Literature, Fashion and Costume in Contemporary Italy

The course aims to study the relationship between Italian literature, cultural context and collective imagination through the analysis of works belonging to different genres and levels of literary production. These include traditional genres such as the novel, but also mixed types and forms of written production which transcend the boundaries of institutional literature: memorialist, honorific, or journalistic literature. These are formulas practiced by writers of various backgrounds - writers, journalists, protagonists of cultural communication - who interpret new professional roles and dialogue for specific audiences through works capable of intercepting their tastes and interests, orienting them in different ways. These are fashionable works, therefore, both in the role of a best-seller, and because they record the new trends of cultural and material consumption, reworking them.

The course aims to lead the participants to the acquisition of an in-depth understanding of the relationship between literary, semi-literary and extra-literary dimensions within the context of nineteenth and twentieth century production. It is a capacity to orient the main genres (novel, memorial, travel and journalistic writings) by linking literary and paraliterary phenomena, cultural context and collective imagination, through the decisive role of the target audience. Thus, through the assimilation of different perspectives of investigation into not only literary texts, the student matures their respective capacity to identify the authorial intentionality within the full awareness of the relationships between work and context, focusing stereotypes and new proposals capable of shaping the imagination of the recipients.