ITAL110

Italian Fashion Cultures

Cross-listed with RMST100

Milano Fashion Week & Design, 02/2011 | Source: Flickr (Mat's Eye)

In 2022, Italy’s newly-elected, right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, re-named a previous trade ministry as the “Ministry for Business and Made in Italy,” thereby invoking a key marker of Italian commercial, group, and cultural identity. Since the end of the WWII, the garment and accessories sector has been traditionally recognized as a pillar within the Made in Italy industries.

“Italian Fashion Cultures” examines both the national history of Italian fashion since the post-WWII period and its global dimensions. The course delineates the dynamics among the country’s fashion capitals (Florence, Rome, and Milan), with a focus on the apparel sector’s growth during the 1950s-1970s. We also probe how and why Italian fashion has developed in response to the clothing sector’s exigencies and creative tension with France, the United States, and China.

The course highlights ready-to-wear and fast fashion, the two most significant categories of the fashion world today. Cultural appropriation, decoloniality, and sustainability are examined throughout the course in relation to the course’s primary texts, including fashion journalism, websites, social media, advertising, literature, films, and artworks.

Students are encouraged to consider three central questions:

(1) how clothing is represented in the primary texts to influence the audience’s cognitive and affective knowledge;

(2) how fashion helps forge individual, brand, national, and other cultural identities;

(3) given the ubiquitous presence of fashion branding, how these narratives articulate the Made in Italy cachet to consumers?

The course does not assume student’s prior knowledge of Italy or Italian fashion. Oral presentations and a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing) are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Regular attendance in class lecturing and participation in group discussions and in-class activities are essential for developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Romance Linguistics

This course examines linguistics with an emphasis on the contemporary varieties of the Romance language family. Six main domains of linguistics will be covered: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and sociolinguistics. This will provide a broad understanding of the major similarities and differences between the Romance languages. Although the focus will be on French, Portuguese, Spanish and French, attention will also be paid to lesser-known varieties including Romance-based Creoles, Occitan, and Catalan, for instance. We will also be particularly interested in topics such as language variation and change, language contact, multilingualism, standardization, and language attitudes. The course will be interactive and based on numerous written exercises, in class and at home, that will allow the students to explore more precisely the different variations of the Romance languages.

Required readings:

There is no required handbook for this course, all relevant material will be provided in class and on Canvas.

Prerequisites: Two years study of each of two Romance languages or two years of one Romance language and one year of Latin.

Language of instruction: English

Pinocchio & Everything Else

Pinocchio’s statue in the town of Collodi

In this course we re-visit Pinocchio, the original educational story for children (the would-be Bildungsroman, if one will) authored in Italian by the Florentine Carlo Collodi (1881 and 1882-83), seeing it in the light of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s critical dictum «It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society». Along with it we also study a panoply of other modern classics from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits which also – very diversely – examine the issue of how the individual and society can be (mis)aligned with each other.

The course is articulated in two parts. The first is devoted to reading and interpreting Collodi’s Pinocchio; the other, to everything else. However, to aim for a better synergy between the two components, we do not tackle the two concepts sequentially but in parallel.

Each week, a first item includes relevant topics or texts to be presented & discussed from mostly (though not exclusively) Romance civs and lits. These may range from the birth of the picaresque novel in Spain to the 19th-century French “novel of ambition”; or from the issue of compassion in Parzival to selfishness and/or happenstance in U.S. “rags-to-riches” narratives; or from Don Quixote’s “visionary” archetype to Oblomov’s multi-layered social superfluousness … This, with tweaks that may depend on students’ preferences based on their own spheres of interest and specialization.

Also each week, a second item follows pretty closely the Italian context – and, of course, text – of Collodi’s Pinocchio: nationalism in Italian history and cultural history, the birth (and nature) of modern Italian literature and identity, and more in this vein.

Italy’s nation-building blueprint since the early 1800s is here considered an exemplary small-scale case of one of today’s most burning issues on the global stage: How previously scattered and colonized peoples may successfully coalesce into a single-identity country in consequence of a deliberate political program, with all the positive and the problematic sides therein implied.

Learning Outcomes:

Our desired learning outcome is to develop the factual knowledge + the critical skills necessary to question, in a well-informed, articulate manner, the mainstream current approach (concept/precept) of adapting-fitting-bending individual behaviour to dominant standards of “social success” that are often destructive, and/or unethical, and/or alienating (commodifying), and/or – tragicomically – a lot more childish than the very child they purport to “train.”

Assignments and Evaluation:

• Draft of ideas for Midterm composition (10%)
• Midterm composition (20%)
• 2 x Drafts of ideas for Final composition (2 x 10% = 20%)
• Final composition (35%)
• Participation (15%, which covers both attendance and its quality)

Required readings:

• Giuseppe “Pinocchio” Collodi. I, Pinocchio, The True and Only One: Confessions of a Puppet Who Converterd from Matter to Soul. Vancouver: Finisterrae, 2022. Available on Amazon.ca in the Kindle Store (USD 5.oo). This text is presented and commented in class.
• Any edition of Carlo Collodi. Pinocchio: Adventures of a Puppet – any English translation (there are many), or any Italian edition of the 1883 text. (There are free web versions of both, as discussed in class).
• Further readings of literary classics (primary literature, secondary literature) involve texts available in the public domain – in practice, on the web – and are to be established as the need arises, in consequence of the discussion in class.

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English

Neorealism in Italian Cinema from Rossellini to Fellini and Beyond: Neorealist Masters and Their Legacy

Cross-listed with RMST355

Pina (played by Anna Magnani) in Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 Roma Città aperta/Rome Open City

Does reality matter? Is it subjective – yes … no … to what extent? How do we construe it? Does how we construe reality not depend, to a large extent, on how we represent / (motion)-picture it? (And vice-versa?). Tough, inescapable questions for our tough times.

In the rubble-strewn world of the immediate post-Second World War period, the answers given by masterly films by Rossellini, Visconti, De Santis and De Sica (and the scripts by Zavattini) amounted to landmark events and established Italian Neorealism as a worldwide cause célèbre.

This artistic movement, exemplary both in aesthetic achievements and ethical commitment, proved to reverberate durably in time: it influenced successive waves of younger Italian filmmakers — such as Lattuada, Fellini, Antonioni, Rosi, Scola and Pasolini — who became great auteurs in their own right, all the way the cinema politico of the 1970s and to the more recent nuovo cinema italiano from Moretti to Benigni.

Italian Neorealism also travelled widely in space, and it had an enormous impact on filmmakers the world over: from young Kurosawa’s Japan, to the United States, to countries (Brazil, India, Eastern Europe, Mexico and Hispanic America in general) previously known as “third world” who reached artistic maturity by absorbing and re-elaborating the great Italian Neorealist masters’ legacy. Even Netflix seems, very recently, to have taken note, in belated tribute (Alfonso Cuarón, Roma, Mexico 2018).

All films are subtitled in English. The viewings are introduced and/or followed by presentations and discussion.

Learning Outcomes:

In successfully completing this course on great Italian neorealist masters, students become keenly aware of how, by using committed filmmaking for ethical illustration of major social, economic, or political issues, it has been possible in the past to contribute to fostering a better informed, more humane humanity. Neorealism’s combination of cinematic accomplishment with box-office success for cultures across the world continues to be artistically and ethically exemplary to this day.

Assignments and Evaluation:

• midterm exam (30%)
• final exam (55%)
• participation (15%, which covers both attendance and its quality).

Required readings:

• Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
• Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. (N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2017, prev. © 2013, 2011, 2009). Also posth. ed. by Federico Pacchioni.

Prerequisite: None

Language of instruction: English

Types and Archetypes of Fascism in the Age of the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Fascism parade (parata rischiarata)

This course aims at offering students with diverse backgrounds some foundational knowledge about the phenomenon of “Fascism” as, in successive incarnations, it arose and ran its course in the context of neo-Latin societes and cultures. Since these tragic events were centred in Italy, our primary focus will be the Italian peninsula, and we will digress from there as needed.

We discuss at length Neville and make references to Bosworth, Mack Smith, Martin Clark, Procacci, as well as to contemporary sociologists (Umberto Eco). We analyze works of theory, politics, fiction and memoirs from that age (by Marinetti, Moravia, Pirandello, Ungaretti, Carlo Levi); examine the philosophy (Giovanni Gentile), architecture and fine arts of Mussolini’s regime, from the EUR to Mario Sironi, or during it (Giorgio Morandi); and watch clips from films belonging to the genres of telefoni bianchi comedy (Camerini’s Mr. Max), war propaganda (Balbo’s transatlantic flights, Rossellini’s The White Ship), as well as historical “peplum” kolossals (Gallone’s Scipio the African).

The last 3 weeks in the course are devoted to the study of F’s legacy after 1945.

Learning Outcomes:

The goal of this Italy-based extended case study is to provide students with the analytical tools indispensable not only to condemn, in facile, dogmatic (and thus ultimately misplaced) self-assurance, the F(s) of yesteryear, but, more importantly, to condemn and — so it is hoped — oppose effectively the many forms of F facing us today.

Language of instruction: English

Instructor: Dr. Carlo Testa 

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Note: Credit will be granted for only one of ITST 345 or ITAL 345 or RMST 345