CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN LITERATURE

The course is part of the main features of the Degree course in Literature, and aims to provide students with not only the basic knowledge of Italian literature of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, but also fundamental theoretical and methodological tools to deal with specific problems related to the discipline.
The objectives of the teaching are, therefore, to outline the framework of contemporary Italian literature; to develop autonomous skills of comparison and evaluation; to start a historically conscious analysis of literary texts.

The student will be able to place the main texts of the literature of the last 150 years in a historical-critical reference framework. It will also have the critical tools to deal with the analysis of a text of both prose and poetry. He will be able to use the specific language of literary criticism and apply it to texts and authors. He will know the main critical questions concerning the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

There are no prerequisites.

The Italian literature of the twentieth century will be studied according to historical and cultural periods and movements through the reading and analysis of some important texts both in prose and in poetry. Sample texts will be identified and inserted in the correct reference context.

For the general framework, knowledge of one of the main high school textbooks is required, such as Baldi Giusso; Ferroni; Luperini; Bologna..

Students must read a book for each of the following lists:

Novel - first period:
1. Il fu Mattia Pascal di Luigi Pirandello;
2. I quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore di Luigi Pirandello;
3. La coscienza di Zeno di Italo Svevo;
4. Ernesto di Umberto Saba.

Novel - second period:
1. Conversazione in Sicilia di Elio Vittorini
2. La casa in collina di Cesare Pavese;
3. Tempo di uccidere di Ennio Flaiano;
4. Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi;
5. Il ragazzo morto e le comete di Goffredo Parise;
6. Una questione privata di Beppe Fenoglio

Novel - third period:
1. Il barone rampante di Italo Calvino;
2. Ragazzi di vita di Pierpaolo Pasolini
3. La storia di Elsa Morante;
4. Altri libertini di Piervittorio Tondelli.
5. I Sillabari di Goffredo Parise;
6. Il sistema periodico di Primo Levi.

Poetry - first period:
1. Ossi di seppia di Eugenio Montale;
2. Trieste e una donna di Umberto Saba;
3. Allegria di Giuseppe Ungaretti;
4. Oboe sommerso di Salvatore Quasimodo.

Poetry - second period:
1. Gli strumenti umani di Vittorio Sereni;
2. Il conte di Kevenhuller di Giorgio Caproni;
3. Il galateo in bosco di Andrea Zanzotto;
4. Somiglianze di Milo de Angelis
5. Ora serrata retinae di Valerio Magrelli.

The oral exam consists of an interview of about 20 minutes in which you will be asked to place the chosen texts in the context of contemporary Italian literature addressed in class. The study of the manual will also be verified through targeted questions on other authors or issues of contemporary Italian literature.

Traditional method: frontal lesson with discussion of some particularly significant texts.

Italian

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