Comparative Literature

This course focuses on three thought leaders of anti-colonialist social movements in 20th century Latin American: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Fausto Reinaga. It analyzes their main written works with an emphasis on themes of race, culture, and colonial condition.

This course surveys American literature and literary history, examining how major American authors from the early colonial period to the present contributed the American literary tradition. Authors, including such canonical writers as Bradstreet, Franklin, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Frost, Williams, Faulkner, Lowell and Morrison, and their selected writings in various genres are read in relevant historical, social and cultural contexts so as to offer a broad understanding of American literary history.

This course explores the characteristics, phases of development, trends, works, and authors of 20th century Latin American literature. Topics include: the pro-indigenous novel; reality transfigured; the current panorama of Latin American literature; modernity and post-modernity.

This reading-intensive course explores the meaning of the Age of Extremes by examining how violence, the state, and society interacted with one another to create a turbulent 20th century. This course addresses crucial questions by reading canonical texts on violence, civil disobedience, and decolonization, including writings by Thoreau, Arendt, Gandhi, Fanon, and King, among others. 

The first part of this course explores one of the founding works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya’s BLESS ME, ULTIMA (1972), a coming-of-age novel combining magical realism with an exploration of the social and identity issues faced by Chicanos in the modern United States. The second part of the course focuses on Henry Fielding’s THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS AND OF HIS FRIEND MR. ABRAHAM ADAMS (1742), the author’s first full-length novel self-defined as a “comic epic poem in prose.” The course studies narratological issues as well as the social, political, and gender dimensions of the texts.

This course explores the fluctuating significance of racial slavery for the development of American and African American literary tradition. It departs from investigation of the idea that particular approaches to selfhood, writing, and freedom arose from the institution of slavery and in particular grew with the slaves’ forced exclusion from literacy and their distinctive relationship with Christianity. Using Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a central point of reference, students look at the development of abolitionist reading publics and the role of imaginative literature in bringing about the demise of slavery. That controversial text also provides a means to consider the relationship of sentimentalism to suffering and identification as well as the problems arising from the simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of racial categories, as oppression and as emancipation. When formal slavery ended, new literary habits emerged in response to the memory of it and the need imaginatively to revisit the slave past as a means to grasp what the emergent world of civic and political freedoms might mean and involve. Other issues covered include the disputed place of imaginative writing in the educational bodies that were created for ex-slaves and their descendants, the issues of genre, gender, and polyvocality in abolitionist texts, the problems of representation that arose in the plantation’s litany of extremity and suffering, and the contemporary significance of slavery in the culture of African American particularity.

The focus of this course is a selection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The critical tools used in class include structuralist, post-colonial, and gender studies. Through this course, the students appraise each text individually and look at the global issues pervading the Sherlock Holmes corpus. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis.

This course analyzes the comic, a narrative art that reads not only in each successive box but also in a complex system relating to the space of the board and album as a whole. It applies literary tools to the media to take into account the image and sequencing. The course focuses on the theme of “the quest” using comics from the French-Belgian domain: set in a medieval universe more fantasized than properly historical. It considers quests and conquests in antico-medieval fictions including literature, cinema, and games.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course is centered on the relationships between Italian Literature and Visual Culture, from the second half of the twentieth century to the first decade of the new millennium, with a focus on photography, graphic novel, advertising, cinema, television, and videogames. Special attention is placed on the identification and analysis of the interactions between the different languages and their contextualization in Italy’s contemporary cultural environment. Course topics change yearly. The 2023 topic is: A Transmedia Longseller: IL NOME DELLA ROSA (THE NAME OF THE ROSE) by Umberto Eco.

From the contemporary to the extreme contemporary, this course offers a journey through literature. It provides an opportunity to discover, through the study of a few authors and excerpts from various works, how French literature of the last decades takes on a form of engagement and disengagement in the uncertainty that creates our present. The course sharpens sensitivity and broadens knowledge in the literary and cultural fields. It improves mastery of the French language to develop the capacities of analysis, synthesis, and criticism essential to intellectual work. The course focuses on the novel, the short story, and the theater on the path of renewal at the borders of reality and fiction: telling again and again, telling the real in times of crisis.