Academic year: 2025-26
Course: Foundation Course Humanities
Credits: 3
Period: second semester
Number of hours: 24
Teacher: Mattia Petricola (mattia.petricola@gmail.com)
Course description
This course examines the rise of the novel in Europe between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth century, using Italian literature as a primary vantage point within a broader comparative framework. While grounded in the study of Italian literary production from the late Baroque to the nineteenth century, the course focuses on a decisive transformation: the shift from earlier narrative forms (romance, epic, heroic tale) to the modern novel.
Beginning with the break inaugurated by Don Quixote and moving toward nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, we will trace how prose fiction gradually redefines what literature can do: how it represents reality, constructs characters, and engages with the everyday. Italian texts—ranging from late Baroque prose to nineteenth-century narrative—will be read alongside this wider European development, allowing us to situate them within a shared set of formal and cultural tensions.
Throughout the course, we will return to a set of fundamental oppositions—ideal vs. real, heroic vs. ordinary, stable identity vs. fragmented subjectivity—as a way of understanding how the novel emerges as a flexible and self-reflective form. The aim is not only to reconstruct a historical trajectory, but to develop a set of analytical tools for reading narrative prose with precision and awareness.
Main goals
By the end of this course, students will:
- Acquire practical tools for the close analysis of narrative prose
- Understand the emergence of the novel as a historically specific literary form within the Italian and European traditions
- Identify key formal tensions that distinguish the novel from earlier narrative traditions
- Situate Italian texts within a broader European literary context
- Develop clear, structured, and text-based critical arguments
Requirements
No prior knowledge of Italian language or literature is required. All texts will be provided in English translation.
The course is built around guided close reading and in-class discussion. Rather than treating literary texts as material to be passively absorbed, we will approach them as problems to be analyzed together. For this reason, attendance is essential, and active participation is expected.
Secondary readings will be assigned selectively to support the development of critical frameworks introduced during the course.
Exam and grading
The final grade will be determined by two components:
Attendance and Participation (30%)
Regular attendance and active engagement are integral to the course. Students are expected not only to be present, but to contribute meaningfully to discussion.
Final Written Exam (70%)
The exam will consist of two parts:
- A multiple-choice section assessing knowledge of key texts, concepts, and historical developments
- An essay section testing the ability to perform close readings and construct coherent analytical arguments
The exam will be based on materials discussed in class and on the assigned secondary readings.