| Description: | Focusing on Italian and Anglo-American literature and some film, this course will explore the multiple representations of Italy in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Particular attention will be placed on the varieties of ways that "foreigners" have imagined diverse "Italies", including Italy as the bel paese, and as an idealized, picturesque vacation land, as well as less ideal visions of Italy as "primitive" nightmare, prison, or fortress. We will read works by travelers to Italy from the United States and England in the early twentieth century; by Italians who lived in the Italian colonies in Africa in the first half of the twentieth century; and by Italian immigrants to America in the early 1900s through today's second generation. We will also consider works that depict "foreigners" within Italy: peoples in Italy who have been consistently marginalized by dominant cultural norms. These groups include Southern Italians, Jewish Italians, political dissidents, women, and, more recently, immigrants from the global East and South. As we read about the dissemination of Italian culture abroad and the influence of other cultures in Italy, we will discover an Italy of a surprisingly rich and complex religious, linguistic, class and racial difference. We will find that Italian culture is comprised of a wide array of "minor" or peripheral voices. Class discussion will also attempt to gage the extent to which these peripheral voices meet in a cross-cultural space, both in a socio-economic reality and across the space of the page. For example: How does writing by Italians in Africa in the 1920s resemble that of immigrants today in Italy? How does writing by African immigrants today in Italy, in turn, recall writing by Southern Italian immigrants to America in the early twentieth century? |