Postgraduate Course: Visualising Boccaccio's Decameron Across Arts and Media (ELCI11009)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This option explores a masterpiece of classical Italian prose, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-1353), a collection of 100 tales told by 10 young people (seven women and three men) who flee plague-stricken Florence to a delightful villa in nearby Fiesole. This course will contextualise and analyse the original text, as well as look at its afterlife across arts and media in the following centuries. We will examine topics, such as fortune, love, death, wit, and critically engage with questions of gender, class, sexuality, and religion. Students will gain an insight into Italian medieval culture and society, as well as examine and discuss how themes, stories, and characters of the Decameron have been appropriated in painting, fiction, theatre, cinema, comics, and pop music across the centuries.
This course is taught and assessed in English. |
| Course description |
This course explores a masterpiece of classical Italian prose, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-1353), a collection of 100 tales told by 10 young people (seven women and three men) who flee plague-stricken Florence to a delightful villa in nearby Fiesole. Boccaccio's text features a broad range of characters representing diverse social classes, professions, abilities, and skills. It is considered by some scholars as a proto-feminist text for the way it tackles women's stories and roles in society. It is also very satirical for the approach it takes towards ecclesiastical institutions and figures. We will examine topics, such as fortune, love, death, wit, and critically engage with questions of gender, class, sexuality, and religion. We will do this by contextualising and analysing the original text, as well as looking at its afterlife across arts and media in the following centuries. Students will gain an insight into Italian medieval culture and society, as well as examine and discuss how themes, stories, and characters of the Decameron have been interpreted in painting, fiction, theatre, cinema, comics, and pop music across the centuries, both in a national and international context. We examine Italian works from fifteen-century painting, such as The Master of The Story of Griselda and Botticelli's The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti III to twentieth-century filmic and comics adaptations, such as Pasolini's Decameron and the stories included in Corriere dei piccoli, Il romanzo illustrato, Birillo. In their projects, students are also encouraged to take a more international perspective and consider works from world literature and cinema, for example Geoffrey Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, Julia Voznesenskaya's The Women's Decameron, Christopher Whyte's Gay Decameron, Hugo Fregonese's Decameron Nights.
The course is organised into two parts. The first part is devoted to the historical and cultural contextualisation of the Decameron, as well as the close reading and discussion of a selection of tales. Each week, we will focus on a specific theme (such as love, women, religion, social status, outsiders) which will determine the choice of tales, by drawing upon relevant theoretical and critical texts. The second part of the course explores various forms of representation of the original text, including literary, visual and cinematic adaptations. Each week, we will focus on a specific form of art (painting, literature, cinema, comics, and pop-music), encouraging students to reflect on Boccaccio's themes, stories, and characters across time and cultures. The course is taught in English using Boccaccio's Decameron in translation. Students with a proficiency in Italian language can engage with the text in the original language.
Classes will be organised in a series of lectures, seminars, and students-led discussions. In seminars, students have the opportunity to discuss the tales in the light of the critical readings assigned (first part), as well as present their projects on the Decameron's representations and adaptations (second part).
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 4 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Coursework (100%) «br /»
«br /»
Mid-semester formative assessment (30%): «br /»
Analysis of a theme in Boccaccio's Decameron (1,500 Words) «br /»
«br /»
Oral presentation (10%) «br /»
10-min oral presentation with PowerPoint on an example of representation, adaptation or rewriting of Boccaccio's Decameron «br /»
«br /»
Final essay (60%) «br /»
Coursework essay (2,500 words) «br /»
«br /»
Different options of assessment will be offered to students with special needs, for example those who are disadvantaged by real-time presentation, as well as to any student who wants to discuss alternative forms of analysis, presentation or essay with the tutor. |
| Feedback |
Students receive written individual and group feedback by their tutor for all coursework components. Individual presentations will be considered as a piece of formative assessment with associated feedback in preparation for their summative assessment (essay). |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of the primary and secondary literature related to this course, with a special focus on the intermedial questions raised in the course;
- Compare representations, adaptations, and rewritings of the Decameron from different historical periods and cultures, analysing media specificities of each text, including affordances and constraints, and how these address different audiences;
- Employ a comparative and intermedial methodological framework to analyse visual representations, adaptations, and various forms of rewritings of the Decameron, noticing connections between media, messages, and audiences;
- Enhance critical analysis and construct and express an argument in oral and written form about the Decameron and its afterlife across centuries;
- Analyse primary and secondary literature and engage in critical close reading, comparative analysis, and drawing on a range of sources;
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Reading List
Essential
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Guyda Armstrong, Rhiannon Daniels, Stephen J. Milner (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Boccaccio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
The Decameron Web https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/
Marco Bardini, Boccaccio Pop. Usi, riusi ed abusi del Decameron nella contemporaneità (Pisa: ETS, 2021)
Ricketts, Jill Megeve, Visualizing Boccaccio : studies on illustrations of the Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Recommended
Olivia Holmes, Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature. Ethics and Mischief in the Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Ruggiero, Guido, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2021)
Ruegg, Madeline, The Patient Griselda Myth: Looking at Late Medieval and Early Modern European Literature (Boston: De Gruyter, 2019)
Olivia Holmes and Dana E. Stewart (eds), Reconsidering Boccaccio. Medieval contexts and Global Interests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Marylin Migiel, The Ethical Dimension of the Decameron (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015)
David J. Wallace, Boccaccio: Decameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism, ed. By Thomas C. Stillinger and F. Regina Psaki, Annali d'Italianistica: Studi e testi 8 (Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d'Italianistica, 2006)
Agnès Blandeau, Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film (Jefferson: McFarland and co., 2006)
Howard C. Cole, The All's Well Story from Boccaccio to Shakespeare (Urbana-London: University of Illinois Press, 1981)
Further Reading
Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)
Michael Sherberg, The Governance of Friendship: Law and Gender in the Decameron (Ohio State University Press, 2011)
Millicent J. Marcus, An Allegory of Forms: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Anma Libri, 1979) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Through a variety of activities, including seminar discussions, individual and group presentations, and the final essay, students will have the chance to develop skills in the following areas:
Research and enquiry (developed through their projects and exploration of case studies): students will learn or hone research skills in early modern Italian culture, as well as modern and contemporary Italian culture, examining a variety of media texts; they will also have the opportunity to apply theoretical concepts, including intermediality (and transmediality) to the analysis of these texts;
Critical and reflective thinking (developed through close text reading of primary and secondary sources, class discussions, and assignments): students will address seminar and assignment questions which will encourage them to think critically about the themes discussed; they will be encouraged to build their arguments, by drawing upon the theoretical and critical texts provided in the bibliography;
Skilled communication (developed through individual and group presentations, as well as essay writing): in the class discussions, as well as in their written and oral assignments, students will be encouraged to communicate their ideas on specific topics, with appropriate terminology, coherence, and evidence; they will also learn how to engage with texts in Italian and quote them in appropriate ways;
Personal and intellectual autonomy (developed through tasks management, including assignments): students will not only address specific questions on selected passages of primary texts, but they will also be encouraged to research the topics they are interested in, by exploring their own selection of texts and building their own paths of research; |
| Keywords | Medieval and Renaissance Italy,Giovanni Boccaccio,The Decameron,Italian culture,Three crowns |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Emanuela Patti
Tel:
Email: Emanuela.Patti@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr Iain Harrison
Tel:
Email: iharriso@ed.ac.uk |
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