Voyage Through Italy (205-0-20)

Instructors

Paola Nasti

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-335: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

What is Italy? This course begins from the premise that Italy is not a geographical given but something continually constructed: a name of uncertain, contested etymology; a peninsula as much divided by its own mountains as bounded by its seas; a young state (1861) laid over a far older cultural idea; a language that became common only in the twentieth century; a people whose sense of belonging is, as historians remind us, an invention that took hold precisely because so many came to share it. We therefore treat italianità — Italianness — not as a fixed essence but as a transnational concept: an identity made and remade beyond as well as within the nation's borders, in departure, return, encounter, and arrival.

Our catalyst is the voyage. The phrase voyage to Italy evokes the Grand Tour — the foreign traveller, from Goethe to Dickens, who came to admire or to disdain the cradle of antiquity. We reverse that gaze. Instead of the outsider looking in, we follow Italians who discover a country not their own: internal migrants uprooted from local worlds into a nation to which they belonged only in name, and emigrants who first felt themselves italiani in the pain of separation across the Atlantic, forging hybrid identities such as the Italian-American. In its second half the course turns to the African and East-European migrants who, since the 1990s, have remade Italy demographically and reopened the question of who Italians are — bringing to the surface the plural, conflicted history that a polished, unitary italianità had concealed, and asking whether identity might be founded not on erasing difference but on it.

Moving from De Amicis and Pascoli through neorealism (Rossellini, Germi, Visconti) to contemporary cinema and migrant writing (Amelio, Gianfranco Rosi, Erri De Luca, Amara Lakhous, Igiaba Sciego), we read literature, film, and song as the mirror in which Italy has repeatedly asked itself who it is — and as creative acts that have both shaped and contested that answer. The course is conducted in Italian; films are in Italian and some criticism is in English.

Registration Requirements

Intermediate Italian or equivalent

Learning Objectives

1. Read closely across forms and media. Analyze the forms, genres, and styles through which Italian writers, filmmakers, and songwriters have represented migration — De Amicis's didactic tale, Pascoli's poemetto with its mix of Italian and emigrant English, emigrant letters and folk songs, neorealist cinema and commedia all'italiana, documentary, and migrant and second-generation writing — using the vocabulary of literary and film analysis (narrative voice, point of view, genre, register, mise-en-scène, montage, the documentary gaze). (FD-LA 1)
2. Place works in their contexts. Explain how the historical, social, and political conditions of each period — Unification and mass emigration, war and Resistance, the economic miracle and internal migration, post-1990 immigration and the Mediterranean crossings — shaped these works; assess how artists addressed their audiences, and how their works affirmed or challenged prevailing ideas of nation, class, race, gender, and belonging.
3. Recognize difference and continuity. Compare the experiences of emigrants, internal migrants, and immigrants as they appear in literature and art, recognizing both the variety of cultures and voices these works reveal and the recurring patterns that link them — departure, loss, language, hospitality and hostility — and so understand italianità as a plural, transnational identity that is continually constructed rather than a fixed essence.
4. Use critical approaches. Draw on scholarly criticism — film studies, migration studies, postcolonial and literary theory — and its reading practices, using it to support, contextualize, or challenge their own interpretations rather than simply summarizing it.
5. Interpret persuasively, in speech and in writing. Build and defend arguments about texts, films, and songs in class discussion, an oral research presentation, structured debates, written responses, and a final essay, grounding each argument in specific textual and visual evidence.
6. Write better and see more sharply. Use close attention to how authors and filmmakers shape language, image, and sound to make their own writing more precise, better supported, and more attentive to style, and to sharpen their aesthetic judgment — while progressing from intermediate to advanced proficiency in Italian.

Class Materials (Required)

No class materials

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
Prerequisites apply, see description
SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro