This graduate-level seminar takes a geocritical approach to the study of post-Unification Sicily. In this course, we will examine the cultural production of/about the island from the perspective of the performative spatial tropes that locate and position it, and shape its relationships to the larger configurations to which it “belongs”: proximity, distance, connection, stasis, flux, tremor, and the simultaneous “piling up” of time and experience. We will find that it is through the deployment of these tropes that artists and texts (literary, cinematic, theatrical, journalistic, and otherwise) have contributed to the creation of the “many Sicilies” described by the writer Gesualdo Bufalino. In our readings/screenings we will track the cultural, political, and geographical contexts that shape these myriad constructions of Sicilian belonging: the Italian nation, the Italian Empire, the South (or “Meridione”), Europe, and the Mediterranean. After a brief introduction to the canonical works of modern Sicilian literature and film (a module which will treat such cultural producers as Verga, Pirandello, Visconti, and Sciascia), the seminar will focus on two particularly rich case studies of Sicilian polyvalence: Sicily under Fascism and Sicily in the post-EU era.
Number of Credits
3
Lina Insana