American Studies

This course introduces students to a variety of scholarly contributions and concepts used for the analysis of American culture. It focuses on different media and forms of cultural representation including film and TV. Addressed are theories on representation and signs, discourse and power, memory and time, race and privilege, gender and queer studies, and class and popular culture. Students reflect critically on the ways these theories are engaged in the production of knowledge about symbolic and material practices.

The course will deal with the involvement of Jews as a group and as individuals in the civic and political life of the United States, during the period since 1920. The course will be given in English. The students will learn about the complex character of civic participation in a changing American political landscape, in which Jews have expressed their interests and taken part in the discourse of political events and public affairs.

The course introduces students to the extraordinary range of American poetry in the first half of the 20th century, which includes, for example, the radical experiments of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams; the conservative modernism of Robert Frost; the European-oriented neo-classicism of T.S. Eliot and H.D.; the cerebral playfulness of Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens; the political daring and earnestness of Muriel Rukeyser; the marriage of avant-garde irreverence with a democratic openness to popular culture (cinema, jazz) represented by Langston Hughes; or the subtle social, sexual and racial awareness to be found in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks.

This course explores the long history of oratorical performance in the USA, from presidential speeches to University debates, from Native American orature to political activism. In so doing, students are introduced to the necessary tools to understand and critique the rhetorical choices of a range of speakers; to analyze the specific historical and cultural factors that give rise both to the speeches they encounter and the rhetorical choices of their delivery; and to a range of key historical and political events in the life of the USA as well as the range of activists and advocates that give voice to them.

This course offers a study of the history and cultures of the United states from its origins to the end of the 18th century. Topics include: indigenous cultures; the meeting of different cultures-- European arrival and African slaves in the American colonies; the cultural and political context of the 18th century.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Students master a variety of North American literary productions in relation to their cultural, social, and technological realities. Students learn to appreciate literary productions as part of complex, trans-media, and inclusive contexts. Course topics vary each term. For the most up to date course topics, access the University of Bologna Online Course Catalog. The fall 2023 course topic is on “Counterecycling: Science Fiction and Cognitive Pollution.” Through an assessment of traditional North American Science Fiction stories (and media adaptations), this course investigates whether using (in fact reusing) this genre traditional literary language helps to truly understand new complex phenomena or whether, instead, it induces cognitive pollution, therefore inhibiting our ability to observe. Recycling is certainly a useful action for the environment, but recycling literary language is not necessarily useful for seeing the limits and potential of a situation, especially where ontological levels are confused through a shared semantic. Among the themes discussed are: inventing the future: literature and technology; the evolving semantics of Science Fiction; the evolving semantics of Technology; environmental explorations: from cyberspace to metaverse; and artificial or artful Intelligence.