Comparative Literature

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.

This course introduces students to fiction and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world.  This course discusses selected texts from postcolonial Africa, beginning with examining what Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called the “struggles to move the centre”—that is, the political and cultural struggles to “correct the imbalances of the last four hundred years” of colonization. The course then turns to fictional writings and other cultural texts that come out of various decolonization struggles in Nigeria, Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa.  The course seeks to answer the question: Why should these texts and ideas matter to us today?
 

This course introduces fictional and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world. It focuses on selected texts from postcolonial Asia. The course begins by critically investigating the concept of the nation—what Benedict Anderson has famously called an “imagined community.” It explores this concept through reading and discussing texts representing the complexities of imagined communities in Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, texts that also represent uneven power relations with China, Japan, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. The course explores the question: why should these texts and ideas matter to us now?