Genres and Literary System in Contemporary Italy

The course aims to offer students an articulated portrait of the contemporary literary system and its founding elements: authors and texts, genres and literary institutions, criticism and publishing mediation. The workshop has a strong interdisciplinary nature, by integrating some fundamental sociological, critical-literary and philosophical reflections of the 19th and 20th centuries (which will be studied in the institutional part). The objectives will be reached thanks to by two monographic modules, in which some important works of Italian literature from the Unification of the Country to the present days will be read and interpreted in depth. The workshop also aims to provide the necessary tools for an in-depth formal and thematic investigation of literary works, their overall interpretation, capacity of identifying the texts' relationships with the literary genres to which they belong, with the cultural and socio-historical context, and with the worldviews below them.

At the end of the course, the student will assimilate some of the main critical reflections on modern and contemporary literary institutions and will learn specific tools for analysing narrative and poetic works.
The student should be able to read, with critical and methodological awareness, the texts proposed during the course, mastering the tools of literary interpretation and applying them appropriately and autonomously. Also, the student should be able to distinguish the roles and relationships that characterize the literary system, understanding their contribution in shaping the physiognomy of texts.