ID:
510709
Duration (hours):
36
CFU:
6
SSD:
LETTERATURA ITALIANA CONTEMPORANEA
Year:
2025
Overview
Date/time interval
Secondo Semestre (23/02/2026 - 22/05/2026)
Syllabus
Course Objectives
The cours aims to provide indepth investigations into literary works, authors, major historical and cultural issues addressing multiple aspects of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature: philological facts, cultural connections, historical background, stylistic and linguistic elements, literary models and genres, the relation between tradition and innovation. The expected outcomes are as follows: • Knowledge of the history of italian literature of the twentieth century (authors, movements, groups, literary journals); • Awareness of the historical-cultural context, in its main lines; • Ability to apply the knowledge acquired in the analysis of anthologized texts and in texts/works examined during the lessons. • Ability to expose the knowledge acquired during the lessons and through the study of the anthology with a precise and correct technical-scientific language.
Course Prerequisites
For foreign students, a good language proficiency is requested.
Teaching Methods
The course is divided into frontal lectures, during which texts/works object of the course will be analyzed and commented. The texts will be uploaded to the KIRO platform, and will be projected during the lessons to facilitate the sharing and to stimulate the discussion with the students. Where appropriate, the teacher will use presentations in Powerpoint, which will then be uploaded to KIRO in the form of PDF. There will be in-depth seminars on the general part, especially dedicated to second-twentieth-century topics. Students who do not attend the course should contact the teacher in order to agree on an alternative program. The course will be accompanied by an optional 6-hour seminar (3 lessons), at a time to be agreed with the students interested, in which the topics of the course will be explored in depth.
Assessment Methods
The exam consists of an individual oral test, aimed at assessing the skills acquired in relation to the contents of the course. The test is divided into two parts. The first, general, deals with the anthology/ the manual, and concerns at least two separate topics, related to the first and the second twentieth century. The candidate will be required to read, analyze and comment at least one of the texts anthologized. The second part deals with the monographic course and the analysis/commentary of the texts (at least one) covered by the lessons. The final assessment is based on the degree of deepening and understanding of the topics presented, the ability to integrate the knowledge acquired during the course, and to expose them fluently, using an appropriate lexicon. NB: the exam, like the lessons, focuses on reading and commenting on passages from the works covered by the course. Having all the texts covered by the course, no matter whether in paper or electronic format, is therefore an NECESSARY condition for taking the exam.
Texts
For the general part of the exam, the teacher will make SELECTED PARTS of the Anthology Testi nella storia available on Kiro. The first part of the exam will focus on knowledge of the authors and anthologized texts. For the monographic part, the specific bibliography will be provided in class. The main reference text is the Edizione Nazionale of the novel by Luigi Pirandello Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, Milano, Mondadori, 2023, pocket edition ("Oscar") edited and with Introduction, Philological Note and Bibliography by L. Stefanelli. The second part of the exam will focus exclusively on the contents of the course and the commentary on the texts analyzed during the lessons.
Contents
Criticism of vision: Cinema in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore by Luigi Pirandello
Film historian Francesco Casetti writes that «one of the essential issues of modernity» is «the emergence of an identity based not on social membership, but on a complex and mutual play of individual gazes, for which one is what one is in the gaze of the other». From L'esclusa (1893; 1901) to Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926), Pirandello's Novel focuses precisely on this disconnection of subjectivity from shared socio-cultural codes. Pirandello and his characters experience the gaze of the other as a source of alienation and dissociation, and engage in a struggle against it that is variously declined and justified, but which expresses (especially in the case of Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda) a regressive instance of immediacy destined for failure: for them it is a question of reconstructing the natural totality of the self, degraded and shaped/false by the gaze of the other. The cinematographic medium that Pirandello introduces in the novel of ’15, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (then entitled Si gira...), therefore originally intercepts and refracts a plexus of questions that have always been open and central in Pirandello's reflection, anticipating in a brilliant way theories and contemporary practices of the visual (think for example of Benjamin, who mentions it in the famous essay on the Work of Art in the Era of Technical Reproducibility, or to the postmodern notion of “simulacrum”, etc). The course aims to investigate the Quaderni in this sense, also in light of the acquisitions of contemporary historiography of Cinema: Si gira.../Quaderni came out in 1915, a turning point between the twenty years or so of «Cinema of origins» (or «Cinema of attraction»: Gunning; Gaudreault), and the advent of narrative Cinema: to quote Morin, between Cinematograph and Cinema. Although Serafino's Cinema has already largely passed through the second phase, probably due to the socio-cultural specificities of the Italian area (Burch), in it one can nevertheless glimpse traces of the «cultural series» in which it had circulated and spread in the first phase, contiguous to spiritualism, magic, hypnotism and more generally to magnetism, also implicated in the research of more or less contemporary medicine on hysteria.
Film historian Francesco Casetti writes that «one of the essential issues of modernity» is «the emergence of an identity based not on social membership, but on a complex and mutual play of individual gazes, for which one is what one is in the gaze of the other». From L'esclusa (1893; 1901) to Uno, nessuno e centomila (1926), Pirandello's Novel focuses precisely on this disconnection of subjectivity from shared socio-cultural codes. Pirandello and his characters experience the gaze of the other as a source of alienation and dissociation, and engage in a struggle against it that is variously declined and justified, but which expresses (especially in the case of Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda) a regressive instance of immediacy destined for failure: for them it is a question of reconstructing the natural totality of the self, degraded and shaped/false by the gaze of the other. The cinematographic medium that Pirandello introduces in the novel of ’15, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (then entitled Si gira...), therefore originally intercepts and refracts a plexus of questions that have always been open and central in Pirandello's reflection, anticipating in a brilliant way theories and contemporary practices of the visual (think for example of Benjamin, who mentions it in the famous essay on the Work of Art in the Era of Technical Reproducibility, or to the postmodern notion of “simulacrum”, etc). The course aims to investigate the Quaderni in this sense, also in light of the acquisitions of contemporary historiography of Cinema: Si gira.../Quaderni came out in 1915, a turning point between the twenty years or so of «Cinema of origins» (or «Cinema of attraction»: Gunning; Gaudreault), and the advent of narrative Cinema: to quote Morin, between Cinematograph and Cinema. Although Serafino's Cinema has already largely passed through the second phase, probably due to the socio-cultural specificities of the Italian area (Burch), in it one can nevertheless glimpse traces of the «cultural series» in which it had circulated and spread in the first phase, contiguous to spiritualism, magic, hypnotism and more generally to magnetism, also implicated in the research of more or less contemporary medicine on hysteria.
Course Language
Italian
More information
For foreign students, custom exam program to be agreed.
Class attendance is highly recommended; students who cannot attend
are invited to meet the teacher during his office hours and/or contact him
to the email address provided, in order to agree an alternative exam
program.
Class attendance is highly recommended; students who cannot attend
are invited to meet the teacher during his office hours and/or contact him
to the email address provided, in order to agree an alternative exam
program.
Degrees
Degrees
HUMANITIES
Bachelor’s Degree
3 years
No Results Found