ITAL-4473 Farewell to Realism

Course Description

With the turn of the century and the new millennium, this course allows us to live through another fin-de-siecle experience, namely, the fascinating transition from the 19th to the 20th century. We will explore the multiple ways in which different literary and visual forms of representation reflect, react, and even anticipate the dramatic changes in the Italian philosophical, political, and social domains at the dawn of a new epoch, decreeing the death of realism. Pivotal issues: the exotic in decadent and colonial literature, the crisis of the hero and the will to power, the shock of the new, women writers’ reaction to Fascist female stereotypes. Conducted in Italian.