History of Ideas, of Culture and of Italian Literature: from the 19th century to the Present

Teacher(s)

Maeder Costantino;

Language

Italian

Prerequisites

LFLTR 1750 (Basic Modern Italian I) and LROM 1751 (Basic Modern Italian II) or similar.

The prerequisite(s) for this Teaching Unit (Unité d’enseignement – UE) for the programmes/courses that offer this Teaching Unit are specified at the end of this sheet.

Main themes

- The Risorgimento: major events and ideologies;
- From the Risorgimento to Fascism: from the concept of nationality to nationalism;
- Fascism: interpretation of written and audiovisual documents of this era. Second World War, post war period;
- Risorgimento and Resistance: the debate around the birth of a popular democracy in Italy;
- The identity of Italians in literature (Calvino, Fenoglio, and others), and in visual arts (from the neorealism of postwarRossellini, De Sica, Visconti, to films of the 60s 70sTaviani, Vancini, Visconti, Lorenzini);
- The image of Italy and Italians in contemporary cultural expressions.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	- should know the broad outlines of the cultural history of Italy from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; - have developed the ability to follow a course in Italian; - should be able to understand Italian literary, philosophical, journalistic, cinematic texts; - should be able to provide information on major events of the nineteenth and twentieth century, by analyzing in parallel how they represent the different sources (written and audiovisual); - have developed a high language proficiency in Italian and autonomy in research.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Content

This course aims to present the Italian culture history, from the Sixties to the Nineties. At the end of this course, students will have an overview 1) of the different ideological currents that have competed and/or followed each other in Italy, and 2) of the factors that have contributed to their emergence and/or their decline. So student will better understand some links within the literary history of these centuries, and the historical foundations of contemporary Italy.

Teaching methods

1) Personal readings and personal works
2) Framing sessions with the professor.
 

Evaluation methods

Exam

Other information

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Bibliography

Umberto Eco: Cinque scritti morali
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Scritti corsari.
Articles de Leonardo Sciascia
Syllabus d'articles sur Moodle

Une série de films (liste communiquée en classe)

Faculty or entity

ROM