Topics for 2023-24 are as follows:

• Topic 1: Testimony, Science, Literature: Primo Levi and Autobiography
• Topic 2: Art, Love, and Devotion: Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna
• Topic 3: Contemporary Women's Autobiography: Luisa Passerini and Igiaba Scego
• Topic 4: Medieval Selves: Dante and Petrarch

Topic 1: Testimony, Science, Literature: Primo Levi and Autobiography

Primo Levi (1919-87) experimented with a wide array of autobiographical modes, making him one of the most complex and fascinating practitioners of the form in the modern period. He was best known as a Holocaust survivor and author of major testimonial works that bore witness to his time in Auschwitz. He was also a scientist and author of a highly influential and unusual autobiography of his life as a chemist. This module looks at these two key works by Levi in order to explore how autobiography shifted under the weight of history and modernity in the 20th century.

Core Texts

• Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (1947; 2nd edition 1958)

• Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico (1975)

Topic 2: Art, Love, and Devotion: Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna

This topic will examine the question of self-representation in the Renaissance through the works of Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. Amorous desire and religious devotion are inextricably bound up with notions of the self, sexuality, and creative expression in the poetic and artistic production of these singular individuals who not only worked independently, but also shared one of the most famous friendships of the era.

Core texts

• Buonarroti, Michelangelo. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. Trans. and ed. James Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
• —.  Michelangelo: The Poems.  Trans. and ed. Christopher Ryan (London: Dent, 1996).
• Colonna, Vittoria. Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.

Topic 3: Contemporary Women's Autobiography: Luisa Passerini and Igiaba Scego

As one of the major scholars in Italian twentieth-century autobiography put it, ‘the sheer number of autobiographical works written by women in Italy in the past century is arresting’ (Fanning, 2017). This topic will consider 20th- and 21st-century women’s autobiography by focusing on two core texts: Luisa Passerini’s collective and political autobiography Autoritratto di gruppo (1988) and Igiaba Scego’s postcolonial autobiography La mia casa è dove sono (2010).

Core texts

• Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto di gruppo (1988)
• Igiaba Scego, La mia casa è dove sono (2010)

Topic 4: Medieval Selves: Dante and Petrarch

This topic will look at two of the major figures of Italian medieval literature and the ways in which each uses poetry as a means of self-representation. Both the Vita nuova and the Canzoniere tell tales of love for a very particular woman, the death of that woman, and the poet's subsequent search for direction in her absence. But above all, both texts virtually invent an idea of authorship and of what a poetry collection looks like that is influential to this day.

Core texts

• Dante, Vita Nuova. Students should if possible buy Vita Nova, trans. by Andrew Frisardi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012). Otherwise any other edition with a facing-page English translation will do.
• Petrarch, Canzoniere. Students should if possible buy the edition published by Indiana University Press, ed. and trans. Mark Musa. Otherwise any other edition with facing page English translation will do. Read as much of the Canzoniere as you can. Lectures, supervisions, and exams will focus on the following poems: 1–12, 16, 35, 60–62, 70, 74, 81, 82, 90, 126, 128, 134, 159, 264, 267, 268, 286, 302, 320, 365, 366.