Courses

The course examines some of the most important novels that belong to Italy's period of major social and economic transformations. Only after WWII Italy finally becomes a modern nation, i.e. a republic based on truly universal suffrage, and an industrialized country. Such accelerated progress, though,causes deep social instability and mobility which obviously results in heavy psychological pressures on the people: adaptation becomes crucial and inevitable. Fiction therefore resumes the task to represent such awkwardness of integration into a modern bourgeois society that, contrarily to its European and American counterpart, is extremely tentative and insecure per se, since it's political identity has extremely precarious grounds. Among other authors, primary readings include Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Italo Calvinos's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Primary Readings in Italian.