Università Roma Tre

The consumption of popular culture and policies aimed at influencing popular culture became increasingly salient in 20th century Western societies. Also Italian political parties and governments became aware of the importance of controlling and manipulating popular culture, and started developing sophisticated and effective forms of propaganda. Concurrently, popular culture itself became politically engaged, as militancy started to be conveyed in various forms of popular art, as writings, drawings, songs, radio and TV broadcasts and movies. The relationship between propaganda from above and popular cultures from below must not be interpreted in terms of a rigid opposition, but rather of a conflictual relationship capable of influencing each other.

The course aims at providing a general overview of the main trends in the history of italian popular culture from the early to the late 20th century, as well as at introducing students to key arguments in historical scientific research on the topic. In this way, students will develop skills to critically read, think, discuss and write about a set of historiographical arguments and a multiplicity of historical evidence.

In this sense, the course will detect how mass communication, literature and the visual arts determined the attitudes, moods and mentality of Italian society during the twentieth century.

The first part of the course will focus on the analysis of the concepts of "Popular Culture", "Propaganda", “Consensus Building” and "Political Religion”, with special references to the so-said “cultural turn”, which changed many perspectives in Contemporary History.

The second part of the course will deal with the role of Italian media as, at one hand, a pillar of ideological consensus and social stability and, to the other, as antidote to social conformism and State power. The connection between Italian Media, Popular Culture and Political History will be stressed through main periods of Italian history, observing continuity and fractures from Liberal Italy to Fascist regime and from the Cold War to the Second Italian Republic.

Students attending AND not attenting classes will have to refer to the following essays for the final oral exam:

- R. Moro, Mosse, the Cultural Turn, and the Cruces of Modern Historiography, (in George L. Mosse’s Italy, pp. 131-136)

- Holt N. Parker, Toward a Definition of Popular Culture, in “History and Theory”, May 2011, v. 50, pp. 147-170

In the oral exam, Students attending classes have to refer also on lessons contents. Students not attending classes must to refer instead to the following textbook:

- Matthew Hibberd, The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital, New York, 2008.


In the last part of the course and before oral exam Students attending classes will have to present a paper on one of the following “blocks”. Students not attending classes will have to choose one of the “blocks” for their oral exams as well, besides essays and textbook suggested above.

Block 1: Poetry and Journalism in Early XX Century
- Pierluigi Allotti, The Style of a Revolutionary Journalist (in Mussolini 1883-1915. Triumph and Transformation of Revolutionary Socialist, pp. 225-256)
- Enrico Serventi Longhi, The Triumph of the Noble People: Gabriele d’Annunzio and Populism between literature and politics (in “Qualestoria”, XLVIII, N. 2, December 2020 : [24])

Block 2: Totalitarian Radio and Music
- Philip V. Cannistraro, The Radio in Fascist Italy (in “Journal of European Studies, vol. 2, 1972, pp.127-154)
- Marilisa Merolla, Jazz and Fascism: Contradictions and Ambivalences in the Diffusion of Jazz Music under the Italian Fascist Dictatorship (1925-1935) (in Jazz and Totalitarism, pp. 31-44)

Block 3: PostWar Italian Cinema and Glamour
-- Maurizio Zinni, Entertainment, Politics and Colonial Identity in Post-War Italian and British Cinema (1945-1960) (in Images of Colonialism and Decolonisation in Italian Media, pp- 67-80)
- Stephen Gundle, Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consuption in Postwar Italy, (in “Journal of Cold War Studies”, vol. 4 n. 3, 2002, pp. 95-118)

Block 4: Women and 70’s
-Andrea Hayek, A Room of One’s Own. Feminist Intersections between Space, Women’s Writing and Radical Bookselling in Milan (1968-1986) (in “Italian Studies”, vol. 73:1, pp. 81-97)
- Ruth Glynn, Press Representation of Italian Women Terrorist (in Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture pp. 39-72)

Block 5: TV fiction and Popular Culture
- Mauro Resmini, ‘Il senso dell'intreccio’: History, Totality, and Collective Agency in Romanzo criminale (in “The Italianist”, vol. 36(2), pp. 243-265)
- Luca Barra, Massimo Scaglioni, Saints, Cops and Camorristi. Editorial Policies and Production Models of Italian TV Fiction, (in “International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, vo. 1, spring 2015, pp. 65-76)

Block 6: Berlusconi and the Second Republic
- Cinzia Padovani, ‘Berlusconi’s Italy’: the media between structure and agency (in “Modern Italy”, vol. 20:1, pp. 41-57)
- Philip Schlesinger, Berlusconi Phenomenon (in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy, pp 270-285)