0aea12ad_A_The_Global_Education_Network__Course_Name
[Course Number] FLOR LITR 3314 / IEHM 3212 [Major(s)] Literature [Course Name] 
Contemporary Italian Literature: Self, Memory, And Expression The course will introduce students to a number of the most significant 20th century Italian novels dealing with the rhetoric of self-expression, the role of tradition in the construction of a sense of self, the psychology of identity, individual and collective memory, remembrance and memorialization. As this is a clearly thematic approach, focus will be placed on the most prominent narrative devices employed to bring out these issues in what can be certainly described as life-writing, but that in this period tends to cluster around the feeling of alienation from middle-class values and society (Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience), and the Italian memorialization of the catastrophe of World War II (Calvino’s The Path to the Spiders’ Nest, Levi’s Surviving Auschwitz). Therefore, the first lessons of the course will be devoted to a survey of the main tenets of narratological theory and to the pivotal questions debated in autobiographical studies. Students will be provided with the basic operational tools to help them recognize how identity is questioned and constructed in Svevo’s and Pirandello’s works, and how individual and collective memory of the horrors of war are expressed in Calvino’s and Levi’s choral narratives. Special emphasis will be placed on the crucial distinction between possessive and relational self, and its consequence for literary practice. Students will learn to practice a close narratological reading of the texts, and will be encouraged to form their own critical opinion on the writings analyzed for their oral presentations Download sample syllabus
Florence | CAPA The Global Education Network
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