This course will expose students to a selection of Italian literary classics of the late-19th and 20th centuries, with specific focus on the relationship they have with Milan and urban space in general. We begin with Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece, The Betrothed, which is partially set in Milan; we will trace the protagonist’s wanderings through the city and visit the house where Manzoni lived and worked. We then watch the transformation of Milan into a modern European city through a reading of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elio Vittorini’s Men and Not Men lead us to explore the city during World War II, including Milanese sites that acquired dramatic roles, such as the track from where Jews were sent to German concentration camps. The course concludes with Italo Calvino’s The Invisible Cities and his visionary postmodern images of cities, while an anthology of poems by Milanese poets will introduce us to the city’s popular neighbourhoods. (3 credits)
Prerequisites:
No previous Italian Literature background is necessary. More advanced students such as Italian majors receive assignments personally tailored to their level and interests.
Learning outcomes:
The course is based on the awareness that literature is not an abstract pursuit, but something which happens in the real world. It also emphasizes making literature as well as studying it: the students will have the opportunity to extend their awareness of literature through their own writing. By reading and walking through Milan students will gain insights into methods of narration, and will learn to integrate various techniques into their own analyses of the texts. They will also develop an understanding of the major issues of Modern Italian Literature, such as the development of the language, Modernism, Neorealism, Postmodernism. They will learn to master a scholarly Italian.
Method of presentation:
The course will alternate class discussions, field studies, student presentations. Great emphasis will be given to the active participation of the student.
LANGUAGE OF PRESENTATION: Italian
Required work and form of assessment:
Each student will be asked to write a weekly journal to keep track of their response to the readings and the field studies, that will be discussed in class. They will have to write and present to the class a creative project, and write a research paper. There will be a midterm, and a final exam. Attendance is mandatory, as well as the punctual reading of the material assigned weekly.
Grade Breakdown:
Active participation through discussion, reading and writing: 15%, Oral presentations: 15%, Paper: 20%, Midterm: 25%, Final Exam: 25%.
content:
The course will develop as a series of lessons on an author, complemented by one or more field studies in Milan.
1. Manzoni: I promessi sposi, preface, ch.10-13, and 34. Field Study, Renzo’s trips to Milan; Manzoni’s House.
2. Pirandello: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. Field Study: The transformation of Milan, from Piazza del Duomo, to the Museo del Novecento.
3. Levi Se questo è un uomo and Vittorini’ Uomini e no. Field Study to Track 21, the Memorial of the
Shoah, and Piazzale Loreto.
4. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Field Study to the Monumental Cemetery.
5. A selections of poems in Milanese dialect, Porta, Tessa, Loi. Lecture by Prof. Luigi Sampietro.
6. Alda Merini: a selection of poems.
Week 1
1. Introduction to the course. Introduction to Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, an overview of the novel
2. Renzo’s trips to Milan: I promessi sposi, ch. 10-13, and 34.
Week 2
3. Field study. Tracing Renzo’s steps in Milan, from Corso Buenos Aires, to the Duomo, following a map of Milan in the 17th Century
4. Manzoni and the question of the language. “Introduzione” to I promessi sposi
Week 3
5. Manzoni’s Biography. Natalia Ginzburg’s La famiglia Manzoni, ch. 1-2
6. Field study to the house of Manzoni.
Week 4
7. Introduction to Modernism and Pirandello. Sei personaggi, act 1
8. Pirandello, The theater as a space for innovation. Sei personaggi, act 2
Week5
9. Field Study: The transformation of the city: from the Duomo to the Museo del Novecento
10. Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, ch. 1-10. Valerio Ferme, “Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi’s
Catharsis through Language”
Week 6
11. Revision
12. Midterm
Week 7
13. Levi, “Il canto di Ulisse”. Se questo è un uomo, ch. 11-17. One of the critical essays in Ernesto
Ferrero, ed. Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica. Torino, Einaudi, 1997
14. Milan during the Resistance. Vittorini’s Uomini e no. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Fascism, Writing, and
Memory
Week 8
15. Field Study, Milan, the places of WW2: Stazione Centrale (Main Train Station), track 23 (the track from which anti-fascists and Jews were sent to concentration camps in Germany), the Memorial of the Shoah, Piazzale Loreto.
16. Porta, Tessa, Loi, and Alda Merini: 4 Milanese poets (from a selection of poems).
Week 9
17. Porta, Tessa, Loi, inventing a poetic language, lecture by Prof. Luigi Sampietro (università statale
Milano)
18. Postmodernism. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Discussion on the cities. Italo Calvino. “Presentazione”, in Le città invisibili. Torino, Einaudi, 2002, pp. V-XI.
Week 10
19. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Discussing the frame of the book. Alessia Ricciardi. “Lightness and
Gravity: Calvino, Pynchon and Postmodernity”, in MLN, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 1999), pp.
1062-1077; Barbara Spackman. “Calvino’s Non-Knowledge”, in Romance Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 7-19.
20. Field study to the Monumental Cemetery: “Le città e i morti”, “Le città e il nome”, walking through the cemetery in search of names and traces of the past and recent history of Milan.
Week 11
21. Students Oral Presentations
22. Conclusions
Required readings:
1. Alessandro Manzoni. I promessi sposi (1840). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
2. Luigi Pirandello. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
3. Primo Levi. Se questo è un uomo (1947). Torino, Einaudi, any reprint.
4. Elio Vittorini. Uomini e no (1945). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
5. Italo Calvino. Le città invisibili (1972). Torino, Einaudi, any reprint
6. A course-pack with a selection of poems.
Recommended readings:
General
In English:
1. E.H. Wilkins. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1974
2. Gregory Lucente. Beautiful Fables. Self Consciousness in Italian Literature from Manzoni to
Calvino. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986
3. Herman W. Haller. The Hidden Italy: Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry. Detroit, Wayne State
University Press, 1986
4. Barbara Spackman. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to
D’Annunzio. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989
5. Lucia Re. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1990
6. Herman W. Haller. The Other Italy: The Literary Canon in Dialect. Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 1999
7. Richard Lehan. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1998
8. Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation. New York, St. Martin’s
Press, 1999
9. Edward J. Ahearn. Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001. Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 2010.
In Italian:
1. Alberto Asor Rosa. Storia europea della letteratura italiana. Vol. 3: La letteratura della Nazione.
Torino, Einaudi, 2009
2. Alberto Asor Rosa, ed. Dizionario delle opere della letteratura italiana. A-L. Torino, Einaudi, 2006
3. Alberto Asor Rosa, ed. Dizionario delle opere della letteratura italiana. M-Z. Torino, Einaudi, 2006
4. Franco Moretti, ed. Il romanzo III. Storia e geografia. Torino, Einaudi, 2002
5. Carlo Dionisotti. Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Torino, Einaudi, 1999
On Alessandro Manzoni:
10. Natalia Ginzburg. La famiglia Manzoni. Torino, Einaudi, 205
On Italo Calvino:
11. Italo Calvino. “Presentazione”, in Le città invisibili. Torino, Einaudi, 2002, pp. V-XI.
12. Carolyn Springer. “Textual Geography”, in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 15, No.4 (Autumn,
1985), pp. 289-290
13. Alessia Ricciardi. “Lightness and Gravity: Calvino, Pynchon and Postmodernity”, in MLN, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 1999), pp. 1062-1077
14. Barbara Spackman. “Calvino’s Non-Knowledge”, in Romance Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January
2008), pp. 7-19
On Primo Levi:
15. Valerio Ferme. “Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi’s Catharsis through Language in the
Holocaust Memoir Se questo è un uomo”, in Italica, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 53-73.
16. Ernesto Ferrero, ed. Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica. Torino, Einaudi, 1997
On Elio Vittorini:
17. Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930-1950”, in The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Sept., 1995), pp. 627-665.
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Maria Sepa (laurea in lettere, Università di Roma, M.A. and Ph.D., Italian Literature, Brown University), has taught Italian Literature at the University of Virginia, Wellesley College, and Brown in Bologna
Program. She has been with IES Abroad Milan since 1996. Along with teaching, she is also engaged in promoting cultural exchanges between Italy and the USA, writing on the subject a weekly column on
Internazionale, and a monthly column on the literary magazine, L'Immaginazione, and running the blog, usalibri (www.usalibri.blogspot.com). She is the translator from English for the cultural pages of Il Corriere
della Sera.
This course will expose students to a selection of Italian literary classics of the late-19th and 20th centuries, with specific focus on the relationship they have with Milan and urban space in general. We begin with Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece, The Betrothed, which is partially set in Milan; we will trace the protagonist’s wanderings through the city and visit the house where Manzoni lived and worked. We then watch the transformation of Milan into a modern European city through a reading of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elio Vittorini’s Men and Not Men lead us to explore the city during World War II, including Milanese sites that acquired dramatic roles, such as the track from where Jews were sent to German concentration camps. The course concludes with Italo Calvino’s The Invisible Cities and his visionary postmodern images of cities, while an anthology of poems by Milanese poets will introduce us to the city’s popular neighbourhoods. (3 credits)
No previous Italian Literature background is necessary. More advanced students such as Italian majors receive assignments personally tailored to their level and interests.
The course is based on the awareness that literature is not an abstract pursuit, but something which happens in the real world. It also emphasizes making literature as well as studying it: the students will have the opportunity to extend their awareness of literature through their own writing. By reading and walking through Milan students will gain insights into methods of narration, and will learn to integrate various techniques into their own analyses of the texts. They will also develop an understanding of the major issues of Modern Italian Literature, such as the development of the language, Modernism, Neorealism, Postmodernism. They will learn to master a scholarly Italian.
The course will alternate class discussions, field studies, student presentations. Great emphasis will be given to the active participation of the student.
LANGUAGE OF PRESENTATION: Italian
Each student will be asked to write a weekly journal to keep track of their response to the readings and the field studies, that will be discussed in class. They will have to write and present to the class a creative project, and write a research paper. There will be a midterm, and a final exam. Attendance is mandatory, as well as the punctual reading of the material assigned weekly.
Grade Breakdown:
Active participation through discussion, reading and writing: 15%, Oral presentations: 15%, Paper: 20%, Midterm: 25%, Final Exam: 25%.
The course will develop as a series of lessons on an author, complemented by one or more field studies in Milan.
1. Manzoni: I promessi sposi, preface, ch.10-13, and 34. Field Study, Renzo’s trips to Milan; Manzoni’s House.
2. Pirandello: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. Field Study: The transformation of Milan, from Piazza del Duomo, to the Museo del Novecento.
3. Levi Se questo è un uomo and Vittorini’ Uomini e no. Field Study to Track 21, the Memorial of the
Shoah, and Piazzale Loreto.
4. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Field Study to the Monumental Cemetery.
5. A selections of poems in Milanese dialect, Porta, Tessa, Loi. Lecture by Prof. Luigi Sampietro.
6. Alda Merini: a selection of poems.
Week 1
1. Introduction to the course. Introduction to Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, an overview of the novel
2. Renzo’s trips to Milan: I promessi sposi, ch. 10-13, and 34.
Week 2
3. Field study. Tracing Renzo’s steps in Milan, from Corso Buenos Aires, to the Duomo, following a map of Milan in the 17th Century
4. Manzoni and the question of the language. “Introduzione” to I promessi sposi
Week 3
5. Manzoni’s Biography. Natalia Ginzburg’s La famiglia Manzoni, ch. 1-2
6. Field study to the house of Manzoni.
Week 4
7. Introduction to Modernism and Pirandello. Sei personaggi, act 1
8. Pirandello, The theater as a space for innovation. Sei personaggi, act 2
Week5
9. Field Study: The transformation of the city: from the Duomo to the Museo del Novecento
10. Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, ch. 1-10. Valerio Ferme, “Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi’s
Catharsis through Language”
Week 6
11. Revision
12. Midterm
Week 7
13. Levi, “Il canto di Ulisse”. Se questo è un uomo, ch. 11-17. One of the critical essays in Ernesto
Ferrero, ed. Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica. Torino, Einaudi, 1997
14. Milan during the Resistance. Vittorini’s Uomini e no. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Fascism, Writing, and
Memory
Week 8
15. Field Study, Milan, the places of WW2: Stazione Centrale (Main Train Station), track 23 (the track from which anti-fascists and Jews were sent to concentration camps in Germany), the Memorial of the Shoah, Piazzale Loreto.
16. Porta, Tessa, Loi, and Alda Merini: 4 Milanese poets (from a selection of poems).
Week 9
17. Porta, Tessa, Loi, inventing a poetic language, lecture by Prof. Luigi Sampietro (università statale
Milano)
18. Postmodernism. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Discussion on the cities. Italo Calvino. “Presentazione”, in Le città invisibili. Torino, Einaudi, 2002, pp. V-XI.
Week 10
19. Calvino, Le città invisibili. Discussing the frame of the book. Alessia Ricciardi. “Lightness and
Gravity: Calvino, Pynchon and Postmodernity”, in MLN, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 1999), pp.
1062-1077; Barbara Spackman. “Calvino’s Non-Knowledge”, in Romance Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 7-19.
20. Field study to the Monumental Cemetery: “Le città e i morti”, “Le città e il nome”, walking through the cemetery in search of names and traces of the past and recent history of Milan.
Week 11
21. Students Oral Presentations
22. Conclusions
1. Alessandro Manzoni. I promessi sposi (1840). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
2. Luigi Pirandello. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
3. Primo Levi. Se questo è un uomo (1947). Torino, Einaudi, any reprint.
4. Elio Vittorini. Uomini e no (1945). Milano, Mondadori, any reprint.
5. Italo Calvino. Le città invisibili (1972). Torino, Einaudi, any reprint
6. A course-pack with a selection of poems.
General
In English:
1. E.H. Wilkins. A History of Italian Literature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1974
2. Gregory Lucente. Beautiful Fables. Self Consciousness in Italian Literature from Manzoni to
Calvino. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986
3. Herman W. Haller. The Hidden Italy: Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry. Detroit, Wayne State
University Press, 1986
4. Barbara Spackman. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to
D’Annunzio. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989
5. Lucia Re. Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement. Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1990
6. Herman W. Haller. The Other Italy: The Literary Canon in Dialect. Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 1999
7. Richard Lehan. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1998
8. Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation. New York, St. Martin’s
Press, 1999
9. Edward J. Ahearn. Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001. Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 2010.
In Italian:
1. Alberto Asor Rosa. Storia europea della letteratura italiana. Vol. 3: La letteratura della Nazione.
Torino, Einaudi, 2009
2. Alberto Asor Rosa, ed. Dizionario delle opere della letteratura italiana. A-L. Torino, Einaudi, 2006
3. Alberto Asor Rosa, ed. Dizionario delle opere della letteratura italiana. M-Z. Torino, Einaudi, 2006
4. Franco Moretti, ed. Il romanzo III. Storia e geografia. Torino, Einaudi, 2002
5. Carlo Dionisotti. Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana. Torino, Einaudi, 1999
On Alessandro Manzoni:
10. Natalia Ginzburg. La famiglia Manzoni. Torino, Einaudi, 205
On Italo Calvino:
11. Italo Calvino. “Presentazione”, in Le città invisibili. Torino, Einaudi, 2002, pp. V-XI.
12. Carolyn Springer. “Textual Geography”, in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 15, No.4 (Autumn,
1985), pp. 289-290
13. Alessia Ricciardi. “Lightness and Gravity: Calvino, Pynchon and Postmodernity”, in MLN, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 1999), pp. 1062-1077
14. Barbara Spackman. “Calvino’s Non-Knowledge”, in Romance Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January
2008), pp. 7-19
On Primo Levi:
15. Valerio Ferme. “Translating the Babel of Horror: Primo Levi’s Catharsis through Language in the
Holocaust Memoir Se questo è un uomo”, in Italica, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 53-73.
16. Ernesto Ferrero, ed. Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica. Torino, Einaudi, 1997
On Elio Vittorini:
17. Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930-1950”, in The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Sept., 1995), pp. 627-665.
Maria Sepa (laurea in lettere, Università di Roma, M.A. and Ph.D., Italian Literature, Brown University), has taught Italian Literature at the University of Virginia, Wellesley College, and Brown in Bologna
Program. She has been with IES Abroad Milan since 1996. Along with teaching, she is also engaged in promoting cultural exchanges between Italy and the USA, writing on the subject a weekly column on
Internazionale, and a monthly column on the literary magazine, L'Immaginazione, and running the blog, usalibri (www.usalibri.blogspot.com). She is the translator from English for the cultural pages of Il Corriere
della Sera.