Seminar : Narrative, Theatre, Opera, Cinema

Teacher(s)

Maeder Costantino;

Language

Italian

Prerequisites

Good knowledge of written and spoken Italian (level B2 of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) ; basic understanding of narratology.

Main themes

In this seminar, we will study the connection born out of the mythic and literary transposition between the transposed text and the text to be transposed. This discourse pertains the rewriting of a narrative text in a dramatic text, lyrical or cinematographical.
Students will either analyse the transposition/rewriting of a novel into another genre (theatre, lyric opera, sculpture, cinematographic script, tableau), either rewrite a narrative text in a theatrical text. We will privilege franco-italian themes such as, for instance, the rewriting of French works in Italy or the rewriting of Italian pieces in France.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	To be able to analyse the relationship between the hypotext and the hypertext, between the text to be transposed and the transposed text. To know how to recognize the strategies of rewriting. To know how to interpret the effects of rewriting.

Content

Trauma, metanarratives and identity. Literature, once we go beyond the level of the textual manifestation, rewrites, with insistence, the same contents, the same problems, haunted by traumas of political, societal character, and so on. That we think of the speeches around the position of the woman in the society, of the challenges of the progress and of the social developments that put in crisis the values of a society.
The different texts enter therefore in a very complex communication network, at a distance, spread out in time, in an intriguing diachronic dialogical game.
In this course we will analyze the representations of traumatic events and their effects on individuals. We will focus on issues related to identity, immigration and emigration.
We will therefore explore the following question: how to represent in literature what cannot be expressed in words?
Choice of authors:

• Music and lyrics by cantautori such as Ghali, Baby Gang Mahmood, De André,
• Poems and narrative texts in El Ghibli (one of the first sites in Europe that collects the literary productions of immigrants who often express themselves directly in Italian).
• Giorgio Bassani
• Alberto Moravia

Teaching methods

In the introductory sessions, the lecturers will present the corpus, the issue and the theoretical approaches to be used. The seminars will continue with personal supervision of students' research work. The final sessions will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of the work done. 

Evaluation methods

First and second session:

• Oral exam
• Written paper handed in at the beginning of the session.

If the paper is not handed in at the beginning of the session, the student is not authorized to attend the oral exam.

Faculty or entity

ELAL