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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

IT 20th Century: New Commitments: Literature, Cinema and Culture in Italy 1960 - present

Course Convenor: Prof Robert Gordon, Section of Italian

 

This module will examine a body of work in Italian film, literature and intellectual debate from the 1960s to the present day. It is interested in analysing the on-going evolution of forms of social or political commitment within the cultural sphere, in a period of intense change in culture and society, and of increasing scepticism about the ideological models of the preceeding anti-Fascist, neo-realist generations. Building on, but also challenging their neorealist predecessors, Italian writers and filmmakers in this period reconfigured the workings of political art in response to shifting national and international histories, from social changes in the family and society to the upheavals of terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s to the end of the Cold War and the 'mediocracy' of the fin de siécle. They also responded to changes in conceptions of history and memory, and the nature of aesthetic form, including gestures towards postmodernism (although the latter term has proved a highly problematic one in Italy). As a result, complex new relations between narrative, history, ideology and representation emerged, including new uses for materials such as the document, the archive, spoken memory and recovered histories. The module will focus on certain key figures who worked towards these new forms of cultural commitment (Pasolini, Sciascia, Moretti, Tullio Giordana) as well as on key motifs or issues at stake within them (eg. relations between law and history, avant-garde and postmodernism, memory, oral history and orality, gender and exclusion, documentary and narrative, genre, the historical film and novel).

 

General Reading:

The following are some key introductory texts:

  • Antonello, P. and Mussgnug, F. eds, Postmodern impegno. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.
  • Baranski, Z.G. and West, R. eds., Modern Italian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001
  • Burns, J., Fragments of ‘impegno’. Interpretations of Commitment in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980-2000, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2001
  • Forgacs, D. & Lumley, R., eds, Italian Cultural Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996
  • Gordon, R. S. C., Introduction to 20th-Century Italian literature: A Difficult Modernity , London: Duckworth, 2005)
  • Sorlin, P., Italian National Cinema, 1896-1996, London: Routledge, 1997
  • Wood, M. Italian Cinema, Oxford: Berg, 2005.

 

 

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