Comparative Literature

This course reads and analyzes contemporary theater that focuses on going outside the box that is the standard form of poetry and theater. It focuses on playwrights such as Sarah Kayne and Debbie Tucker Green; and on "in your ear" theater, written in Britain, that highlights the discrepancy between what is heard and seen. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course will help students to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to present, with a focus on painting. The course discusses the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and analyzes critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts. In addition to the interactions between literature and the arts, the module introduces students to the following themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and the visual arts; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the "visual turn" and the “pictorial turn;” and 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into the intermedial influence of the visual arts (painting, illustration, and photography) and the reflection on the gaze in some works by Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati in the last decades of the 20th century.

This course focuses on the literary and cultural production that has emerged under colonial rule and its aftermath in different locations including the Caribbean, Middle East, and Latin America, as well as texts written by diasporic and repressed minorities. It discusses a theoretical approach to development studies and comparative ethno-racial studies for current considerations about the contemporary global order. 

This course studies works (mainly literary) from prehistory to try to better understand the power of attraction that this still so enigmatic period in the history of man exerts on the imagination and to explore, particularly from the daydreams and fantasized representations that unfold there, what that they say about us more than about our distant ancestors. The course also provides an opportunity to address, from the texts studied, specifically literary questions, through for example those of genres and registers, the construction of the story or writing resources. Part of this course is devoted to the study of works of youth literature to discover the vision of prehistory that they offer.

This course studies French-Spanish filmmaker of Luis Buñuel, in particular his final and probably most productive period which was mainly French. Accompanied by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, his faithful sidekick, the father of Spanish cinema drew his inspiration from several of the great French novels of the preceding decade. This course explores one of them, LE JOURNAL D’UNE FEMME DE CHAMBRE, to reflect on the specific work of adaptation characterized by varying degrees of difference from the original.

This course introduces the different schools of theories that enables one to understand any kind of narrative. Using a selection of prose extracts and poetry, the course teaches methods of reading and analyzing texts in class. By the end of the course, students are expected to reach a general conclusion about possible interpretations of the text, supported by concrete evidence.

This course focuses on the analysis of 19th century American poetry from poets such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman.

This course reflects on how the novel genre was constructed in awareness of multilingualism and the challenges of translation, based on the most translated novel in the world, DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA. It discusses the numerous rewritings of the novel that have been carried out around the world and studies a certain number of “adaptations” for youth, theater, comics, and film.

This team-taught course introduces students to a broad range of texts, authors, and issues in Irish writing. Students work across genres and forms, encountering canonical and less often studied works. This comparative course proposes various ways of thinking about Irish literary texts, while at the same time providing a sound knowledge of the social, cultural, and political conditions in which these texts were written, produced and read.

Demons, ghosts, and monsters have populated the cultural landscape in Japan for centuries. Appearing in anime, manga, games, and movies, mysterious creatures continue to form the core of contemporary popular culture, sparking a global obsession with Japanese monsters. This course explores the cultural history of the strange and supernatural in Japanese literary, visual, and performing arts. Engaging with primary and critical sources from the eighth century to the present, it considers the social roles that representations of “the weird” have played in Japan.