Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea (Ordinario)

MODULE 1: The Duty of the Times. Carlo Levi: Literature and Politics

MODULE 2: Christ Stopped at Eboli: The 'Body-Character' in Carlo Levi's Fiction

Starting from the intellectual, artistic, and literary work and actions of Carlo Levi—and reanalyzing and rereading his political writings alongside his major novels, especially Christ Stopped at Eboli—the course aims to explore the connection between literature and politics through the emergence of artistic experience in the youth of a twentieth-century Italian and foreign author, with a specific focus on the emergence of an anti-fascist consciousness in the writings of the Italian Fascist period.

Currently, critics have always focused primarily on the connection between youth and Fascism, associating the two names without any gray areas or reversals. In Inventing Memory (Marsilio 2025), Elisa Donzelli has brought the connection between youth and anti-fascism back into focus. Several authors born in the 1910s and 1920s discovered and experimented with forms of anti-fascism in their youth, not so much through actual experience of political militancy and activism, but through artistic and literary expression (often both pictorial and poetic in origin, as in the case of Lalla Romano). These expressions served as a source and incipient vehicle for a later, more active and informed political awareness of their rights as citizens and the foundations of democracy. The course aims to analyze the various artistic and literary representations of youth (and of relationships between young people, as well as relationships with teachers, mothers, and fathers), also extending the notion of "body-character," identified by Donzelli for the early Soldati, to all Italian depictions of physical identities from the 1920s and 1930s that did not conform to the plastic-symbolic models of fascism. This applies to both writers (possibly Soldati, Levi, Scotellaro, Pasolini, Pratolini, Comisso, Fortini, Sereni, Caproni, and Bigiaretti among them) and women writers, both of whom were often also painters during the gestation and birth of their own writing. Specifically, for women writers born between the 1910s and 1920s, the central presence of hybrid and desiring bodies constitutes within their works a possibility of aesthetic and linguistic-figurative opposition to the regime capable of generating an incipient and "primitive" anti-fascism (think of Venturi's 1926 theoretical text "Il gusto dei primitivi," which informed many young people of the time, and not only those from Turin). This is the case – in addition to Romano – at least of Masino, Ferro and Céspedes, or of the painter but also poet Nella Marchesini, authors of novels or poems censored in the 1930s, keeping in mind the slightly preceding experience of Cialente.