Comparative Literature

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.

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).

Every war story, according to Leo Tolstoy, begins with the disclaimer that war cannot be understood by those who have not witnessed it for themselves – yet the story is always told anyway. Since the earliest works of art and literature, war has been a persistent topic and a prevailing theme, but it has also presented a challenge for artists and writers: while culture cannot resist representing war, war often seems to resist being represented. This course asks why war has seemed to hold such a challenge for representation in art and writing, and how artists and writers have attempted to overcome this resistance to image-making and storytelling. Our primary focus is on literary works that offer rich and evocative writings of modern warfare, but students begin by paying brief attention to earlier works of literature, as well as some visual pieces, that set the scene for our cultural understanding of warfare today.

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This course looks at how the experience of migration is represented in 20th-century Irish writing. While the central focus is on literary representations of the Irish diaspora, contemporary representations of the immigrant experience within Ireland is also examined. English language and Irish language texts (in translation) are considered.