| Unit name | Postmodernism and the Italian Novel |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ITAL30034 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Professor. Glynn |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Italian |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
What is postmodernism and why are they saying such awful things about it? Amongst media pundits, postmodernism has become a blanket term for all that is superficial, incoherent, relativist, and cynical in contemporary culture. This course engages and challenges those concerns and explores the ideological underpinnings of Italian postmodernism. It traces the development of the postmodernist mode of narration within the Italian literary corpus, focusing on the writings of some of Italy's most influential contemporary authors.
The novels studied illustrate the breadth of postmodernism's challenges to traditional notions of genre and literary form and provide the dominant motifs of postmodernist narration. Playful, ironic, and intriguing, the novels on this course display a significant degree of textual self-consciousness and a preoccupation with the construction of literary worlds. They frustrate the reader's expectations of order and reason by overturning traditional narrative conventions (as in Eco's Il nome della rosa, where the medieval detective's quest for the monk-killer ends in failure and a recognition of the limited nature of contemporary knowledge) or by promoting readers and readings to the centre of the narrative in Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Questions of gender and identity - submerged in the work of Eco and Calvino - are addressed directly in Capriolo's Il doppio regno, where the labyrinthine hotel enveloping the female protagonist raises questions about the relationship between the self, the text and the world. Finally, Malerba's exploration of urban culture, pollution and the commodification of the contemporary Roman cityscape in Il serpente invites a psychoanalytical reading of the relationship between self and city in the postmodern age. Analysis of all four texts will focus on representations of the ways in which we, as human beings, interact with the spaces and realities of our contemporary culture.
