The Place of the Intellectual: Civic Life in Italian Literature and Theory

This course offers a survey of the notion of civic life in Italian literature and theory, from its beginning(s) to contemporary authors. The topic will be explored through some of the major representatives in Italian intellectual history, actively concerned with the life of the community at the urban, national and transnational level. From Dante to Petrarch, from Renaissance Civic Humanism to Machiavelli, from Vico to Gramsci, from Esposito to Agamben, the focus of the class will be on human sociability and on the forces that enhance or hinder the constitution of communities and collective life. Italy offers a privileged entry point into the issue of civic life due to its belated national unification and richness in local cultural varieties, traits that makes Italy unique in the European cultural and political landscape. Thematically, the class will look at the relationship between Church and Empire; at forms of communality beyond political institutions, such as friendship and family; at the imagination of ideal cities and utopias; at the effects of disruptive natural and human events on the making/unmaking of human sociability; at literature and popular culture in the constitution of regional and national identities.