Classes taught in Spring 2019
What Is Europe? (FRENCH 201; ITALIAN 201; LIT 273; ROMST 201)
Continent, n. A continuous body of land on the earth’s surface…
Oxford English Dictionary
A look at a world map soon reveals a curious fact: whereas Africa, America and Australia have clear geographical limits, Europe is instead a land mass extending, without geographical separation, into Asia. Where does Asia end and Europe begin? Could Europe be nothing more than “a small heading of the Asiatic continent… a western appendix of Asia” — as Paul Valéry once put it? This course looks at the construction of European identity in history. From antiquity, through EU integration, to the recent Greek crisis, we will reflect on the limits and possibilities of Europe as a political, moral, and cultural identity.
Antonio Gramsci (ITALIAN 588S; LIT 572S)
“If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically by its author (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire development of all his intellectual work, in which the elements of such view of the world are implicit), we need to do careful, preliminarily philological work, carried out with the greatest scruples of exactness, of scientific honesty, of intellectual loyalty, and without preconceptions or prejudice.” Taking as a starting point Gramsci’s note from notebook 16 § 2, this course proposes a philological reading of the fragmentary Prison Notebooks to reconstruct the “world-view” and possible political uses implicit in Gramscian concepts such
as hegemony, praxis, Renaissance, Reformation, popular literature, Americanism and subaltern.
