S1219 Discovering the Mediterranean: Tourism and Literature in the Twentieth Century (S1219)

In the first decades of the twentieth century a number of artists (mostly writers and painters) choose the Mediterranean as a place to work. Some of them came from the northern regions of Europe, others came from Mediterranean countries, but mostly from big cities: all searched light and sun but also old forms of life endangered by growing urbanism and industrialization. They were not the first to discover, so to say, the Mediterranean; though Romanticism provided the strongest ideological backing, we can find a tradition that goes back to the XVIIIth century, mainly represented by the Grand Tour, a journey through Europe, whose protagonists were the youngsters of the British aristocracy.
Our course specially aims at studying the way the Mediterranean was observed during the years that cover the end of the XIXth Century and the beginning of the XXth, specially through four writers, that are also highlights in their literatures: Chekhov, Proust, Mann or Garcia Lorca. We will read them closely, but keeping an eye to the traditions we spoke about: a not so representative of the Grand Tour, Edward Gibson; a forerunner of romanticism, Goethe. And finally we will consider also other arts that have looked at the Mediterranean with a new vision, like the Dutch painter Van Gogh; or that have re-read what those authors had written: the films about Mann's novel or about Chekhov's will be seen in this light; and other films, too, that revive this tradition either with nostalgia (Mediterraneo) or disbelief (Viaggio in Italia). The Venice setting of the course provides, needless to say, an excellent opportunity to show the impressions that those travellers, coming mostly from affluent cities of powerful European and American countries, experienced and how they felt challenged by the simplicity of a rural life in the frame of a decadent maritime empire.
Some aesthetic trends overlap in this sentimental journey, among them primitivism, that pretended to discover uncontaminated forms of life, away from the industrialized societies, seeking to find in the rural world ideals that the urban life had banished. In their quest for primitivism, those artists made popular these same places they pretended to preserve, because they were forerunners for a new industry on the rise: tourism, that showed people in towns the possibility to rest far from the stressing urban life. Primitivism, on the other hand, had a great spell in the avant-garde movements, so that artists who searched for colour and light searched also purity and rest, far from the madding crowd. This course will also focus on those artists and their work, and on the expansion of tourism mainly in Italy, France and Spain.

Learning Outcomes
One of the principal goals of the course is to have students understand how dissimilar and even opposite cultural events (mass tourism and lyric poetry or naïf painting) overlap in their objectives. A second goal is to provide students with instruments to make cross-analysis of such events.

Teaching and Evaluation Methods
Classes will begin with a short lecture on each of the main topics followed by a discussion on the materials (text, film, images...) found on the current blog section or the web page and previously read by students.
A composition will be assigned every fortnight, to be written over the weekend and be handed in the following Monday.
These essays will have a length of 4.500 characters. The percentage for this part will be 35%.
Participation, including class preparation, attendance and classroom participation (frequency and quality), will have a percentage of 25%
There will be an essay question, and a short-answer section, all to be written at the assigned exam time, with a percentage of 40%.

Preliminary knowledge required
None, except the standard required to any undergraduate.