All Reading and Composition courses must be taken for a letter grade in order to fulfill this requirement for the Bachelor’s Degree. This course satisfies the second half or the “B” portion of the Reading and Composition requirement.

A good neighbor may knock on your door the day you move in and greet you with a fresh-baked pie. A bad neighbor might spy on your household from behind the curtains. When it comes to a neighborhood, whether doors are left open or not, the border between domestic and public space is porous and far from peacefully established. A neighborhood can be a community as much as a place of social tension in which proximity only masks dissonance. Although neighbors look at the world from a same portion of a city, chances are they see it very differently.

This summer we’ll take a tour of Italy through novels of the 20^th century and films that thematize the neighborhood as a space of encounter, appropriation, and exchange. Layers of history, laws, wars, gentrification, emigration, compose the stratified stories of each quartiere that we will explore. The coursework will stimulate reflections on a variety of themes across the architectural and social boundaries of urban, suburban and peripheral realities: political power and patriarchy, multiculturalism and racism, urbanization and nature, labor and consumption, the local and the global.

We’ll discuss narratives that spring from the periphery of a community or a neighborhood. We’ll explore “extreme” living conditions, as they appears in Carlo Levi’s 1946 novel Christ stopped in Eboli, or in the postwar Neorealist film The Roof  by Vittorio De Sica. In other cases, we’ll discuss radical ideological and cultural standing points that compromise the very notion of coexistence, as in Amara Lakhous’ novels’ multicultural piazza, or in Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day, set in two apartments facing each other in fascist era Rome.

Since this is a Reading and Composition course, our primary goal is to develop and hone our skills as active readers and analytical writers. To this end, students will be expected to thoroughly read all assigned texts, attend class regularly, participate in class discussion, and complete a variety of written assignments.

Texts:

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

Diane Di Prima, excerpts from Recollections of My Life as a Woman

Charles Dickens, excerpts from Great Expectations

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend or The Days of Abandonment

Carlo Levi, excerpts from Christ Stopped in Eboli

Amara Lakhous, Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

Elsa Morante, excerpts from Arturo’s Island

Anna Maria Ortese, short stories from The Involuntary City

Ettore Scola, A Special Day (film)

Vittorio De Sica, The Roof (film)

Federico Fellini, Cabiria’s Nights, The Road

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mamma Roma (film)

David Simon, selected episodes from The Wire

 Prerequisites:  Successful completion of the “A” portion of the Reading & Composition requirement or its equivalent.  Students may not enroll in nor attend R1B/R5B courses without completing this prerequisite.