ITAL 3502 is also offered in Spring 2025
ITAL 3502 is also offered in Spring 2024
ITAL 3502 is also offered in Spring 2023
Spring 2024 | ITAL 3502 Section 001: Making of Modern Italy: From the Enlightenment to the Present. (55078)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Discussion
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 12 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- Completely Online
- Times and Locations:
- Enrollment Status:
Open (12 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Italian literary, cultural, and symbolic practices from the Enlightenment to the present. prereq: 3015
- Class Notes:
- http://classinfo.umn.edu/?ITAL3502+Spring2024
- Class Description:
- Vulnerable History: the Risorgimento's story of becoming. In Hayez's 1848 portrait Meditation, a melancholy looking young woman, sits facing the viewer holding in her lap a cross and a book the title of which, Italy, one can barely discern. In another of his founding paintings of Risorgimento patriotic discourse, I Vespri Siciliani, Hayez foregrounds a woman swooned in the arms of her husband while her brother extracts his sword from the body of a dying foreign oppressor who had just dared assault her honor while she was on her way to church. Both paintings are considered iconic of Risorgimento patriotism: values of love, honor, and kinship expressed in the honor-seeking action of the latter painting and melancholic reflection on and complicity with Italy's long history of subjection and oppression through the former. Yet how did these images ?work??. The New Risorgimento historiography has begun to examine how the circulation of images and materials helped educate people to new feelings of love, pride and honor for Italy thereby helping them repudiate their reputation as an indolent and effeminate people. But such images and Risorgimento patriotic discourses are founded, as we will see, on narrative of victimhood and, more specifically, the construction of Italy as a blameworthy victim of (her) oppression. Political and national identity in liberal Italy thus can be read as founded on a patriarchal understanding of victimhood, suffering, responsibility, accountability. What impact did this representation of Italia's suffering have on political life, daily living, criminal law, cultural texts and emotional expression? What forms of suffering were effaced or not even seen from this patriarchal, female gendered, and hierarchical view of suffering and injustice? To better grasp the importance of this narrative we will think about the importance of victimhood stories in our own society: the media gluttony for horrendous suffering, for raw interviews with ?survivors?, and conservative political campaigns about America's ?victim problem?. We will examine Risorgimento narratives through gender analysis and a history of emotions perspective giving particular space to Risorgimento women's ?effaced scenarios of suffering? (Lyotard. the differend). Readings will include selected writings of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Belgiojoso, Villari, Castiglione, Collodi and De Amicis, Lombroso as well as an analysis of 19th century paintings, photographs, newspaper as well as historical accounts of scandalous acts of injustices.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/55078/1243
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 10 March 2015
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2024 Italian Classes