Comparative Literature

This is an independent research course with research arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific research topics vary each term and are described on a special project form for each student. A substantial paper is required. The number of units varies with the student’s project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student’s special study project form.

This course explores the literary tradition of German women writers, focusing on primary texts by contemporary women writers from the 20th and 21st centuries, with an additional focus on Berlin. The course examines modern German culture, society and the gender politics that create the frame of reference for understanding literary texts.

This course connects students to the city of Berlin through the study and production of non-fiction writing. In order to understand the rich and complicated past and present of this city, students read non-fiction writing about Berlin from the 1920s to the present. Students also experience the city directly through excursions to important city sites, interviewing locals, and conducting their own research. Students turn these moments of engagement into reflective essays about the sites and people they encounter.

The seminar deals with the literary representations of insects. The introduction to the topic is the Czech play by the Capek brothers “From the Life of Insects” from the 1920s, in which the society of the interwar period is criticized in an allegorical manner. The traces of this short text can be found in the Russian novel “The Life of Insects” by Viktor Pelevin. The novel captures another transformative era - the geopolitical change of the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The characters show the characteristics of insects, but act like humans and experience both physical and social metamorphoses. In addition to considering the obvious intertextual references, the inclusion of Jan Švankmajer's animated film “Insects”, a free film adaptation of the play, also opens up a further intermedia perspective. The theoretical focus is on the concepts of allegory, metaphor and metamorphosis. Knowledge of the Slavic languages (Czech/Russian) is not a prerequisite for participation.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. In Spring 2024, the course offered a special focus on the literature, photography, and illustration at the beginning of the 20th century: The collaboration between Henry James and Alvin Langdon Coburn. In analyzing this case study from the point of view of the genesis of the images and of the editorial context, this course reflects on the relationship between writing and visual culture, literature and photography, word and image within the framework of the technological, social, and cultural transformations that have marked the turn from the 19th to the 20th Century: from the rise of what Walter Benjamin has called the "technological reproduction" to the development of tourism and the emergence of a new imagery of space and places. The course provides the theoretical tools for interpreting literature in the new framework of visual culture which emerged at the threshold of modernity. Students acquire a deep knowledge of the relationships between verbal and visual texts in their multiple manifestations, and are familiar with the main theoretical categories and methodologies which have been elaborated by visual studies and have crossed (and transformed) literary studies themselves.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.

This course involves guided reading, research, and discussion. It treats some of the classics of American literature and examines how each text generated controversy in its own time and continues to do so in the present. From these texts, along with some theoretical readings, the course develops an understanding of cultures of censorship in the United States and their relationship with colonialism and dominant notions of civility. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides in-depth knowledge of how the Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance evolved, with particular reference to the texts that profoundly influenced the subsequent literature and culture, so confirming the canon. The course explains how to best analyze texts, reading them with a critical eye and relating them to various temporal and social-cultural periods. Specifically, this course focuses on the works of Dante Alighieri, which are a landmark of both the Italian and the European medieval literary canon, and have exercised a paramount influence on the Western cultural tradition as a whole. The course introduces a selection of crucial themes and episodes from the Commedia and other minor works. Lectures and seminars explore the context of late medieval Italian culture and society in which Dante's oeuvre has been produced, and examine its afterlife and significance for modern literature and visual culture.

The 'Gothic novel', which originated in mid-18th-century England, took the world by storm as a form of weird and terrifying fiction reflecting the medieval taste of the time. There were many variations, and the most common in the early years were bizarre adventure stories, such as the tale of a maiden locked in an old castle and the young man who rescues her. Other typical variations include tales of a wise man who sells his soul to the devil and falls into hell; tales of an artificial man such as Frankenstein; tales of a man who transforms into a monster such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; vampire tales such as Dracula, and many other types. Furthermore, up to the present day, the Gothic tale continues to be reproduced and re-created in a variety of media, not limited to the novel, while further diversifying. The mystery novel, a significant genre, is one of the tributaries that branched off from the Gothic novel.

English Literature 7 and 8 traces the Gothic novel's development over a year. This course is the first half, which will begin with the beginnings of the Gothic novel in the 18th century, the medieval taste that formed its background, and the establishment of a new tourism culture. Then it moves on to the new developments of the Gothic novel in the 19th century and its relationship to psychic studies of the same period.