Divergent Voices: Italian Women Writers

3 units

This course engages the fictional and political works of Italian women writers from the seventeenth century to the present day. We will read one of the acclaimed Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, who is considered by many to be the most important Italian fiction writer of her generation. We will examine a cloistered Venetian nun's defiant 1654 indictment of the misogynist society that forced her into the convent. We will confront the reality of a woman writer who in 1901 was compelled to choose between her child and her literary career. Among other contemporary writers, we will study the humorous and radical feminist one-acts of playwright Franca Rame. Taught in English. No Final.