafia and the Movies from Scarface to The Sopranos

Topic for SP21: Dante's Inferno. This 2-credit course will introduce students to sustained study of one Italian masterpiece (a literary, philosophical, historical, or scientific work, or a major achievement in the visual, performance, or media arts).

Full details for ITAL 3240 - One Italian Masterpiece II

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for ITAL 4200 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for ITAL 4290 - Honors in Italian Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for ITAL 4300 - Honors in Italian Literature

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for ITAL 4710 - Labor and the Arts

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for ITAL 6400 - Special Topics in Italian Literature

This seminar will be dedicated to reading and analysis of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-51), a masterpiece of Italian literature whose popularity has been renewed as it has been proclaimed "the 14th-century Italian book that shows us how to survive coronavirus" and the "medieval book to read while under quarantine."  Particular attention will be dedicated to: gender, social class, the ethical dimension of literature, and Boccaccio's refashioning of Italian, Latin, French, and Provencal source material.  Students can read the Decameron in the original Italian or in English translation.

Full details for ITAL 6450 - Decameron

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relation of politics to art in general and the cultural politics of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape cultural and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rude) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others: with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say postautonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for ITAL 6710 - Labor and the Arts

In this course, students work on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also develop their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra! Po polsku 1" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 0-9. If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 1131 - Elementary Polish I

In this course, students work on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish. Students will also develop their intercultural competency. The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input. Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra! Po polsku 1" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries. This class covers chapters 10-20. If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 1132 - Elementary Polish II

In this course, students continue working on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish.  Students will also enhance their intercultural competency.  The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input.  Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra!  Po polsku 2" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries.  This class covers chapters 1-10.  If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 2033 - Intermediate Polish I

In this course, students continue working on their ability to speak, write, read, and understand contemporary Polish.  Students will also enhance their intercultural competency.  The instructor uses communicative language teaching with emphasis on structured input.  Students use the textbook and workbook "Hurra!  Po polsku 2" supplemented by Polish-English chapter dictionaries.  This class covers chapters 11-20.  If a student is not sure of his or her language level, he or she can contact the Polish instructor, Ewa Bachminska, at eb583@cornell.edu.

Full details for POLSH 2034 - Intermediate Polish II

Full details for POLSH 2104 - Advanced Polish II

Intended for students who have already taken the first level of Portuguese, or as an intensive introductory course for those who are native/near native speakers of Spanish.* An all-skills course with particular emphasis on Brazilian Portuguese spoken within the contexts of its culture, it presents a fast-paced review focused on improving grammatical accuracy, pronunciation and on enriching vocabulary.

Full details for PORT 2020 - Intermediate Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers II

This course provides an introduction and overview of Brazilian culture. It will study different periods of Brazilian history, through the analysis of films, literature, essays, visual arts, and music. Students will explore different definitions of Brazilian identity and "Brazilianness" focusing on key topics including the formation of the colonial Brazil  and the emergence of the nation of Brazil as a tropical paradise; slavery and abolition; the particularities century; and the contradictions of the modernization process throughout the 20th century. We will consider elements of Brazilian popular culture such as Carnival, Samba, and "telenovels," and some of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century, such as "Modernismo," "Cinema Novo," and "Tropicalia." The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the relevant background to understand Brazilian cultural history.

Full details for PORT 2800 - Perspectives on Brazil

This course provides intermediate level students with the opportunity to advance their oral and written fluency, proficiency, and understanding of the grammar of Portuguese. In addition, students will be introduced to several cultural aspects of the Lusophone world, including regionalisms of Portuguese language. This goal will be achieved with the aid of literary and journalistic texts. Students will be expected to give individual and group presentations, as well as to write short pieces in the target language. The course is tailored to bridge language learning and content-based courses and research in Portuguese.  

Full details for PORT 3100 - Advanced Portuguese I

While building language proficiency and accuracy through communicative activities, the course encourages students to actively interact with one another. The instructor facilitates communication and provides feedback and language learning strategies that guide students to take responsibility of their own learning and become active participants in the process. The course also introduces students to the many peoples and cultures of the Spanish-speaking world, prompting them to make comparisons with their own culture. Additionally, lectures provide students with opportunities to reflect on relevant grammar topics and assist students in developing language learning strategies. Class discussions are conducted entirely in Spanish. After 1220, students may take SPAN 1230, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090 depending on their LPS score.

Full details for SPAN 1220 - Elementary Spanish II

The goal of this low-intermediate course is to achieve a higher level of comprehension as well as to advance oral and written expression in a cultural context. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in communicative and creative activities. Students engage in linguistic and literary analysis of texts to acquire new vocabulary, complete analytical exercises, and develop reading strategies. Students continue developing writing skills through composition, and review grammatical structures independently with some clarification by the instructor as needed. After this course, students may take SPAN 2000, SPAN 2070, or SPAN 2090.

Full details for SPAN 1230 - Continuing Spanish

Full details for SPAN 1305 - FWS:Narrating the Spanish Civil War

This innovative course focuses on oral communication in Spanish for students who will do special projects abroad or short term study abroad trips.  Emphasis is placed on developing speaking and listening skills and strategies in a culturally relevant context.  It is intended for students with limited or no knowledge of Spanish and active class participation is required.

Full details for SPAN 1501 - Strategies for Spanish Abroad

Provides a conversational grammar review, with dialogues, debates, compositions, and authentic readings on health-related themes. Special attention is given to relevant cultural differences and how cultural notions may affect medical care and communication between doctor and patient. The objective of 2070 is to provide practice in real-life application, such as taking a medical history, calming a patient, and how to speak to a Hispanic patient in a culturally acceptable manner. After this course, a student may take or SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2070 - Intermediate Spanish for the Medical and Health Professions

This intermediate course develops accurate and idiomatic oral and written expression in a cultural context. Students achieve a higher level of syntactical and lexical competence through reading and discussing literary texts and viewing films. Particular emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer/instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, with clarification and support of the instructor. After this course, students may take SPAN 2095.

Full details for SPAN 2090 - Intermediate Spanish I (Composition and Conversation)

This advanced-intermediate course is designed to prepare students for study abroad and is required for any Cornell CASA program in a Spanish speaking country.  It also serves as an entryway into the major, and advanced-level courses. Students study stylistics, analyze and discuss texts, view films, and acquire advanced reading strategies. Continued emphasis is on writing and editing academic essays with peer and instructor feedback. Classes are in Spanish, and the language is actively used in oral presentations and communicative, creative, and critical-thinking activities. Students review grammar structures on their own, although the instructor may clarify as needed. Check with the instructor if you intend to take this course concurrently with SPAN 2140, SPAN 2150, or SPAN 2170.

Full details for SPAN 2095 - Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This advanced course will focus on spoken Spanish in its formal and informal registers, regional dialects, and pronunciations.  Authentic texts from across different genres of film, newspapers, fiction, songs, and essays will be used to develop all skills with emphasis on oral production, as well as intercultural and pragmatic competence.  Students will further their fluency and accuracy by engaging in activities that might include debates, oral presentations, and interviews.

Full details for SPAN 2130 - Advanced Spoken Spanish

Introductory survey of modern Spanish literature. Students develop their analytical skills and learn basic literary concepts such as genre (drama, lyric, short story, and novel) and style (romanticism, realism, etc.) as well as male/female perspectives and the translation of literature to film language. The survey introduces students to Spain's cultural complexity through readings of works by authors representative of its diverse linguistic and literary traditions.

Full details for SPAN 2140 - Modern Spanish Survey

Readings and discussion of representative texts of the 19th and 20th centuries from various regions of Latin America. Among the authors considered are Sarmiento, Hernández, Martí, Darío, Agustini, Cortázar, García Márquez, Poniatowska, and Valenzuela.

Full details for SPAN 2150 - Contemporary Latin American Survey

This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.

Full details for SPAN 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey

This course, which is required for the major, is designed to help the learner develop increased accuracy and sophistication in writing in Spanish for academic purposes and continued oral practice in Spanish. To this end, there will be ample writing and revising practice, with a focus on specific grammatical and lexical areas, customized to the needs of the students enrolled in the course.  All writing will be based on a particular theme relating to Latin America with a focus on film, literary texts, newspaper readings and conducting an interview.

Full details for SPAN 2180 - Advanced Spanish Writing Workshop

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring. Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area. In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions. Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2200 - Perspectives on Latin America

Interdisciplinary course offered every spring.  Topics vary by semester, but readings always focus on current research in various disciplines and regions of Latin America. The range of issues addressed include the economic, social, cultural, and political trends and transitions in the area.  In the weekly meetings, instructors and guest lecturers facilitate student discussions.  Students taking the course are required to participate in all class discussions and write a research paper in their chosen focus area.

Full details for SPAN 2205 - Perspectives on Latin America in Spanish

This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important fictional work by US Latina writers, including short stories, novel, and film, with a particular focus on social justice, gender advocacy work, and work by Afro Latinx writers.  We will begin with discussion of canonical figures like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to provide a basis for our focus on more recent writers like Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, Linda Yvette Chávez, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Full details for SPAN 2460 - Contemporary Narratives by Latina Writers

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for SPAN 3020 - Spanish Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC)

Focuses on the practice of narrative writing in Spanish. Explores what makes a novel and a short story work, paying close attention to narrative structure, plot, beginnings/endings, character development, theme, etc. Students read classic novels and short stories as points of departure for the discussion. Because the course is a workshop, students are expected to write their own fiction.

Full details for SPAN 3170 - Creative Writing Workshop (in Spanish)

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for SPAN 3335 - Border Environments

This course provides an overview of historical and contemporary notions of racial identity, particularly in relation to 21st century waves of immigration in Spain.  We will examine how racial identity, nationality, and a sense of belonging has been represented in contemporary fiction, film, and media.

Full details for SPAN 3580 - Race and Immigration in Spain

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the America? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Césaire, Walcott, Bolaño, Espada, Waldrop, Vicuña, Hong, and Rankine.

Full details for SPAN 3800 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

Guided independent study of special topics. For undergraduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 4200 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for SPAN 4300 - Honors Work II

Benedict Anderson famously argued that nations are "imagined political communities." Following Anderson's claim, this course explores the different mechanisms at play in the act of imagining the nation and the ways in which art defines how a nation imagines itself. We will focus on Venezuela, and on the images that have historically defined its national identity: oil, ghosts, and beauty queens. As we discuss contemporary works of Venezuelan literature, film, and performance, we will ask: How do natural resources shape a nation's identity? What role does the past play in the coming together and coming apart of revolutions? How do notions of masculinity, femininity, and beauty define political power? And, finally, who gets to participate in the imagining of the nation, and who gets excluded?

Full details for SPAN 4374 - Oil, Ghosts, and Beauty Queens

Topic: The Late Medieval Devotional Image. A commonplace in the scholarly literature surrounding late medieval visual culture in Spain is that it was always "late".  The Spaniards lagged behind the Italians -- so the story goes -- in getting a handle on perspective, and trailed after van Eyck and van der Weyden in mastering the niceties of oil painting and realistic effects.  Spain's visual production, in other words, is generally treated from a standpoint of connoisseurship and "history of styles," producing predictable results:  evaluations of how it does (or does not) conform to the models established for other European contexts whose appropriateness to late medieval Iberia is doubtful to say the least.  We will examine, through the contextually based study of the introduction of the retablo (altarpiece) into Iberian churches, chapels and palaces (these contexts, of course, included a significant consciousness, and often presence, of Jews, Muslims, or recent converts to Christianity from those latter two religions) in the early 15th century, both the problems enumerated above and the problematic culture of the religious image in Iberia.

Full details for SPAN 4570 - Methods in Medieval

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for SPAN 4710 - Labor and the Arts

The fantastic and the supernatural are the fundamental elements of this course, in which we will analyze Latin American short stories, novels, and films featuring ghosts, vampires, monsters, witches, zombies, haunted houses, and ecological horror.  We will explore issues relating to colonialism, feminism, hybridity, and miscegenation.  The texts range from the 19th century to the present.

Full details for SPAN 4855 - Latin American Horror

This course examines Latin American literature in the context of the visual and auditory of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, in which mass media such as photography, film, and the Internet have threatened writing's "representational privilege" as a technology of information processing and storage.  We will analyze how literature has been able to sustain its visibilty in the competitive media ecology: the power of mass media fantasies to mold the individual's subjectivity, and of the visual image to manipulate reality; the relationship between literature and popular culture and the market place: and the young writers' engagement with the new technologies of the information age.

Full details for SPAN 4910 - Latin American Literature and Mass Media

This course focuses on a place and a concept where two of the most urgent issues of our times - migration and environmental degradation - converge, collide, and shape each other. It examines borders not as abstract lines on the map, but as dynamic hubs that connect human societies, politics, and cultures with the natural and built environments that we inhabit and transform. Through scholarly and creative work from an array of borders around the world, we will develop new theoretical approaches and methodological toolkits for rethinking and re-visioning borders in an era of climate change, toxic pollution, and mass extinction. The course encourages multi- and inter-disciplinary projects from students and will feature guests from diverse areas, disciplines, and practices.

Full details for SPAN 6335 - Border Environments

Guided independent study for graduate students. For graduates interested in special problems not covered in courses.

Full details for SPAN 6400 - Special Topics in Spanish Literature

Topic: The Late Medieval Devotional Image. A commonplace in the scholarly literature surrounding late medieval visual culture in Spain is that it was always "late".  The Spaniards lagged behind the Italians -- so the story goes -- in getting a handle on perspective, and trailed after van Eyck and van der Weyden in mastering the niceties of oil painting and realistic effects.  Spain's visual production, in other words, is generally treated from a standpoint of connoisseurship and "history of styles," producing predictable results:  evaluations of how it does (or does not) conform to the models established for other European contexts whose appropriateness to late medieval Iberia is doubtful to say the least.  We will examine, through the contextually based study of the introduction of the retablo (altarpiece) into Iberian churches, chapels and palaces (these contexts, of course, included a significant consciousness, and often presence, of Jews, Muslims, or recent converts to Christianity from those latter two religions) in the early 15th century, both the problems enumerated above and the problematic culture of the religious image in Iberia.

Full details for SPAN 6590 - Methods in Medieval

This seminar explores the concept of deceleration through cinematic experience.  The poetics of deceleration can be traced back to early cinema when filmmakers were fascinated by the inherent immobility and photographic statis of moving pictures and by slow motion techniques of the "cinema of attractions."  Subsequent reminations on "dead time" and unorthodox experimentation's with duration have come to define "contemplative" of "slow" cinema.  Why does slowness persist as an aesthetic form?  Could deceleration today be considered a political, cultural and aesthetic response to the ever increasingly accelerated and homogenizing effects of global capitalism?  To what extent does a decelerated aesthetic enable a re-valuing of time?  How might slowness be linked to new modes of perception and imagination?  Could we think about slowness as a form of refusal and oppositional poetics?  These are some of the questions we will consider in our weekly film screenings and class discussions.

Full details for SPAN 6710 - Deceleration: Politics, Poetics, Cinema