Marta Serena
This course equips students with the tools to read and interpret the work of several women authors who reshaped twentieth-century literature, situating their writing within the personal histories and cultural contexts from which it emerged. This analysis involves reflecting on the social history of women—especially key moments in women’s experience in Italy—to show how these writers gave voice to the need for new forms of expression and representation of self and world.
In a historical context that often placed women in uncomfortable positions, caught between private and public spheres, their literary voices reveal and help us interpret this state of “permanent division.” The course therefore centers on female self-narration, through which authors such as Paola Masino, Alba De Céspedes, Natalia Ginzburg, Michela Murgia, and others redrew the boundaries of the reality around them. Through their voices, we will see how speaking and writing became opportunities to reinterpret everyday life and inner identity from fresh perspectives. Reading these authors also means questioning the literary canons that relegated them to the margins, as if to an “exotic” corner of contemporary literature, and opening new pathways for reading and understanding their texts.