Is Horror (also) Italian?

Catalog description

Horror haunts our world. We associate it with manmade and natural catastrophes. But horror is also a genre. And haven't we all experienced something horrible? In this class, we take up the task of understanding what horror means, why it fascinates us, and to what extent it belongs to our lives. Our laboratory is perhaps an unexpected one: Italy. In the popular imagination, Italy is the land of fashion and Vespas, sunshine and romance: this class reveals its darker side. After finding the roots of Italian horror in Dante and Boccaccio's descriptions of Hell and the plague, we will then focus on horror in more recent Italian literature, comics, and cinema - covering supernatural sources, such as a haunted dance school, and horrifyingly real ones, such as the concentration camp. Centering on the Italian twentieth and twenty-first century, this class introduces students to a genre which is also, at the same time, an experience - and vice versa. Participants will reflect on questions such as: why and how do we represent horror? Is there anything philosophical about horror, and can we learn anything from it? Does horror presuppose gore or monsters, or specifically belong to certain canons and motifs? Are we all equally exposed to horror or can it be, for instance, a gendered experience? Taught in English. Readings available both in Italian and in translation. Authors include Dante, Boccaccio, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Primo Levi, Dario Argento, Giorgio de Maria, Elena Ferrante.