Learning objectives
Knowledge and understanding.
The course aims at strengthening the basic knowledge of literary study, opening the way for a specialized field, and promoting the development of original statements about the thematic net described throughout the course itself.
Applying knowledge and understanding.
The study of literary methods, the learning of the genre theories, and finally the comparative approach elicit the development of the capacity to understand and connect literary facts, in a profoundly interdisciplinary perspective.
Making judgements.
By the end of the course students ought to have acquired the capacity to carefully value the complexity of literary text, critically interpreting their structural elements, the morphological similarities and differences between them. They should also have acquired particular intepretive and comparative abilities about the historical and socio-cultural contexts to which those artistic documents belong.
Communication skills.
By the end of the course students should have conceived the capacity to describe literary texts on the basis of the genre theories and supranational literary study, developing a personal, reliable and consistent way of reading.
Learning skills.
The commitment shown in acquiring competences and learning should provide the students with a definite methodological competence as well as with skills aimed at consolidating their set of readings, their capacity to understand and schematize the dynamics of literary facts – all necessary skills in order to organize contents into the written form.
Prerequisites
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Course unit content
Precarious masculinities. Revising gender in the Italian novel, 1949-1964
A number of narrative episodes, in post-World War II in Italy, fully reproduce the changing dynamics of masculinity. The satiric attack on fascist virility model, as seen in Brancati’s depiction of Sicilian male-dominated society, gives way to more sophisticated revisions of the male character in the age of the so-called ‘economic boom’. We can observe this process throughout the first half of the Sixties, in the schoolteacher who becomes a loser, in Mastronardi’s description of the race towards industrial development that modifies the face of the province for good, as well as in the jealous fears of classy architect Antonio, who desperately falls in love with, and experience rejection from, a young prostitute, in Buzzati’s Un amore, and in the representation of the both psychic and physical entanglement, as confessed by the narrative voice of Berto’s Il male oscuro.
Full programme
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Bibliography
1 Bertoni, Letteratura. Teorie, metodi, strumenti, Carocci 2018
2. Brancati, Il bell'Antonio, Mondadori
3. Mastronardi, Il maestro di Vigevano, Einaudi
4. Buzzati, Un amore, Mondadori
5. Berto, Il male oscuro, Neri Pozza
Further readings will be available on the Elly webpage of the course
Teaching methods
Lessons will be held in streaming, via Teams. Privileged methods will be the following: frontal lessons, film screening,g uided readings of selected narrative passages
Assessment methods and criteria
Oral exams, held in presence and/or, if necessary, via Teams. Questions will firstly regard the handbook, in order to subsequently involve themes, plot turns, the development of characters, as inferable from the reading of literary texts.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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