Learning objectives
Knowledge and understanding.
The course will provide the students with a basic understanding of the rhetorical, stylistuc, thematic and ideological structures of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts.
Applying knowledge and understanding.
By providing a constant guide to the activity of reading, and showing a specific interest in the single points of view, as expressed by the rewritings, the course aims at generating a peculiar consciousness of the way both characters and narrators voice one’s own vision of literature and of the world. Students should be able to apply their knowledge and interpretive skills to the classical tradition, as well as to a wider set of texts and artistic genres, developing a learned and critical spectatorship. A peculiar form of understanding will result from the practice of analysis of the processes of intersemiotic translation.
Making judgements.
By the end of the course, students should be able to apply their judgements to a theoretically grounded, supranational level of textual reading. They should also be able to show the capacity to correctly situating the texts in the epoch and cultural atmosphere which gave them life. Students will interpret them in a critically founded way, paying attention to narrative devices, themes, genres, poetics, as consistently employed by their authors.
Communication skills.
By the end of the course, students ought to show the capacity to master the expression of textual contents, knowing how to point out and communicate the identifying and connecting elements which run across a defined series of texts.
Learning skills.
Trained to read literary as well as artistic texts which belong to geographically and historically different cultures, students should develop critical skills, in order to successfully study the contemporary art panorama. They should also improve their judgement abilities about what they have learnt in order to structure their final dissertation, as well as to prepare themselves to the reading abilities, as required by the second cycle of studies.
Prerequisites
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Course unit content
Memories and fantasies of a moviegoer. Paths of the cinematic imaginary in literature
Unlike the well-engrained study of adaptation, the other way round process, the so-called rebound effect, from cinema – with its glamorous imaginary – to narrative prose writing, has been theorized, and shown throughout a historic tradition, only recently. Therefore, we can reconsider contemporary literature through the images it reproduces from the centenary story of cinema. It is a world whose reading proves always suspended amid spectacular illusion, deception, ruthless interactions, and a never ending reservoir of images which give sense to our living.
Full programme
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Bibliography
Criticism
1. Giovannetti, Il racconto. Letteratura, cinema, televisione, Carocci
2 (Moreover, and only for students who will be not attending the related workshop) Fusillo, Estetica della letteratura, Il Mulino
Fictional texts
3. Pirandello, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, edizione consigliata: Garzanti
4. West, Il giorno della locusta, Einaudi/et al./Mattioli 1855; OR Nabokov, Una risata nel buio, Adelphi
5. Isherwood, La violetta del Prater, Adelphi
6. Celati, Comiche, Quodlibet
7. Puig, Il bacio della donna ragno, SUR
Films
8. Truffaut, Effetto notte (La Nuit américaine, 1972)
9. Babenco, Il bacio della donna ragno 1986)
10. Jonze, Il ladro di orchidee (Adaptation, 2002)
NB1: films are available at Centro Cinema Lino Ventura, as well as in some other city libraries.
NB2: No supplementary reading is required from students that are not able to attend the course. All students are required to prepare the supplementary didactic material provided on the platform Elly.
Teaching methods
Frontal lessons. Screening and analysis of films in the classroom. More didactic material online, on the platform Elly.
Assessment methods and criteria
Oral exams
Evaluation: A fail is determined by the lack of an understanding of the minimum content of the course, the inability to express oneself adequately, by a lack of autonomous preparation, the inability to solve problems related to information retrieval and the decoding of complex texts, as well as an inability to make independent judgments. A pass (18-23/30) is determined by the student’s possession of the minimum, fundamental contents of the course, an adequate level of autonomous preparation and ability to solve problems related to information retrieval and the decoding of complex texts, as well as an acceptable level of ability in making independent judgments. Middle-range scores (24-27/30) are assigned to the student who produces evidence of a more than sufficient level (24-25/30) or good level (26-27/30) in the evaluation indicators listed above. Higher scores (from 28/30 to 30/30 cum laude) are awarded on the basis of the student’s demonstration of a very good or excellent level in the evaluation indicators listed above.
Other information
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