Raccontare la guerra. I conflitti bellici e la modernità, a cura di Nicola Turi, Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2017. In addition to the textbook, students will also have to study texts and documents relating to the teacher's lessons, published on the moodle platform or in other solutions.
Learning Objectives
Knowledge of the Italian war events of the 1800s and 1900s and of the different interpretations and perceptions of the war by writers and artists of the time
Prerequisites
Knowledge of European and Italian history of the 19th and 20th centuries
Teaching Methods
Lectures, remote lessons, exercises, seminars and interviews according to the procedures established by the University for reasons of health prevention.
Type of Assessment
Frontal examination
Course program
The wish to narrate about war through different expressive models has very distant origins in time. In literature, as in poetry, music and painting, women and men have always tried to instill in their works the feelings related to the experience of the war lived directly or as witnesses, also questioning the meaning and reasons of a tragedy destined to repeat itself over time for reasons that are often beyond the understanding of the protagonists themselves. This course deals with the theme of the relationship between the different forms of literature and war, limiting itself to the Italian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the fairly defined temporal contours, the survey panorama is, however, very broad both in order of literary genre (novels, short stories, testimonies, diaries) and authors. In addition to the testimonies of Giacomo Leopardi, Italo Calvino, Guido Mosselli, Beppe Fenoglio and many others, the course will offer the reading of passages taken from some other military authors who have dealt with the theme of war on a professional level without forgetting the "classic" foreign narrators like Lev Tolstoy,
Ernest Hemingway, Vasilij Grossman to enrich a literary and historiographical panorama of great human depth. Through these different voices it will also be possible to understand how the very image of war has assumed, over time, increasingly tragic proportions due not only to advances in war technology and the expansion of the size of the armies but also due to the increasing involvement of the civilian population.