Department of Italian
Paper It 6
Topics in modern Italian culture
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This paper allows you to study a wide range of different texts and topics from within Italian culture of the modern era, broadly stretching from the unification of Italy to the present day. It focusses on texts of different kinds (novels, poetry, drama, short stories), works in different media (written texts, film, visual arts), and different modes of cultural enquiry (literary criticism and theory, intellectual and cultural history, cultural sociology and philosophy), to give you a rich sense of the variety and complexity of modern Italian culture and history. There are no compulsory texts or topics: you will select four or five of the topics on offer in any one year and study each in a combination of lectures / seminars and supervision.
The topics to be taught will vary from year to year.
In 2013-2014, the following topics will be taught:
Topics
- Postmodern Impegno
- Rome in Italian Cinema
- Science and Fiction
- Maschere nude: 20th-century Italian theatre
- The Holocaust in Italian Culture
- Leonardo's Children: Art, Design, and Industry in Italy, 1930-1960 [This is an It. 9 topic, available for It. 6 students who are not also taking It. 9.]
- Pasolini Between Text, Image and Film [This is an It. 9 topic, available for It. 6 students who are not also taking It. 9.]
Preparation and Teaching
Each topic will be taught in a series of 4 lectures / seminars and 2 supervisions during MT and LT. You are expected to study at least four topics. There will be revision teaching in ET.
In addition to familiarising yourself with the primary texts listed for each topic you are interested in, you should look at all or relevant parts of the following:
- R. Gordon, Introduction to 20th-Century Italian Literature. A Difficult Modernity
- P. Brand and L. Pertile,eds. Cambridge History of Italian Literature
- D. Forgacs and R. Lumley, eds. Italian Cultural Studies
- Oxford Illustrated History of Italy
Examination
The paper will be assessed by a three-hour written exam. There will be at least four questions on each topic and you will be required to answer three questions on three different topics.
Further information
If you have any queries about the paper, please contact Dr Pierpaolo Antonello paa25@cam.ac.uk (on leave MT 2011) or Professor Robert Gordon rscg1@cam.ac.uk.
Introductory Reading Lists for Topics
Postmodern Impegno: post-ideological approaches to ethics and socio-political commitment in contemporary Italian culture
For an introduction to this course and full details of preparatory reading for this topic please click here.
Rome in Italian Cinema
This topic will examine some of the most important films in Italian cinema from the perspective of the representation of the city, of Rome as the site of cinema, of socio-political protest, of Italian national identity or simply as autobiography. Films studied will include:
- R. Rossellini, Roma città aperta (1945)
- V. De Sica, Ladri di biciclette (1948)
- Steno, Un americano a Roma (1954)
- F. Fellini, La dolce vita (1960), Fellini Roma (1972)
- P. P. Pasolini, Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962)
- M. Antonioni, L'eclisse (1963)
- N. Moretti, Caro diario (1993)
- F. Ozpetek, Le fate ignoranti (2003) La finestra di fronte (2001)
Preparatory reading
In preparation you should look at relevant parts of some of the following introductory surveys of Italian cinema:
- P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema (1995)
- P. Bondanella, Italian Cinema. From Neo-Realism to the Present (1983, updated 1990)
- A. Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror. Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992)
- S. Gundle, 'Cinema, Politics and Society' in Z. Baranski and R. Lumley (eds.) Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy (1990)
- M. Liehm, Passion and Defiance (1984)
- M. Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (1986)
- M. Morandini, in G. Nowell Smith (ed) World Cinema (1996)
- P. Sorlin, Italian National Cinema 1896-1996 (1996)
- C. Wagstaff, 'Cinema' in D. Forgacs and R. Lumley (eds) Italian Cultural Studies (1996)
Science and Fiction
This topic investigates the way science and the scientific imagination have been employed and how technology has been praised or criticized in narrative texts by Italian authors of the period.
For an introduction to this course and full details of preparatory reading for this topic please click here.
Maschere nude: 20th-century Italian theatre
Information coming soon
The Holocaust in Italian Culture
This topic examines a series of texts, films and other material which have marked Italy's response to and memorialization of the Holocaust. It examines in particular the unresolved and contradictory sense of Italy's own role as both co-perpetrator and victim of Nazi violence and racial ideology.
Texts and Films
- Giacomo Debenedetti, 16 ottobre 1943 (1944)
- Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (1947); La tregua (1963); I sommersi e i salvati (1986)
- Giorgio Bassani, "Una lapide in via Mazzini', in Dentro le mura (1954); Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962)
- Rosetta Loy, La parola ebreo (1997)
- Kapò (dir. G. Pontecorvo, 1959)
- L'oro di Roma (dir. C. Lizzani, 1961)
- Pasqualino Settebellezze (dir. L. Wertmüller, 1974)
- La vita è bella (dir. R. Benigni, 1997)
- Concorrenza sleale (dir. E. Scola, 2001)
- La finestra di fronte (dir. F. Ozpetek, 2002)
Background Reading
History
- Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista : vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin, 2000)
- Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (Cambridge, 2005)
- Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust (London, 1987)
Books
- on Debenedetti: Alberto Moravia, Judith Woolf [prefaces] in G. Debenedetti, 16 October 1943 (Market Harborough, 1996)
- on Levi: Mirna Cicioni, Primo Levi. Bridges of Knowledge (Oxford, 1995)
- on Bassani: Douglas Radcliff-Umstead The Exile into Eternity (Rutherford, 1987)
- on Loy: Giuliana Minghelli, 'What's in a Word? Rosetta Loy's Search for History in Childhood', MLN, (116:1), 2001 Jan, pp. 162-76.
Films
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat, 'The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful', The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14 /1, Spring 2001, pp. 253-266
- Giacomo Lichtner, 'For the Few, Not the Many: Delusion and Denial in Italian Holocaust Films', in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image. Representations in film and television since 1933 (London, 2005), pp.236-42
- Millicent Marcus, 'De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Contini' in Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore, 1993), pp.91-110
- Millicent Marcus, 'Return of the Repressed: Italian Film and Holocaust Memory', in Zimmerman, pp.321-9
Leonardo's Children: Art, Design and Industry in Italy, 1930-1960
This topic aims to explore the intersection between art, design and industrial innovation in a crucial period of Italian artistic and cultural production, which acted as the matrix from which one of the excellences of Italian industry emerged at world level. The years spanning from 1930 and 1960, in fact saw the gestational steps and the progressive consolidation of a corpus of theories and practices related to industrial design which became influential and dominant worldwide. The topic would single out key figures in the field (Fortunato Depero, Gio Ponti, Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari) who all worked at the intersection of various disciplines (visual art, architecture, industrial design, publishing, advertising, essaysm). The topic will try to account for the historical, aesthetic and epistemological presuppositions from which their art emerged, teasing out the communality of their methods and of their ideas about the relationship between art, design and technology, to reflect the web of connections and practices which link these different experiences.
Primary texts:
- Fortunato Depero, Ricostruire e meccanizzare l'universo
- Gio Ponti, Amate l'architettura
- Bruno Munari, Arte come mestiere
- Bruno Munari, Artista e Designer
- Enzo Mari, 25 modi per piantare un chiodo
- Enzo Mari, Francesca Alfano Miglietti, La valigia senza manico. Arte, design e karaoke.
Secondary reading:
- Matteo Vercelloni, Breve storia del design italiano
- Renato De Fusco, Made in Italy. Storia del design italiano
- Licitra Ponti, Lisa, Gio Ponti, The Complete Work, 1928-1978, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press, 1990;
- U. La Pietra, Gio Ponti. L'arte si innamora dell'industria.
- Maurizio Scudiero, Depero : l'uomo e l'artista.
- Gabriella Belli, Beatrice Avanzi, Depero pubblicitario: dall'auto-réclame all'architettura pubblicitaria.
- Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past, Miroslava Hajek and Luca Zaffarano eds. Milan: Silvana, 2012.
- Tanchis, Aldo. Bruno Munari. From Futurism to Post-industrial Design. London: Lund Humphries, 1986.
- P. Antonello, 'Beyond Futurism: Bruno Munari's Useless Machines' in G. Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and Technological Imagination. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009: 313-34. Longer web version: http://www.munart.org/doc/bruno-munari-useless-machine-pp-antonello-rodopi-2009.pdf
A full reading list will be provided at the start of the academic year.
Pasolini Between Text, Image And Art
Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most significant writers and filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century in Italy. His eclectic interests also included extensive engagement with and theorization of the image - from Renaissance and Mannerist art and art history, to modernist painting, to the semiology of film. This topic will examine a series of works by Pasolini where text and image, or rather a complex triangle between text, art and moving image intersect and interact in ways that include, but also go radically beyond the paradigm of adaptation, centred on a philosophy of transposition and analogy between diverse sign systems. The key work at the centre of the topic will be the 1968 book and film Teorema.
Primary works by Pasolini:
- La ricotta (1963)
- Sopralluoghi in Palestina per Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
- Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964)
- 'Israele', section of poetry collection Poesia in forma di rosa (1964)
- **Teorema (1968) [film and book]
- Empirismo eretico (1970)
- San Paolo (1975), screenplays
[written texts and film screenplays are available in P.P. Pasolini, Opere (Milan: Mondadori, 1998-2003]
Secondary reading:
- Z. Baranski, "The Texts of " Il Vangelo secondo Matteo," in Pasolini Old and New. Surveys and Studies, ed. Z.G. Baranski, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999, pp. 281-32
- N. Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Cinema as Heresy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
- R. Gordon, Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity (OUP, 1996)
- R. Gordon, audio commentary to DVD of Teorema / Theorem (BFI, 2008)
- A. Maggi, The Resurrection of the Body. Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade (Chicago UP, 2009)
- A. Marchesini, Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pasolini (Nuova Italia, 1994)
- M. Viano, A Certain Realism. Making Use of Pasolini's Film Theory and Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
A full reading list will be provided at the start of the academic year.
