«Nessuno, nessuno poteva tenerlo quel ragazzo irrequieto e leggero come gli aquiloni di carta che i bambini mandano su ai primi venti d’aprile.»
Fausta Cialente, Cortile a Cleopatra

The general part of the course introduces the basic principles of literariness, examining the characteristics of narrative communication and the main categories used in the analysis and interpretation of narrative texts. Attention will be paid to the relationships texts establish with other texts and with the historical, social, and cultural contexts in which they are produced and read, also in relation to the authors’ biographical experience. Particular attention will be devoted to the relationship between narrative and experience and to the role of the reader in the construction of meaning.
Building on these tools, the course offers a broader reflection on the nature and functions of literature, understood both as a form of communication and as an individual and collective aesthetic dimension in which the values, aspirations, and conflicts of different historical and cultural contexts find expression. The specificity of literature as the art of language will provide an opportunity to explore the reasons why we tell stories and read, and to examine the ways in which texts represent behaviours, relationships, and forms of experience.

The monographic part of the course focuses on two novels, Cortile a Cleopatra (1936) by Fausta Cialente and Il barone rampante (1957) by Italo Calvino, and on a long short story, Lavinia fuggita (1951) by Anna Banti: narrative forms that intersect and intermingle in twentieth-century Italian literature, here explored through two women writers and one male writer who differ greatly in their poetics, style, and modes of representation. At the centre of the three works are young protagonists who transgress norms and challenge the dominant patterns of behaviour within the societies to which they belong. Their rebellion takes different forms and arises from different motives – Marco’s intolerance of any constraint, Lavinia’s artistic vocation, Cosimo’s radical choice – but in each case it stems from a refusal to conform to imposed roles and desires. Breaking rules, resisting expectations, and inventing alternative destinies thus become the only way of remaining true to oneself, even at the cost of isolation, estrangement, and flight. Through a comparison of three profoundly dissimilar modes of writing, the course explores literature’s capacity to represent and make conceivable identities that call into question the values and conventions on which collective life is founded. The three works thus explore the search for one’s own way of being and inhabiting the world, together with the contradictions and costs entailed by individual determination and fidelity to oneself.

The course is structured so as to integrate the general and monographic parts, bringing theoretical tools and textual analysis into constant interaction. Examined individually and in chronological order, the two novels and the long short story will serve as the primary laboratory for acquiring and applying the interpretive tools progressively introduced during the course. The categories presented in the reference handbook (see the bibliography below) will therefore be examined and tested in the concrete workings of the texts:

• text, author, and context (relationships between biographical experience, history, and narrative invention): Cortile a Cleopatra, Il barone rampante;
• narrative segmentation and the actantial model: Cortile a Cleopatra;
• narrative functions of the fairy tale and their reuse in the novel: Cortile a Cleopatra;
• narrative voice and narrative levels (homodiegetic and heterodiegetic, extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators): Il barone rampante, Lavinia fuggita;
• point of view, focalization, and polyphony: Cortile a Cleopatra;
• order of events, fabula and plot: Lavinia fuggita;
• story time, discourse time, and time of narration (order, duration, rhythm, and frequency): Cortile a Cleopatra, Lavinia fuggita;
• narrative pact, verisimilitude, and suspension of disbelief: Il barone rampante;
• construction and system of characters: Il barone rampante;
• intertextuality and the relationship with models from the literary tradition: Il barone rampante;
• symbols, archetypes, and cultural and ideological codes: Cortile a Cleopatra;
• semantic isotopies and the construction of underlying thematic patterns: Lavinia fuggita;
• reader-characters, modes and functions of reading: Il barone rampante.