ITAL 250C - Intermediality: Italian Theatre, Opera, and Film

How did the Italian historical context and theatrical spaces impact the creation and reception of theatrical texts? How did these texts shape the context of the Italian society? What is intermediality? How do media re-narrate, re-interpret, and adapt literary texts? How do media cross linguistic, space/time, and cultural borders? What gets lost in the translation of texts across different media? What is produced instead? These are some of the questions we will explore to improve our understanding of intermediality, or the relations among different media (theatre, opera, film), using the humanist's tools and methodologies (historical and social contextualization, close reading, critical analysis, scholars' production).We will engage with the history of Italian theater from 16thto 20thcentury, contextualizing, reading, and analyzing plays and libretti by Machiavelli, Da Ponte, Goldoni, Mascagni, Pirandello, Fo, and Ginzburg. We will combine a traditional approach to canonical texts of the Italian theatrical tradition with an interdisciplinary methodology that compares literary and visual texts.