Course contents
Institutions of Italian literature: key metrics, philology, bibliography, literary history, reading and analyzing texts of Sicilian poetry: 30 hours
A literary genre: The short story. From its flourishing in the fourteenth-century to its revival in the second half of the nineteenth century: 30 hours
The first 30 hours will be devoted to institutional lessons to provide a basic orientation about the general content of the discipline and the main tools: bibliographic, philological and critical. The course will provide:
Basics metrics: - Verse: the number of syllables (counting, metric shapes : elision, anasinalefe, diasinalefe, episinalefe, dialefe, dieresis, syneresis, vowel linking, apheresis, crasis, syncope, apocope, prosthesis, epenthesis, epithesis, tmesi), rhythm (diastole and systole); imparisyllabic, parisyllabic, double verses; break; enjambement. The rhyme: schemes of the main rhyme, major technical rhymes, regional rhymes, assonance, consonance, " rhythmic rhyme". The metrical forms: canzone, sestina, triplet, sonnet, octave, ballads, madrigals, canzone libera, blank verses, free verse. Recommended manual : G. Lavezzi, I numeri della poesia. Guida alla metrica italiana, Roma, Carocci, 2002 (only the items set out in Chapters 1 and 2). For lessons on metric we will use the collaboration of Professor Gianfranca Lavezzi.
Basic elements of literature. Recommended Guide: M. TARANTINO, Guida alla biblioteca di Italianistica, Rome, Carocci, 2001.
Basic elements of textual criticism. Recommended Manual : A. Stussi, Breve avviamento alla filologia italiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009 (only chapters I, III, IV).
Elements of Italian literature with particular attention to textual analysis: thirteenth, fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphasis on the following topics and authors:
Thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: The birth of vernacular, Umbrian religious poetry, The Sicilians, the Sicilian-Tuscan, Il Dolce Stil Novo, Prose of the thirteenth century, the comic-realistic poets, Dante Alighieri, Petrarca, fourteenth-century prose, Boccaccio, the short story.
Nineteenth century: The early nineteenth century: Neoclassicism and new cultural turmoil, Vincenzo Cuoco, Vincenzo Monti, Ugo Foscolo, the question of language, Romanticism in Europe and Italy, Alessandro Manzoni, Giacomo Leopardi, the dialect poetry, Fiction, Scapigliatura, The Verismo, Giosue Carducci, Giovanni Verga''s novel.
Recommended Guide: C. Riccardi, La memoria letteraria, Florence, Le Monnier, 2003, voll.I, IV and V ).
Reading of a chosen part of the Commedia. For each part a group of cantos are suggested for further analysis:
INFERNO: I-X, XII-XV, XXV, XXVI, XXXII-XXXIV
PURGATORIO: I-III, VI, IX-XI, XVI, XXI-XXII, XXIV, XXVI, XXVIII, XXXI, XXXIII
PARADISO: I-III, VI, XI, XII, XV-XVII, XXII, XXVII, XXX-XXXIII.
Recommended editions: edited by V. SERMONTI, Milan, Bruno Mondadori, 1996, edited by U. BOSCO, G. REGGIO, Florence, Le Monnier, 1988, edited by A.M. Chiavacci LEONARDI, Bologna, Zanichelli, 2000.
For the poets of the Sicilian School students will greatly benefit from the edition of "Meridiani", Poeti della Scuola siciliana, vol.I and II, edited by A. Antonelli and C. Di Girolamo, Milan, Mondadori, 2008.
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