An in-depth treatment of a current area of special concern within the field of English Literature. Courses offered previously include: Dickens and Englishness; Race, Class, Gender, Culture: The American Dream in Literature; The Innocents Abroad: Perceptions of Italy in American, European and British Writing; Topics in World Literature: Masterpieces in Western Fiction. May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

In the course we will explore a variety of twentieth and twenty-first century novels and films set in Italy.  These include works by non-Italian writers and directors, contemporary Italian writing in translation, novels of and by expatriate Americans, and classics of twentieth-century and contemporary Italian cinema.  The course will give students studying in Rome a more textured and complex sense of what Italy is, was, means, and has meant at different times and for different people.  We will explore what it is that foreigners have sought out or found by moving to Italy, as well as looking at the ways that Italian writers and directors of the 20^th and 21^st centuries have depicted their country. We will look at both the reality of Italy, and Rome in particular, as it comes to us in fiction and film and at Italy as a place of the imagination, as an idea with deep psychological and poetic resonances, a site of personal transformation and discovery, of beauty and horror repression and freedom.