Course Description

This course is meant to offer you an introduction to Italian Modern Culture since the 19th century.  Our goal is not to cover every author or literary movement of interest, but rather provide you with a comprehensive outlook on Italian Culture from the time: we will be spanning from memoirs, the opera tradition, the fine arts, the theatre, novels, short stories, pop songs, movies to poetry.

Literature, as a key to understanding society, will be our back-bone, but we will contextualize it to make sense of the historical and socio-cultural setting of the Italian peninsula, which was quite discontinuous and disjointed, compared to other European states. We will examine the making of Italy as a nation and its unmaking through the world wars and fascism.

Two themes will accompany our exploration: the representation of the “humbles” (as Italian authors called the lower classes) in the 19th century and the “human” question in the 20th century.