The Contemporary Italian Novel

The course will focus on the rich landscape and development of the contemporary Italian novel and narrative prose techniques from the post-war movement called neo-realism to the present. Students will be exposed to an interdisciplinary framework that considers a variety of movements and experiments in the art of the novel and prose fiction. Students will examine Italian novels and their implications for a critical understanding of Italian history, cultural movements, avant-garde experimentations, word and image, the page and the screen, the digital, memoir and autobiography, and the fast changing pace of today’s literary landscape with study of migrant writing in Italian (Amara Lakhous, Igiaba Scego etc). Other authors to be studied include, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Umberto Eco, Vincenzo Consolo, Goliarda Sapienza, Irene Brin, and Elsa Morante.