As the Italians party incessantly above my room, with the speaker literally a few feet above my head creating a sort of pounding effect on all the walls and ceiling around me, I'm going to write a blog post about something I've found interesting in my Italian short story class.
We've been talking a lot about Italian dialects. For those who don't know, standard Italian was a conscious decision that has failed to unify this country linguistically, just as the political unification back in the 19th century didn't particularly succeed either. To explain myself, I'll start with the French example, since that's clearly what I know best.
In the 16th century in France, during the Renaissance, a group of writers (specifically Du Bellay) were particularly insistent that the national language of the country should be French, and that people should write in French instead of in Latin (which at the time was a language reserved and spoken only by academics and religious figures, and was drastically different from the Latin spoken in the Roman Empire before the Middle Ages). Du Bellay's argument was that French was the vernacular, the vulgar language if you will, and that in order for it do develop properly, it needed a literature. Fortunately, this seemed to coincide (approximately) with a thorough formalization of the language on every level. A creation, rather. The French language, as we know it today, finds its roots in this recreation of a naturally-developed tongue, a refashioning that consisted in a standardization of the accents (é, è, î, etc.), the way letters were written (the printing press, as you know, was new technology back then, and it was especially important to have that standardized), the way things were pronounced, the way poetry should be written, etc. In the following century, the Académie française was established as the authority on the French language, its official protector, and it does things such as actively try to keep other languages from entering into the French one.
I know I'm not competent to make any grand judgments about this standardization, but I like to think that it is part of the reason there are more jobs available for French literature PhD students than Italian literature PhD students at the very least. I'd venture to go even farther, and say that this linguistic unification in France allowed for a national unification that didn't happen in Italy until much later. And even when Italy as a country was unified about three centuries later, the fact that a forced political union preceded a parallel linguistic one seems to be a major hindrance to speaking about a national Italian literature, or even Italian literary history. What's more, this lack of communication (given even now in Italy, everyone continues to speak their own dialect first, and is taught at the very least to understand standard Italian) might be contributing to their political and economic problems. Like I said, I don't know or care enough about Italian politics or economics to comment in detail, but a part of me believes that these problems are related to the linguistic barrier.
For instance, we're discussing Calvino's collection of Italian Folktales, and this collection was written in the 50's in Italy. Written might not be the best term. To write it, Calvino went all around the country, listened to stories that had been conserved in a purely oral and dialectical tradition, and rewrote them in standard Italian with his own inimitable style and brilliance. They are delightful stories, an important work in Italian literature to say the least. This was done in the 1950's. He was the first to do it. Even nowadays, Italian writers incorporate their dialects into their works, mostly in a way all Italians can understand, but this sort of style might be part of the reason that Italian literature in general isn't quite as international as other literatures. Calvino's Italian seems mostly free of dialects to me, but honestly, what do I really know? I've been studying this language for 2 years. It is almost astounding that American students who learn Italian in college feel they can do academic work on Italian literature. It seems to me that to know the literary history and context would be virtually impossible for a non-native speaker given the existence and predominance of these dialects.
Anyway, that was my academic post for this blog. Forgive me. I'm not thinking straight because it is 12:01am and they are turning up the music above my room. I have a headache, and have to give a 15 minute presentation in class tomorrow. I don't understand why they continue to have these parties for a dwindling number of people (I was up there 20 minutes ago, and there were under 10 people there), on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, as loud as possible. In fact, perhaps the linguistic issue isn't the real problem. Immaturity, people being inconsiderate, and laziness might be the real culprits. These Italian students don't seem to understand that in order to get 2 semester's worth of credit for 6 weeks in Italy, they have to do a lot of work, wake up every morning at 7am, have three hours of class a day, and especially this: get their money's worth. Italians are worse than the French in this respect. The university costs so little, they have no incentive to do well. Their exams are oral. They aren't required to attend classes. A minimum amount of work can get them a passing grade, and eventually a degree that likely won't help them get a job. And while they refuse to understand why American universities cost so much, Americans pay that price because we believe a university education will help us get a job, and a better job than had we not gone. And since we're paying, there is more incentive to learn something. Italians, on the other hand, seem to chill at their university, party, and stay as long as they want. The guy throwing this party is 30 years old, living in a dorm with students a decade younger than him, and screaming "ciao nè" into a microphone above my head right now. Good thing Italy's so pretty...
