Words and Sex: Storytelling, Censorship, and Boccaccio's Decameron
ITAL 216
Spring 2024
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
COL 293 |
We will explore literary genres and representations of sex and gender in Boccaccio's Decameron. Through close readings of selected tales and cultural analyses of their trans-historical and transnational reception, we take the Decameron's words as point of departure for the study of storytelling and the politics of readership. As modern readers of Boccaccio's renowned and classic Medieval collection of short tales, we investigate the text's notions of love, gender, and sexuality by comparing and contrasting the Decameron with various other texts across varying media, from the works of Petrarch and Chaucer to the modern readings of D. H. Lawrence and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and from visual arts to digital humanities. Students are invited to creatively engage with these and other texts of their choice (and with approval of the instructor) in order to produce, by the end of the course, either a) an analytic blog post that may be published on the H-Net of the Transnational Italian Studies working group; or b) an individual or collective project inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA RLAN |
| Course Format: Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Major Requirement for: None |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
: G. Boccaccio, DECAMERON.
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Examinations and Assignments:
: Weekly posts on the class forum, oral presentation, written assignments of varied length, final essay/creative project. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
: This course is intended primarily for the following students: those who have a) taken a course at the 200 level; b) who have studied in Italy (for one or two semesters); c) whose experience with Italian is very recent (e.g., studied in Italy during the Fall). This course may be suitable for students who have not completed a course at the 200 level but whose placement exam suggested they should take courses numbered above 112. In the event that a student with advanced reading, writing, and speaking abilities in Italian has not yet completed a course at the 200 level, they will be asked to conduct a brief oral interview with the professor during registration or drop/add. In the event that the student does not meet the prerequisites AND the professor has any doubts as to placement, he will ask the student to engage in a brief oral interview. |
| Instructor(s): Miglianti,Giovanni Times: .M.W... 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: FISK404; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 3 | JR major: 3 | | |
| Seats Available: 5 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 2 | SO: 2 | FR: 2 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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