ITALIAN POP CULTURE (ELR)

Catalog description

This course is aimed at investigating Italian contemporary pop culture and mediated narratives produced by the Italian media industry (with a focus on tv drama and movie narratives). While investigating media, format, genres and imageries of contemporary Italian pop culture, students will be able to immerse themselves deeper into aspects of the Italian cultural identity that inform and shape pop culture narratives such as mafia, the Catholic/religious imagery, food as well as ideals of beauty, etc. In so doing students will be able to better detect the main aspects of contemporary Italian culture as represented from the lenses of the media. The course will investigate new practices of production and consumption of media content and it will take into consideration key concepts and practices that are central to the cultural industries such as genres, format, celebrity and adaptation by presenting and discussing different media products. While focusing on the Italian case, comparisons will be made with the U.S.A. and other European countries. At the same times cultural products of foreign cultural industries will be analyzed for understanding how Italy is represented from abroad.