No particular prerequisites are necessary to be able to attend the course, in addition to a basic literary preparation (theoretical and practical).

No particular corequisites are essential, but it would also be useful to attend another course in Italian literature or other literature, dedicated to the same period of time (from the nineteenth to the twentieth century).

The course is monographic. The lessons will be mostly frontal, alternating with seminar-type lessons, carried out with the aid of didactic materials that will be submitted to the students on paper, but presenting numerous excerpts from films intended for the dissemination of Romanian literature for higher educational purposes, together with excerpts from interviews or literary works available in digital format. Often recourse will be made to projections of literary documents, images of certain scientific and didactic importance and, always with the aid of projections, some of the poetic texts, as well as passages of critical literature chosen by the teacher will be analyzed.

Type of support tools: in addition to didactic materials on paper, which will be provided in photocopies (and / or scans) by the teacher, other materials can be downloaded and consulted from specific websites, also for the purpose of the work carried out in groups or individually, during or independently of the lessons time.

The course will be held in Italian, with the use of bilingual literary texts (published in Romanian original and with Italian translation) or, depending on the composition of the "class", using mainly volumes published in Italian translation.

Title Course

Experimentalism and dialogue of poetics between Romanian literature and European literatures from the nineteenth to the twentieth century

The course allows students to deepen a broad panorama of Romanian poetry between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presented both in the diachronic succession of the most diverse poetics, trends and currents that have composed Romanian literature, and in a synchronic perspective, in which the direct or indirect dialogue with similar orientations that have manifested themselves in European poetry over the same period of time reveals the common roots of a sensitivity expressed by similar aesthetic models.

Among the main objectives of the course, the study of the concrete historical-literary relationships that have linked numerous Romanian writers to contemporary representatives and cultural backgrounds - especially Italian and French - and the literary and / or cultural exchanges that actually occurred will acquire particular importance. and therefore documentable, to which such personal, epistolary contacts have given rise (exchanges of ideas, works, editorial projects, etc.). For situations characterized by the lack of direct relationships between these men of letters, students will be provided with the critical tools necessary to understand and evaluate the ways in which works by contemporary writers belonging to two or more literatures can be approached from an aesthetic point of view. , who in their life have never had any kind of personal exchange which today allows the examination of any direct influence.

At the same time it will be essential to provide an adequate theoretical framework of the tools inherent to the use of intertextuality and, moreover, some interpretative hypotheses will be advanced for the reading and understanding of the rich and different possible meanings, triggered by the procedures of the quotation, which often refer to elements codified from a literary or cultural point of view, typical of Romanian literature.

Therefore, the course aims at proposing an overall panorama first of all of the most innovative processes and moments that defined Romanian literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phase after phase, with the addition of each new orientation, passing from one poetic to another and from one work to another, the criteria and elements that concur to define the meaning of the terms "experimental", "experimentalism", "innovative" and that indicate situations and literary contexts in relation to which these terminologies will be exposed must be used.

Among the main objectives of the course, the study of the concrete historical-literary relationships that have linked numerous Romanian writers to contemporary representatives and cultural milieux - especially Italian and French - and the literary and / or cultural exchanges that actually occurred and therefore documentable, to which such personal, epistolary contacts have given rise (exchanges of ideas, works, editorial projects, etc.) will acquire particular importance. For situations characterized by the lack of direct relationships between these men of letters, students will be provided with the critical tools necessary to understand and evaluate the ways in which works by contemporary writers belonging to two or more literatures, who in their life have never had any kind of personal exchange which today allows the examination of any direct influence, can be approached from an aesthetic point of view.

At the same time it will be essential to provide an adequate theoretical framework of the tools inherent to the use of intertextuality and, moreover, some interpretative hypotheses will be advanced for the reading and understanding of the rich and different possible meanings, triggered by the procedures of the quotation, which often refer to elements codified from a literary or cultural point of view, typical of Romanian literature.

Therefore, the course aims at proposing an overall panorama first of all of the most innovative processes and moments that defined Romanian literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phase after phase, with the addition of each new orientation, passing from one poetic to another and from one work to another, the criteria and elements that concur to define the meaning of the terms "experimental", "experimentalism", "innovative" and that indicate situations and literary contexts in relation to which these terminologies will be exposed must be used.

It will be possible to observe the way in which the meanings of the two terms chosen as the main reading grids change over time, namely experimentalism and intertextuality and the aesthetic reasons with which they appear employed.

In summary, the course aims to provide a wide range of poetic models and registers analyzed mostly through the filter of the same two interpretations previously announced, which will reveal the poetic act in its making, together with various themes that are will be profiled in Romanian literature, in conjunction with the rapid succession of historical changes, of sensitivity, of mentality, but also in function of other ways in which we understand literature over two centuries particularly rich in stimuli and thrusts of all kinds.

At the same time, the hermeneutic exploration of the literary corpus that will be presented will seek answers to some questions such as:

- what is an experimental literature?

- what are the most experimental “shelves” of Romanian literature seen as a library full of excellent literary texts to be discovered?

- Does an experimental writer remain such in all phases of his work?

- Are you experimental in relation to the immediate literary past or also towards the contemporary situation of the national literary field in which you are active as writers?

- to be considered experimental or innovative, must a specific literary group or writer be able to link their name to a new aesthetic paradigm with wide international diffusion, or can this recognition be conquered also in other conditions?

The almost two-century-long literary journey is entrusted to a path of readings and comments aimed at introducing, through appropriate critical and interpretative tools, some prominent authors and their works, the exponential cultural personalities and the epochal “enterprises” that have made possible and have illustrated the major movements and literary trends of the pre-modern, modern and contemporary period of Romanian literature, together with the anthropological and social changes that writers have often felt the urgency of transposing into their verses.

The corpus of literary texts that will be analyzed will make it possible to deepen numerous poetic arts in Romanian literature, which will highlight, on the one hand, precisely the reasons for being of poetry and its ability to incorporate and express existence in general, in all its complexity and that of whoever says I, on the other hand, will show the modalities, compositional and stylistic techniques specific to each phase of literary history, from the most innovative and experimental to those deeply connected to contemporary European poetics, from the procedures that take up the ancient and modern topos in an intertextual key to the most varied 'combinatorial arts', which abolish the past with virtuosity, projecting the history of literature into an eternal and inexhaustible simultaneity.

The experimental charge of a large part of the Romanian nineteenth century will be illustrated by poets who expressed through their multifaceted personality the entire potential of novelty and cultural, institutional and democratic achievements of their time and who founded and brought with exceptional results a real Italianist orientation in Romanian culture. They are first of all two enthusiasts of Italy, the skilful craftsman of poetry in fixed form, Gheorghe Asachi, who practiced poetic self-translation from Italian into Romanian, emulating in his other Italian verses leading names of the poetic tradition Italian, and Ion Heliade Rădulescu, an encyclopedic spirit of absolute importance for the Romanian culture of the nineteenth century, the post-romantic who loved the Italian language more than any other of his compatriots, so much so as to propose it as a unique model for the consolidation of the sublime register of his own national literary language, on the basis of the Gerusalemme liberata.

Dimitrie Bolintineanu, an inexhaustible traveler linked to the 1948 Revolution, with democratic views, mentioned by a newspaper of his country among the corifei of the revolution in Wallachia, who, after a happy two-year period in Paris, becomes the exile capable of transforming his long political exodus (before imposed, then chosen on his own initiative) on the occasion of excellent knowledge of the oriental world, Arab, Macedonian and Trojan Greece. Bolintineanu was therefore that poet who still enchants the reader today with his highly refined exoticism in which he wraps, for example, the face of Palestine, but also that of the young oriental Esmé, the protagonist of the Flowers of the Bosphorus, a cycle inspired by the idyllic and erotic life of Istanbul and oriental women seen as oriental art objects, paintings or miniatures. Bolintineanu's romanticism stands out above all for its picturesque exoticism, with which he made direct contact along his extraordinary itineraries to Egypt, and which allows him to fix in his verses the sensual physicality, the ritual of feminine gestures and floral scenographies, after having evoked them with encyclopedic erudition in the travel diary, mindful of the models of the genre inherited from Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Hugo.

The predominantly French and Biedermeier influence, which is found in these poets capable of welcoming even neoclassical influences, gives way to the fully romantic one of Mihai Eminescu, with whom the Romanian poetic language of the nineteenth century reaches heights of extraordinary beauty. With this last great European romantic poet, High Romanticism and Biedermeier project poetry and love towards the absolute, into the dimension of cosmogonies and the beginnings of the creation of the world (Genesis), in a metaphysical and mythical adventure in which the poet dialogues with the Demiurge and with his beloved, the last being invited in the masterpiece Hesperus to meet the lover-star of immortal nature in his crystal palaces, in the depths of the sea and in the skies, for an hour of human love and for a happiness that turns out to be impossible.

The reasons for being of poetry, but also the models and poetic forms change at the end of the century with the fertile contradictions of Alexandru Macedonski, in whose multiplicity of formulas and poetics there is a real synthesis of the two eras: a poet with romantic sensibility, he writes the masterpieces of his Nights in this register, but he also has the task of the theorist of free verse in Romanian literature, being also a lover and frequenter of the French post-symbolist atmospheres and circles, in which he is received and published, as well as in the magazine Poesia direct from F. T Marinetti in Milan (in collaboration with Mario Dessi) in the early twentieth century.

Modernism (anticipated by the influences of French Post-Symbolism) will offer splendid developments in Romanian poetry, starting with the poetic art of George Bacovia "set" in lake scenographies, sometimes mortuary, with decadent hues (in the debut volume Plumb, 1916) , to unfold its fertile potential, in the triple meaning credited by Tudor Arghezi in the image of the poet – craftsman of the word, psalmist condemned to silence but also creator of a playful universe, apparently within reach of children, Arghezi being a poet who has able to anticipate all the major directions of modern Romanian lyric and introducing erotic gestures considered scandalous, attracting the accusation of "pornography". Thanks to them and to other leading representatives of modernism, the language and the poetic registers are enriched exponentially in the Romanian lyric of the early twentieth century.

The anti-sentimental, anti-traditionalist, ultimately anti-artistic frond culminates with the most experimental component of modernism, namely the Romanian historical avant-garde, which had extensive and intense relations with Futurism, Dadaism, literary Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism - or with the most iconoclastic formulas, which revolutionized European culture at the beginning of the century. Given the strong charge of experimentalism inherent, for example, in the first verses of the future Dadaist Tristan Tzara, of Ilarie Voronca, author of literary manifestos and poetics of the image, or "poetics of supermarket products", as well as inventor of burlesque hymns to the potato and tea, it is planned to reserve a section for itself for this chapter of Romanian literature and to the same extent for the particularly rich picture of exchanges and cultural relationships between the Romanian avant-garde and contemporary European movements and in the first place with Futurism.

With the changing historical context, marked from 1948 to 1989 by the limitations and impositions of censorship placed at the service of the ideology of the dictatorship, the extent of experimentalism changes, to ensure the survival of the aesthetic value in literature and to give voice to messages also of an ethical and political nature, setting in motion strongly codified strategies, capable of evading censorship meshes.

Under these circumstances, the experimentalism, expressed by metapoetry, which is at the origin of numerous masterpieces in the 60s and 70s, in the poems of Ana Blandiana, Marin Sorescu, Nichita Stănescu, Mircea Ivănescu, Leonid Dimov, Constant Tonegaru and others still, it also attracts in its constellation, among the most recurring figures, the metaphor and the parable, figures also able to conceal the urgencies and dramas that have crossed the Romanian history of those same decades of dictatorship and of which literature departs and defends itself, entrenching itself behind the means most proper to it. The impression of a certain excess of self-reflexivity, inter- and meta-textuality were actually the few lifelines to preserve the aesthetic value in the war against censorship.

The arrival of the multiform postmodernism in the last decades of the twentieth century - which initially followed Anglo-Saxon models, developing characteristics capable of reflecting the strong specificity of Romanian culture through the often ironic and playful revival of many aspects of its literary tradition - indicates the full democratization of language and of the way of conceiving both poetry and existence as a whole. In poems that are often long, narrative, prose, the act of composing verses, often intertwined with events in the sentimental sphere, becomes for the poet, most often the protagonist of the verses, an experience similar to performance, or to a technique that uses the procedures of the theater, of the show in general, including a very wide range of literary devices designed to enhance the pleasure of the text, or, in other words, to propose a textual erotica, with multiple levels of meaning, imbued with the most different that today define postmodernity in all fields of knowledge and existence. The poets - Matei Vişniec, Mircea Cărtărescu, Florin Iaru, Traian T. Coşovei - become virtuosos in the game with literature, but also characters in love, capable of seducing the reader thanks to a thousand tricks.

At the same time, the succession of the different literary phases within Romanian literature will be presented in close connection with the historical conditions and with the epochal changes, anthropological in the broad sense, which have marked Romanian society over the same period of time.

In addition to acquiring aspects of the marked individuality of Romanian poetry between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is to say its individuality further highlighted by the main themes of the course - that is, by the attention paid to the experimentalist and intertextual side of this literature -, students will have the opportunity to complete and broaden one's horizons towards topics, literary phenomena and expressive modalities common to the most well-known literatures, and which have found ample space for manifestation even within Romanian literature. 

Poetical texts:

Poesia romena d’avanguardia. Testi e manifesti da Urmuz a Ion Caraion, a cura di Marco Cugno e Marin Mincu, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1980 (the parts and authors to be studied will be indicated in class)

Marco Cugno, La poesia romena del Novecento, studio introduttivo, antologia, traduzione e note di Marco Cugno, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2008 (the parts and authors to be studied will be indicated in class).

Mircea Cărtărescu, Il Levante, traduzione e a cura di Bruno Mazzoni, Roma, Voland, 2019 (the parts and authors to be studied will be indicated in class).

    Al fine di procurare i testi poetici che illustreranno la lirica dell’Ottocento e altri poemi aggiuntivi, a completamento dei testi letterari del Novecento inclusi nelle due antologie e nel volume menzionati in precedenza, sarà necessario consultare la Dispensa aggiornata per la fruizione del corso che sarà tenuto nell’a. a. 2021-22, e che sarà disponibile dall’inizio delle lezioni presso la copisteria Mistercopy, in via Santa Maria, 83.

Critical Texts:

Emilia David, From Postmodern Intertextuality to “Decomposed Theater”: Matei Vișniec between Romanian and Francophone Literatures, in Francophone Literature as World Literature, a cura di Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal, Bloomsbury Academic, New-York, 2020, pp. 252-265 (the article will be provided in digital format by the teacher).

Andrei Terian, Mihai Eminescu: From National Mythology to the World Pantheon, in Romanian Literature as World Literature, a cura di Christian Moraru, Mircea Martin e Andrei Terian, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 35-54.

    Dan Octavian Cepraga, Esperimenti italiani. Studi sull’italianismo romeno dell’Ottocento, Verona, Fiorini, 2015 (the parts to be studied will be indicated in class).

    Dan Octavian Cepraga, L’occidentalizzazione romanza del romeno letterario: Heliade Rădulescu e la traduzione della ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’, in Études Romanes. Hommages offerts à Florica Dimitrescu et Alexandru Niculescu, a cura di Dan O. Cepraga et alii, I, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2013, pp. 168-187 (the article will be provided in digital format by the teacher).

    Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires et culturelles/ Romanian Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, serie nuova, n. 1-4, 2009, intitolato Le postmodernisme alors et maintenant, Bucureşti, Ed. Institutul Cultural Român. Reperibile anche on-line: http://icr.ro/uploads/files/euresis.pdf.

    Marco Cugno, La poesia romena del Novecento: dal simbolismo alla “Generazione ’80”, saggio introduttivo dell’antologia La poesia romena del Novecento, traduzione e note di M. Cugno, cit., pp. V-LXXXI.

    Emilia David, cap. I e II, in Futurismo, Dadaismo e avanguardia romena: contaminazioni fra culture europee (1909-1930), Torino, L’Harmattan Italia, 2006, pp. 19-138.

    Bruno Mazzoni & Rodica Zafiu, Poesia romena di fine millennio, in Giorgio Manacorda (a cura di), Poesia ’98. Annuario, Roma, Castelvecchi, 1999, pp. 183-203.

    Ion Bulei, Breve storia dei romeni, Alessandria, Edizioni dell'Orso, 1999 (i capitoli che riguardano l’Ottocento e il Novecento).

    Nathalie Piégay-Gros, Introduction à l’intertextualité, sotto la direzione di Daniel Bergez, Paris, Dunod, 1996.

     Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony, Londra–New York, Routledge, 1994.

     Linda Hutcheon, Ironie, satire, parodie, in Poétique, n. 46, aprile 1981, pp. 140-155.

Altri testi e materiali didattici verranno forniti a lezione, insieme alle edizioni d’autore che sono state usate per costituire la Dispensa contenente il corpus di testi letterari volti a completare le letture e le illustrazioni del corso.

Optional bibliographie:

In relation to the topic concerning the poetry of the 80's Generation, depending on the mastery of the Romanian language, students will be able to read::

Emilia David, Generaţia ’80: Intertextualitate şi “performance”, Bucureşti, Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2016, cap. I.

Mircea Cărtărescu, Postmodernismul românesc [Il postmodernismo romeno], postfazione di Paul Cornea, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 1999 (from the 4th part, the chap. Generaţia ’80 în context postmodern, Proza optzecistă and Scurtă privire asupra literaturii anilor ’90).

In relation to the topic concerning Romanian literary modernism, students will be able to read:

Matei Călinescu, Reazioni culturali contro la modernità e la modernizzazione in Romania (1900-1940), in Geografia e storia della civiltà letteraria romena. Tomo II, a cura di Angela Tarantino e Bruno Mazzoni, Plus Pisa University Press, Pisa, 2010, pp. 59-90.

Călin Teutişan, Textul în oglindă. Reflexii ale imaginarului eminescian, Biblioteca Apostrof, Cluj-Napoca, 2006.

The thematic program of the course will include the same topics, works and authors included in the Bibliography valid for attending students.

The final examination consists of an oral test, during which the written test, carried out in progress, will also be analyzed with the students.

The oral exam consists of more general questions (e.g. characterizing a specific literary tendency or exposing the historical-literary profile and the poetics of an author) and more specific questions, concerning the literary texts presented during the course, in order to check the accuracy of the analysis and comment applied to the respective text passages.

Students will be asked to indicate appropriate associations and parallels starting from and among the most important themes analyzed during the lessons, as well as to be able to identify relationships between the main literary trends that have manifested themselves in Romanian literature in the reference period indicated above and the currents contemporary Europeans.

Students will be able to attend internships and traineeships in Romania, through the Erasmus Plus mobility program, in the universities with which the Romanian Language and Literature discipline has activated agreements and especially at the Universities of Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Constanţa, Timişoara, Iaşi and Suceava or in other public and private institutions in Romania.

In addition, students attending the third year of Romanian will have the opportunity to leave for a semester of mobility and acquire up to 30 credits at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bucharest, being able to choose various courses (including Romanian Literature) from a broader “package”, agreed by the Fileli Department with the university of the Romanian capital. For more information, contact Dr. Emilia David and / or the Presidency of the LIN CdS or the Erasmus Office of the FiLeLi Department.

Page of the CdS LIN on the site of the Department: https://www.fileli.unipi.it/category/didattica/lingue-e-letterature-straniere/

Page of the CdS Letters on the site of the Department: https://www.fileli.unipi.it/category/didattica/lettere/

Page of the CdS Italian studies of the Department: https://www.fileli.unipi.it/category/didattica/italianistica/

Site of the Department FiLeLi: https://www.fileli.unipi.it/

Page of the disciplina Romanian Language and Literature: https://www.facebook.com/Romeno.unipi

Pagina della docente su unimap:

https://unimap.unipi.it/cercapersone/dettaglio.php?ri=98484

THE MEETING FOR THE PRESENTATION OF THE ROMANIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE COURSES

L'INCONTRO DI PRESENTAZIONE DEI CORSI DI LINGUA E LETTERATURA ROMENA si terrà il 21 settembre, dalle h. 16.00, in modalità mista, su Teams e nell'aula B9 del Palazzo Boilleau. Il link per l'accesso all'incontro è:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aTPO6D92BDWfVYmlC9M8x5kJqwKUqhfeohEATkc1fbn41%40thread.tacv2/1630923885771?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c7456b31-a220-47f5-be52-473828670aa1%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22c7015b0a-6542-4abd-8099-d4958ed33640%22%7d

Il corso di Letteratura Romena avrà inizio martedì 28 settembre, dalle h. 16.00. Il codice per accedere al team del corso, aperto su Teams, vi sarà comunicato non appena disponibile.

E' con piacere che vi annunciamo l'arrivo imminente a Pisa della nuova Lettrice di lingua romena, la dott.ssa Cristina-Elena Gogâţă, che coprirà le lezioni del Lettorato fin dal I semestre di questo anno accademico, nonché una parte delle ore dei corsi curriculari di Lingua Romena I, II e III nel secondo semestre.

Ricevimento:

Durante il I semestre dell'a.a. 2021-22

l'orario di ricevimento online della Dott.ssa Emilia David sarà:

Mercoledì: h.10.00-12.00

Su appuntamento, anche in altri momenti

Luogo: La piattaforma Teams di Microsoft e in presenza. Gli studenti devono mettersi in anticipo d'accordo con la Prof.ssa David per stabilire la modalità del ricevimento.

Vi aspettiamo!