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ITW4481/ITW5486 -
Reading Contemporary Italian Prose – Dr. Irène Zanini-Cordi
Vivere Nell’ombra Diversity And Marginalization In Italian Literature And Film
Our fast paced, goal driven
society is difficult to keep up with and easily leaves people
behind. From the teenager who cannot afford the latest fashion
to fit in with the pack, to the recent immigrant without papers
who becomes visible to society only as a threat, (the English
term “illegal alien” aptly defines it), a great deal of lives
are spent in the shadows, as “subaltern citizens.” Diversity
tends to be perceived as difference, and difference, be it physical,
racial, sexual, economic, religious or cultural, in most cases
leads to marginalization. Who are these individuals that live
in the social, economic and cultural margins? What are the rhetorical,
textual and visual strategies employed by literature and film
to represent them? Does contemporary Italian culture have answers
to this problem or does it just denounce it through representation?
The course will focus on a variety of brief novels and short
stories by contemporary authors and, when possible, on their
film version. Some examples of such works are Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura, Pace Ottieri’s Quando
sei nato non puoi piu` nasconderti,
Baricco’s
ITW4400/ITW5415
Renaissance Literature – Dr. Reinier Leushuis
The Italian Renaissance: Humanist and Courtly
Literature
This course will be a study of the
humanist and courtly literature and society of the Italian Renaissance.
In a representative selection of readings we will study the
principal themes and tensions governing the literary and artistic
culture of this time period: the individual and the society
in the emerging city-states, the dynamics of the courts, the
relationship between the arts (in particular sculpture, architecture
and painting), the position of woman in the Renaissance, the
survival of chivalric ideals and their comic treatment in literature,
and the debates on the Italian language. This course is not
a survey course, but rather we will do an in-depth analysis
of substantial parts of each author’s work, focusing not only
on the literary and cultural context, but also on the text’s
literary characteristics: form, genre, style, and reader-awareness.
We will also use a variety of other materials, such as slides
of artworks as well as musical excerpts and film and documentary
clips, to illustrate the various themes discussed in the literature.
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