ATS3135 - War and memory: Resistance, massacre and representation in second world war Italy - 2017

Through seminars, workshops and fieldwork this unit will examine how conflict has been represented, remembered and memorialised. The unit will have a specific focus on World War 2, the Italian Resistance, and the massacre of civilians in Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. The unit will consider how written and visual responses to these events, material forms of remembrance - monuments, memorials, museums, and cemeteries in, or within reach of Prato - each function to memorialise the dead and how in articulating political and national ideologies, such sites acknowledge and incorporate countervailing ideologies and the contradictory testimony of survivors. The unit will unpack, examine and critique the complex inter-relations between media, memory and war, exploring how in pursuit of specific political and cultural goals, memories of conflict are created, constructed and recovered through an array of artistic and memorial forms. Students will be invited to move beyond a purely theoretical understanding of these issues by visiting museums, massacre sites and their memorials, examining and critiquing their mediation and creating a critical/creative response to one such site.

Upon successful completion of the unit students will be able to:

1. demonstrate an understanding of the history of the second world war in Italy and a detailed knowledge of the massacres on Monte Sole and their subsequent remembrance;
2. articulate an advanced understanding of the roles of literature, film, arts and other media in shaping dominant modes of remembering conflict;
3. demonstrate an informed understanding of the nature and functions of propaganda, how it has been employed to advance political and ideological imperatives and how it combines with specific media to frame the remembering of differing conflicts;
4. demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of how material forms of remembrance, monuments, memorials, cemeteries, places of commemoration, are informed by ideology and function as media;
5. apply an advanced understanding of theories of memory, histories of conflict and developments in the media to explore the complex inter-relations of media, memory and war in relation to the second world war in Italy and the massacres at Monte Sole.

   Students taking the unit at 3rd year level will be expected to demonstrate a greater theoretical fluency, a broader grasp of the relevant cultural background and to take a leading role in seminar and workshop discussions and activities.

Within semester assessment: 100%

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement. + Additional requirements + This unit will be taught intensively at Prato

See also Unit timetable information

Associate Professor Kevin Foster

Communications and media studies

Literary studies

Global cultural literacies

Italian studies

Twelve credit points of second-year Arts units.

ATS2335