Though Italy's Jewish population had the highest rate of survival of any Nazi-occupied country in Western Europe, the Holocaust has continued to haunt the Italian literary and cinematic imagination in ways that warrant close critical scrutiny. The aesthetic and moral problem of how to represent this event in art gains special urgency in the Italian context, where a realist tradition dating back to Dante and Giotto joins forces with a postwar neorealist impulse to create a series of compelling literary and cinematic works. In keeping with the Holocaust's invitation to interdisciplinary study, the course will examine the intersection of a number of discourses: historical, literary, cinematic—viewed from a variety of perspectives—feminist, generic, philosophical, theological, and historiographic. Since a good portion of the authors will be women, the question of the "voce femminile" and its creation of an alternative, or anti-history, will also be raised. The purpose of the course will be three-fold: 1. to examine what the specificity of Italian cultural traditions brings to bear on our understanding of Holocaust history; 2. to examine what effect, in turn, the Holocaust, as problematic object of representation, has on the literary and cinematic means of expression; 3. to continue, through this study, the authors' and filmmakers' own commitment to bear witness to what Primo Levi called "the stain, the central fact" of our times. To be conducted in Italian.