SELCS

Italian 20th Century Literature: the Short Story

Course codes: ITAL4915.

Course unit value: 0.5.

Term: taught in Term 1.

This course studies Italian Twentieth-Century literature through one of its most important genres: the short story. In the last century, many Italian writers have turned to this “fairest field of mere prose” (Edgar Allan Poe) in order to experiment with new themes and styles and to challenge customary ideas of literary writing. Thanks to its extraordinarily rich past – from Medieval allegorical tales to Bocaccio’s novelle, from Romanticism to the Nineteenth-Century Ghost story – short prose fiction offers a vast range of literary models, many of which have been explored and often radically transformed by Twentieth-Century authors. At the same time, the short story has frequently been perceived as a particularly authentic form of story-telling, which moves “beyond” the boundaries of conventional prose narrative and opens up new fields of knowledge and moral and political action.

Assessment: one assessed 5000 word essay (100%).

Tutor: Dr Florian Mussgnug.

Set texts:

  • Luigi Pirandello, Il meglio dei racconti di Luigi Pirandello, ed. by Simona Costa,  (Milano: Mondadori, 1993).
  • Dino Buzzati, Sessanta racconti [1958] (Milano, Mondadori, 1994).
  • Tommaso Landolfi, Ombre [1954] (Milano, Adelphi, 1994).
  • Elsa Morante, Lo scialle andaluso [1963] (Torino, Einaudi, 1994).
  • Anna Maria Ortese, In sonno e in veglia (Milano, Adelphi, 1987).
  • Antonio Tabucchi, Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1985).

Preparatory Reading:

  • Ferdinando Amigoni, Fantasmi nel Novecento (Milano, Bollati Boringhieri, 2004).
  • Neuro Bonifazi, Teoria del fantastico e il racconto del fantastico in Italia: Tarchetti, Pirandello, Buzzati, (Ravenna, Longo, 1982).
  • Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981).
  • Roger Callois, Au coeur du fantastique (Paris, Gallimard, 1965).
  • Remo Ceserani, Il fantastico (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1996).
  • Monica Farnetti, Il giuoco del maligno: Il racconto fantastico nella letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento (Firenze, Valecchi, 1988).
  • Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Routledge, 1988).
  • Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris, Seuil, 1970).