Comparative Literature

This course offers an overview of the foundations of contemporary theoretical-critical thinking and motivations behind the latest trends in literary theory. Topics include: feminist theory and literary criticism; from feminist theory to gender studies; the debate on reading.

How does America begin? With the fertile imagination of the first Europeans who arrived at its shores? With the creation myths of its indigenous communities? With John Winthrop’s utopian vision of a “City on a Hill?” With the Declaration of Independence that severed the ties with the British Empire? Questions of origin and identity sit at the center of this course. Every week the course analyzes fictional and non-fictional accounts of America as an idea, from its beginnings up to the early nineteenth century. We will pay attention to the so-called “founding fathers” and, especially, to those silenced by their master narrative of “fatherhood:” women, African slaves, and displaced American Indians. Whereas the course revolves around a specific historical context, the course explores relevant themes and problems to your own experience as a 21st century student and citizen: cross-cultural encounters, gender inequality, violence, war, colonialism, racism, democracy, capitalism, and labor rights. 

This Italian-taught course focuses on Italian literature. At the end of the course the student is expected to have a deep knowledge on diachronical aspects of the Italian literary tradition, knows the critical discussion on the keys issues about texts and authors, and is able to use the main tools of the methodological analysis of texts and contexts. The focus of the course changes each term, review the specific term’s course details page in the University of Bologna online course catalog for information on your specific term’s topic. The spring 2023 course focuses on feminine power, from the demonic to the divine.

The course imparts a historical, literary, and cultural study of English-speaking post-colonial countries. It examines the literary works of prominent authors in their historical context, literary genres, and the culture of Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Other topics include the history of these regions from seventeenth-century British colonization to present-day, the relationship between literature and culture, and English language diversity among these regions.

The course provides an introduction to selected genres of Celtic literature from the early modern and modern periods, and an understanding of the social and historical background that gave rise to the texts studied. Two strands make up the course, one dealing with the Scottish Gaelic tradition and the other looking at Early Modern and Modern Irish literature. English translations are used throughout the course, and no knowledge of the original Celtic languages is required. The course is aimed at students who have successfully completed Celtic Civilization 1A and 1B, as well as Heroes, Wonders, Saints and Sagas: Medieval Celtic Literature in Translation, but it is also open to anyone who has taken a course in a literary or historical or similar subject at university level and wishes to explore the Celtic tradition. The course does not provide a comprehensive survey of the two literatures studied, but rather to examine in greater depth certain periods or themes or genres which are characteristic of the tradition, which offer cross-cultural comparisons within the Celtic world, and which are amenable to study through translation. For history students, the course offers insight into the nature and working of the two literary traditions; for literature students, enhanced understanding of the social and political background to the selected parts of Scottish Gaelic and Early Modern and Modern Irish literature; for students of Celtic Studies, the opportunity to range widely in the early modern and modern fields.

This course explores the major questions raised by the ambition of today's literature to render justice, as well as the risks of public and even legal contestation to which it is exposed. By browsing works that have given rise to a public debate, scandal, or even lawsuit, and exposing the terms of the controversy and its stakes (the difference between fiction and testimony, the rights of the characters in the face of romantic or family settling of accounts, the limits of the representable, the debates on cultural appropriation, the traumatic risks of reading, the search for transgression, new forms of censorship, etc.), this course introduces contemporary literature in its liveliest and most political form. It also returns to major societal issues (the rise of populism, social crises, the Me Too affair, contemporary family recompositions, debates on postcolonialism, racialism, etc.) from an original angle: that of the story of fiction.

This course invites students to ways of reading London. Students read London literary texts from the early modern period to the present day and encounter the city through walking, travelling along its transport connections, listening to guides, looking around them and engaging self-reflexively with the meanings and imperatives found in the city. The course includes walking lectures, seminars, and workshops and develops skills of close reading, observation, critical thinking, and effective communication.