Paul Colilli
Associate Director of Italian School, Italian School Faculty
Email: pcolilli@middlebury.edu
Phone: work802.443.5727
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Paul Colilli holds a B.A. (McMaster University), as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. (University of Toronto). He is professor of Italian Studies at Laurentian University and is a regular Visiting Professor at Middlebury College's Scuola italiana in Middlebury, Vermont. He has written many articles in the area of Renaissance to Modern Italian literature and thought. As well, Dr. Colilli is the author of numerous scholarly books including Petrarch's Allegories of Writing (1988), Poliziano's Science of Tropes (1989), La poetica dell'aletheia nell'Africa del Petrarca (1993), Signs of the Hermetic Imagination (1993), The Idea of the Living Spirit (1997), The Angel's Corpse (1999), Semiotics as a Bridge between the Sciences and the Humanities (co-ed. 2000), Vico and the Archives of Hermetic Reason (2004). Dr. Colilli is presently Laurentian University's Dean of Graduate Studies
E-mail: pcolilli@laurentian.ca
Courses
Courses offered in the past four years.
▲ indicates offered in the current term
▹ indicates offered in the upcoming term[s]
ITAL 6573 - Intro Early Modern Ital Lit ▹
Introduction to Early Modern Italian Literature
This course focuses on the historical development of mid- to late- sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian literature. We will read the works of major Italian authors in relation to their impact on both Italian and European culture, from the last days of the Renaissance to the onset of Arcadia. While discussing the representative literary and philosophical works of these two centuries, we will examine the evolution/involution of the intellectual class, the hegemony of religious and political power over science and the arts and how literature emerges from the society which it attempts to change or describe. (1 Unit)
Required text: M. Pazzaglia, Letteratura italiana. Testi e critica con lineamenti di storia letteraria. Vol. II. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1992-1993.
LiteratureSummer 2010, Summer 2011, Summer 2012
ITAL 6577 - Textual Worlds Med&Humanistic
The Textual Worlds of Medieval and Humanistic Italy
This course examines the emergence of Italian literary culture from its earliest manifestations in the thirteenth century to Renaissance Humanism of the fifteenth century. Selected readings from major works of representative authors will illustrate the dominant intellectual trends and the development of literary forms. We will explore topics such as the interrelationship between literature, the history of ideas and the other arts, as well as the connection between literature and social forces. (1 Unit)
Required Text: M. Pazzaglia, Letteratura italiana. Testi e critica con lineamenti di storia letteraria. Vol. 1. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1992-1993.
LiteratureSummer 2008, Summer 2009, Summer 2010, Summer 2011
ITAL 6665 - Mediterranean Sig Dante's DC ▹
The Mediterranean Signature of Dante’s Divina Commedia
The course will explore Dante’s Divina Commedia with special reference to the Medieval Mediterranean cultural context from which it emerged. We will be reading selected cantos, as well as some of Dante’s other works, in relation to the network of intellectual traditions (Islamic, Jewish, Christian) that dominated Dante’s age.
Required Text:
Dante Alighieri, Tutte le opere (Divina Commedia, Vita Nuova, Rime, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Monarchia, Egloghe, Epistole, Quaestio de aqua et de terra). Introduzione di Italo Borzi. Commenti a cura di Giovanni Fallani, Nicola Maggi e Silvio Zennaro. (Roma: Newton Compton editori, 1993).
Summer 2008, Summer 2012
ITAL 6777 - Invention of New Aesthetic:
The Invention of a New Aesthetic: Petrarch and Petrarchism
The aim of the course is to analyze the poet logical, philosophical and theological traits of Petrarch’s poetry making, and to explore why it was codified in the form of an aesthetic ideology during the Renaissance. The focus of the course will be Petrarch’s Canzoniere, but we will also read the Renaissance interlocutors such as Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Giovanni della Casa and others.
Required texts:
-Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere. A cura di Marco Santagata. (Milano :Mondadori, 2004) ISBN 88-04-52376-X
-Lirici del Cinquecento. A cura di Luigi Baldacci. (Milano: Lampi di Stampa, 1999) ISBN 88-304-0282-6
LiteratureSummer 2009
