ITAL 182 - Southern Italy on Page and Screen

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

It has famously been said that Sicily holds “the clue to everything” and that one can “see Naples and die.” Why and how is the South, Italy’s “internal other”, viewed with alternating fascination and revulsion? In books and on film, Southern Italy is depicted in dramatic, contradictory, and sometimes problematic terms: as pastoral idyll, social and economic backwater, archaeological repository, land of mafia denizens, or locus of modern migration crises. As the site of intersecting, contradictory, and too-often limiting figurations, Southern Italy has a prominent and highly contested position in the modern Italian cultural and artistic imagination that has much to teach us about Italy and Italians. This course interrogates these depictions and stereotypes in literature and film through the careful unpacking of a broad range of texts and images from the 19th century to the present day. Simona Bondavalli.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS