Speech Crimes: Satire and the Limits of Expression in Italian History

ITAL 154 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Do not take this class. Stop reading here. Please. If you are still reading, stop now. OK. Good.

If you are still reading, it is now your fault. Take this class if: you want to move through seven centuries of Italian history by following three things that repeatedly get people into trouble: laughter, censorship, and non-physical violence. We will be working with materials from Dante through the Renaissance, the Inquisition, Fascism, television, stand-up comedy, cartoons, and memes. Second: you want to understand some linguistic and cultural phenomena that are exclusively human and that we use constantly without being very good at explaining them: irony, sarcasm, parody, insult, innuendo, caricature, comic timing, offense, and laughter itself. Third: you want to learn through practice. We will take jokes apart to see exactly how they work, rewrite them, run a cartoon-caption competition, experiment with comic timing and phrasing, and try to produce satire ourselves. We will attend live stand-up comedy in Boston and work with a professional satirist. The central question of this class is how satire works: linguistically, culturally, historically, and socially.

Course Notes

Lectures in English; sections in Italian and English; materials available in English translation.