Comparative Literature

This seminar studies literary and artistic production during the Modernist era, seen as a period of crisis that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It covers Picasso’s Cubism; Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; and the European literary scene including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; and Marcel Proust and André Gide in France. The course also examines this new literary “modernity” in American fiction, including Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Each novel provides an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, or the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism. The second part of the course looks at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The course considers how numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are not only critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of 20th century society.

This course provides an introduction to European fairytales within a historical, geographical, and cultural context including European folk genres such as myth or legends and a close focus on Czech fairytales. The course describes and surveys the changes in the approach to European fairytales within the development of scholarship about them. It presents sociohistorical, psychological, or anthropological interpretations, as well as biologically based and gender or feminist methods of their interpretation. The course topics include ethical or moral principles in fairytales, gender and social roles, and historical and political influences on fairytale adaptation.

A literary and philosophical inquiry into such themes as selfhood, nothingness, name, namelessness, reality, Karma, yin-yang, and so forth through examination of great literary and philosophical writings in the East Asian tradition. All works are read in English translation. Topics covered include: Taoist thought and literature, Confucian thought and literature, Buddhist literature, the origins of East Asian thought, search for cultural archetypes, Confucian ideology in crisis, and modernity in modern Korean and Chinese fiction.

This course examines the major developments in the field of Postcolonial Theory. The course starts with Said's observation that colonialism affected both the colonizing countries as well as the colonized peoples. As such, Postcolonial Theory provides a variety of methodological tools for analyzing literature and culture that are of special relevance in the age of globalization. Students focus on the development of a postcolonial consciousness, the implication of literature and other cultural forms in the colonizing process, and as forms of resistance. Students become familiar with all major issues in the field of Postcolonial Studies and acquire a number of theoretical perspectives that apply to the interpretation of literature and other forms of culture.

This course explores the idea that just as English painting is renowned for its representation of landscape, poetry in Britain and Ireland has been shaped by the nature of place. The course looks at a variety of 20th-century poetry from the standpoint of its complex engagement with place. Students examine topics such as poetry and landscape; poetry, the country, and the city; poetry and the idea of England (the “spiritual, the Platonic, old England,” as Coleridge called it); insularity and post-imperial retrenchment; travel and the foreign; and what Seamus Heaney has called “the place of writing.”

This course gives an introduction to different forms of storytelling, exploring the origins and evolution of fairy tales with a focus on contemporary retellings. A variety of fairy tales are examined, ranging from ancient myths and medieval storytelling tradition to Disney’s adaptations and TV series such as ONCE UPON A TIME and GRIMM. The course introduces students to different literary genres, such as children’s literature (by looking into how children’s novels such as ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO have been retold) and graphic novel studies. Students learn different approaches of literary analysis, such as comparative criticism and psychoanalysis. The course includes excursions to relevant exhibitions and interactive workshops on storytelling.

This course introduces Korean literature in English translation and explores the relationship between Korean literature and world literature. The first half of the semester is devoted to pre-modern texts, including prose fiction, essays, and poems with an emphasis on Buddhism and Confucianism. The second half of the course examines short stories and poems of the 1920's through the 1980's against the backdrop of the Japanese colonization and the Korean War.

This course analyzes the forms in which contemporary narratives construct social imaginaries that contribute to the development of identities and perspectives, as well as discussing contemporary narrative theories. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program in Modern, Post-Colonial and Comparative Literatures. The course is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. Students acquire knowledge of gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts whereby the notions of identity and otherness, difference, and diversity are analyzed within an intercultural perspective. The course intends to favor the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, and visual). The course focuses on the following topics: controversial books, ethical reading, and ethical criticism: cultural representations of diversity and the survival of the outsiders. The course analyses books that were banned (such as WIDE SARGASSO SEA or THE COLOR PURPLE) or controversial (for instance THE PASSION OF NEW EVE and DISGRACE) for their provocative and non-mainstreaming cultural position. The first lessons analyze critical theories on difference and diversity within an intersectional perspective. The second part interrogates and discusses literary and visual texts where the construction of women and other subjects as "negative" and functional/structural diversity are challenged and overcome through narrative strategies of resistance and trans-formations. The violence of representation is thus exposed and critically challenged. The diachronic study of theories and fiction (in different genres) aims at showing repetitive patterns in the cultural representation of difference as well as in the strategic patterns of resistance, reaffirming the necessity, right, and power of diversity.