of (a) a written examination of at least three hours based on an individualized reading list, and (b) an oral examination following the written (though not immediately). If a student fails either part of the examination, he or she may be reexamined once more, if that is the recommendation of the examination committee and Chair of the department. In the case of the M.A. student specializing in literature, the Comprehensive Exam in literature may act as gateway to the Ph.D. It amounts to Part I of the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.
The Italian Literature Specialization
The exam here is based on an individualized reading list, prepared by the student in consultation with the Director of Graduate Studies and a departmental faculty member of their choice. This list will be based on the much larger Comprehensive M.A. Reading List (available from the Graduate Student Officer). The chosen faculty member will chair and help form the M.A. exam committee, composed of three members, all Italian ladder faculty or, with approval of the Graduate Director, of ladder faculty and visiting faculty. The reading list must be submitted for approval to all members of the M.A. exam committee at least one month prior to the exam.

The individualized list will follow these guidelines:
• It must include between 15 and 25 texts, depending on length and complexity, chosen from the comprehensive list. Students can substitute texts not on that list with individual approval.
• The chosen texts must be distributed among at least seven centuries and present a balance of genres.
• The list must be organized into three general categories on the following model:
A literary genre (e.g., the lyric, the novel, epic, comedy, tragedy, autobiography, etc.)
A critical problem or interpretive question (e.g., realism and representation, symbol, myth, allegory, point of view, irony, parody, romanticism, classicism, ideology, commitment, tradition vs. innovation, the status of the signifier, the question of gender, etc.)
A theme (e.g., passion, time and memory, silence, desire, nature, community, male-female relationships, authority, class conflict, war, the representation of the self, etc.)
• Each category must contain at least five texts, spanning at least three centuries. Some texts may occupy more than one category, so long as each category contains five texts that do not.
• Dante's Divina Commedia must be on every student's list.
EXAMPLE A:
Genre: Comedy. Dante, Divina Commedia; Lorenzo de Medici, La Nencia da Barberino; Machiavelli, La mandragola; Goldoni, La locandiera; Dario Fo, Le commedie (selections)
Critical Problem: What is realism? Boccaccio, Il Decamerone; Vico, La scienza nuova; Manzoni, I promessi sposi; Verga, I Malavoglia; Serao, Il paesa di cuccagna; Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal; Aleramo, Una donna; Deledda, Marianna Sirca; Fenoglio, Il partigiano Johnny.
Theme: Passion. Cavalcanti, poesie, Ariosto, Orlando Furioso; Tasso, Aminta; Torquato Accetto, Della dissimulazione onesta; Alfieri, Mirra; Leopardi, Canti; Neera, Teresa; D'Annunzio, Forse che sì forse che no; Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (selections); Pasolini, Le ceneri di Gramsci; Gruppo 63, I novissimi; Amelia Rosselli, Variazioni belliche
EXAMPLE B:
Genre: The Novel. Foscolo, Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis; Manzoni, I promessi sposi; Verga, I Malavoglia; Neera, Teresa; Deledda, Canne al vento; D'Annunzio,Il piacere; Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana; Ortese, L'iguana; Calvino, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
Critical Problem: Commitment. Guittone d'Arezzo, Rime (selections); Dante,Divina Commedia; Coluccio Salutati, selections; Machiavelli, Il principe; Campanella, La città del sole; Parini, Odi; Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere; Vittorini,Uomini e no; Morante, La storia
Theme: The Representation of the Self. Petrarca, Canzoniere; Leopardi, Canti; Pirandello, Enrico IV; Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno; Ungaretti, Vita di un uomo; Antonia Pozzi, Parole; Zanzotto, La beltà
The exam will present students with a choice of up to three essay questions for each category on the list. The student will answer one question for each category (or three essays of one hour each). One week after the completion of the written exam, a one-hour oral examination with the three members of the exam committee will address the student's performance on the written exam. He or she will also be expected to have a comprehensive grasp of the general development and periodic shifts in Italian literary history. Please consult with your exam director for textbooks, histories, and critical works that may be helpful in preparing for the exam.

Dante/medieval
 Dante's concept of pietà
 Sacred and secular in late-medieval civic art in Tuscany and Umbria
 A comparative study of Franciscan influence in the works of Dante and Giotto
 Franciscan attitudes to poverty in their social context
 Dante and the papacy: Boniface and Beatrice in context
 Dante and the classical poets
 Boccaccio's Corbaccio
 Byzantine art in Sicily
Renaissance
 Michelangelo's Vatican Pietà and Florence Pietà : finito or non-finito?
 The representation of the Judith and Holofernes theme in Italian art, 1550-1650
 'Difesa delle donne': a study of feminist writings in early modern Venice, with particular reference to the works of Arcangela Tarabotti
 The propagandistic use of art in the political context of the Renaissance courts of Italy, focussing on Milan (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries)
 Italian epic with particular reference to the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo
 Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and its reflections in the visual arts
Modern
 The treatment of history in the novels of three twentieth-century Italian women writers
 Silent communication: the physical texts of Dacia Maraini and Oriana Fallaci
 Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, and the early 'ritorno all'ordine'
 Ideals of reality in the literature and history of the Italian Risorgimento
 Calvino and his use of the image of the labyrinth between 1957 and 1985
 The cultural and social formation of an anti-hero in the novels of Italo Svevo
 The representation of women in post-war Italian film and literature
 Futurism in Italy based on works of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876—1944)
 Modern Sicilian Literature
 The Enlightenment in national and local context: Enlightenment ideas and their development between Paris and Milan.
Linguistic
 Investigation into morphosyntax of Italian songs
 Interjections and their use throughout the Italian peninsula
 A study of the dialect of Venice
 The language of Italian pop music
 The influence of German on Rhaeto-Romance dialects
 The language of Italian advertising
 A sociolinguistic study of the use of Italian and dialect in Emilia-Romagna

IT3035 Italian Detective Fiction
Detective stories are enormously popular in Italy but the genre has generally been regarded as primarily Anglo-Saxon. The prominence of a number of Italian crime writers in the 1990's prompted talk of a giallo nazionale and a reconsideration of the history of the genre dating Italian crime fiction back to the nineteenth century. This module studies the history of the detective novel in Italy, considers critical approaches to the genre, and examines the treatment of common features and themes by writers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Umberto Eco, Carlo Lucarelli, Loriano Macchiavelli, and Andrea Camilleri.
Availability:
Semester: 2
Time: To be arranged.
Teaching method: 2 hours and 1 surgery hour per week.
Prerequisites: none
Antirequsites: none
Assessment: Coursework = 40%, 2-hour Written Examination = 60%
Reassessment:
Short loan supplementary reading list

15 Credits
IT3037 Contemporary Italian Women Writers
Since the Second World War the role of women in Italy has undergone profound and rapid change. Women writers have reflected these changes in their fiction. This module explore the development of female identity, considers the ways in which women writers have responded to social, political and cultural changes, and examines common themes such as women's autobiography, the mother and daughter relationship, and the body, as treated by contemporary writers such as Anna Banti, Luisa Passerini, Clara Sereni, Elena Stancanelli.
IT4016 Twentieth-Century Italian Canonical and Anti-Canonical Poetry
This module looks at voices and texts that have created contrasting discourses within the Italian Poetic tradition during the 20th century. Poets that have been recognised and promptly accepted and included within the Italian Canon, and poets who have been excluded or censored by it due to formal or political reasons. The module will study poets such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale and Umberto Saba as representatives of the Canon, and Aldo Palazzeschi and other Futurist poets, as well as Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Pagliariani, and Nanni Belestrinin as voices of the Anti-Canon.
IT4015 Literary Transvestism in Italian Literature
The module looks at literary texts that have been written or re-narrated from the point of view of the opposite sex to that of the author. This phenomenon has recently been described as literary transvestism. This creates a variety of effects in the resulting texts, ranging from mere masquerade, to issues dealing with sexuality and gender, and even fetishism and pathology. The module will study texts such as Cesare Pavese's La bella estate and Tra donne sole, Alberto Moravia's La romana and La ciociara, and Elena Ferrante's L'amore molesto. In addition a number of films will be studied which are relevant to the texts and the theme of transvestism.
T4013 Modern Italy through Cinema
This module offers a perspective on historical as well as present views/conceptions of Italy, through the study of films by Italian directors such as: Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, Nanni Moretti and Gianni Amelio. There are about twenty screenings of selected cinematic texts in Italian with English subtitles. There is a greater in-depth analysis of between seven and nine films in classes. Students will be encouraged to develop their own critical approach through seminars and discussion. An element of Italian history will inform the module.