FRS 002 — Sec. 006 — (2 units) —CRN 73050 — F 2:10 – 4:00 pm — 111 Wellman
Literature and Cinema: The Italian Case

Instructor: Margherita Heyer-Caput, Department of French & Italian, College of Letters and Science

Description: The seminar will explore the intriguing journey that literary texts embark upon when they are transposed into cinematic narratives. These texts become bridges between a medium that attempts to make the visible significant (novel) and a medium that attempts to make the significant visible (film). The bond between literary and film cultures is particularly deep in the history of Italian cinema. For this reason, I propose to analyze two of the most significant examples of the "Italian case" in the diacronic relationship between literature and film: The Leopard, published in 1958 by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and adapted for the screen by Luchino Visconti in 1963, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, written in 1962 by Giorgio Bassani and directed in 1970 by Vittorio De Sica. I have selected these two sets of works for the following reasons: 1) They bear witness to the artistic significance of the interaction between literature and film; 2) They confront readers/viewers with two crucial moments in the history of modern Italy, namely the "Risorgimento" or the complex process of Italian unification, and Italian Fascism and the Holocaust; 3) They present two different but complementary aspects of multifaceted Italian cultural topography (Palermo and Sicily, Baroque and Catholicism in The Leopard, and Ferrara and Emilia Romagna, Renaissance and Judaism in The Garden of The Finzi-Contini; 4) They offer freshmen a first opportunity to meet with two "auteurs" of Italian cinematic Neorealism, such as Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti. The goals of the seminar are threefold. First, students will acquire analytical skills with regard to literary and filmic texts. Second, they will strengthen their writing skills by working on two short papers (approximately 4-5 pages), about the relationship between each novel and the corresponding film. Students will meet with the professor during office hours in order to discuss the first draft of each paper. The final grade of each paper will consist of 60% based upon the first version and 40% based upon the second, revised version. Third, in more specific cultural terms, the seminar aims at making students acquainted with Italian literature, film and history by means of analyzing two significant illustrations of the synergy between two different codes of signification.

Format: Students will be invited to give oral presentations, in pairs or small groups, related to the reading assignments. As a structuring device for textual analysis and class discussion, the professor will distribute every week a brief series of questions to facilitate the comprehension of the reading assignments for the following session. The required texts will be Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in English translation, and two critical essays on the two films included in Filmmaking by the Book, by Millicent Marcus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The seminar will meet once a week for two hours. The first week will be devoted to a general introduction to the topic of Italian cinema and literary adaptation, while the final week will host a conclusive discussion about the students' experiences in analyzing the complementary texts. The second, third and fourth week will investigate the novel/film The Leopard, while the fifth, sixth and seventh week will focus on the novel/film The Garden of the Finzi-Contini. Students will be required to attend the two screenings of the films outside of the regular meeting times. Grading: Grading will be based on active class participation (20%), an oral report (40%) and two short papers (40%).

About the Instructor: Professor Heyer-Caput is a native of Italy. She received her Laurea in Philosophy from the University of Turin, Italy and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Before becoming a faculty member of the French and Italian Department at UCDavis in 2000, she taught at the University of Berne, Switzerland and at various colleges and universities in the North East.
Her research and teaching areas cover the Italian literature of the 20th and 19th century, with particular attention to philosophical approaches to literature, Italian women writers, literature and film, and relationships between Italian and German literature.
In addition to her two books on Franz Kafka (1982) and Luigi Malerba (1995), Professor Heyer-Caput has published extensively on Boccaccio, Leopardi, Svevo, Saba, Croce, DeSanctis, Morazzoni Deledda, etc.
At present she is working on a long-term project about the 1926 Nobel Prize laureate Grazia Deledda.