Corso di laurea in Lettere

The course aims to provide the tools for reading a literary text, namely, women’s lyric poetry during the Italian Renaissance. The literary text will be examined from both gender and historical perspectives, expanding the analysis to include contemporary Italian female poetry. Students will be able to read thoughtfully the literary texts discussed during classes through the application of the appropriate methodology for such a reading. They will also be able to set literary texts in their historical context, to identify the genre to which they belong, to study sources and fortunes of these texts, and to correctly present the results of this analysis.

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

1) demonstrate that they have read thoroughly or partially some collections of Italian poetry of the 16th- and 20th-century;

2) identify female Petrarchan forms (for 16th-century texts) and consider the structure of poetry texts (for 20th-century texts);

3) grasp independently and interpret such literary works that are not included in the programme.

The course is structured in 36 hours (6 ECTS credits). Lessons are based on frontal teaching. In addition, students can also take the aid of the materials previously uploaded to the professor’s personal website.

Assessment of student learning is through oral exams and grades are given on the basis of a 30-point scale. In the oral exam, students will be asked two types of questions. The first one is a general question to assess the students’ capability of reformulating knowledge, of identifying and organising the main subject matters, and of using literary language to clearly and correctly expound upon topics discussed during the course. The second question relates to the reading and commentary of a passage to assess the students’ proficiency in understanding and interpreting a literary text.

Women and poetry: from female Petrarchism to late nineteenth-century poetry

Collections of rhymes by some women poets of the Italian Renaissance such as Veronica Gambara, Vittoria Colonna, and Gaspara Stampa will be read as an anthology during the course. This is to illustrate the bridgehead established by Petrarch’s cultural model and its female form. Particular emphasis will be given to lexical fixing, together with the possible individual differences concerning lexicon, as well as to the syntactic articulation and the argumentative structure of the sonnet form. The second part of the course will deal with contemporary women poets. Based on ongoing research projects and colloquia on Italian poetry in the 1980s, the debut collections of Patrizia Cavalli (Le mie poesia non cambieranno il mondo, 1974) and Patrizia Valduga (Medicamenta, 1982) will be read thoroughly. This is to analyse their formation as well as to study the representation (even dramatised) of the Self that these collections give on the one hand, and the re-emergence of a “faithful adherence to poetic meter” as a form of estrangement that can be witnessed in these poetic works, on the other hand.

1) The following books:

Liriche del cinquecento, a cura di M. Farnetti e L. Fortini, Roma, Iacobelli, 2014;

Patrizia Valduga, Medicamenta e altri medicamenta, pref. di L. Baldacci, Torino, Einaudi, 1989;

Patrizia Cavalli, Poesie (1974-1992), Torino, Einaudi, 1992.

2) La poesia italiana degli anni Ottanta. Esordi e conferme, a cura di S. Stroppa, Lecce, Pensa MultiMedia, 2016 (introduction and the chapters on Cavalli and Valduga).

Further commented bibliography of the women poets dealt with in lectures will be provided in class. It is also to be made available, in English and Italian, as a teaching tool.

3) for the institutional part of the syllabus: G. Alfano, C. Gigante, E. Russo, Il Rinascimento, Roma, Salerno Ed., 2016.

Non-attending students will also have to read: “L’una et l’altra chiave”: figure e momenti del petrarchismo femminile europeo, a cura di T. Crivelli, G. Nicoli e M. Santi, Roma, Salerno Ed., 2005.