Comparative Literature

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Students selecting the Italian subject area must select the course readings in Italian. The course examines gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts with specific reference to the analyses of the notions of identity and otherness, difference, and diversity. The course favors the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, and visual). The course presents case studies in which texts (literary and visual) are in dialogue with theories and methodologies of gender and postcolonial studies. The texts elaborate on the issue of gender, identity, difference, race, and politics of the body in the representations, transmissions, and elaborations of traumatic events in literary and visual texts (with specific reference to utopian and dystopian fictions). Lessons make reference to memory and trauma studies, dystopia, and science fiction within a gender and postgender perspective. The course elaborates on debates on the intersectionality of gender(s) and race in theories, and visual and literary texts, and to analyze issues related to utopia/dystopia/science fiction within a postcolonial and posthuman perspective. The main theoretical issues discussed by the course include critical theories and methodologies of gender and women's studies and queer studies; re-reading of the notion of identity, difference, and diversity; gender as a social construction; women’s and postcolonial re-visions of the symbolic and social order; the construction of sexual difference as a deconstructive strategy; re-writings of the body; French Feminism(s) and African American and Postcolonial responses; postcolonial and African American critical debates on the representation and deconstruction of the notion of gender and race. New politics of identity and difference; intersectionality of race and gender(s); and the interconnection of gender, ethnicity, and race in trauma and memory studies.

This course offers a study of the principal literary movements in the second half of the 19th century: realism and naturalism. It examines the fundamental characteristics of each movement including the works of representative authors.

Conventional histories of French literature usually begin with the Chanson de Roland (c.1100), which is viewed as an inaugural text for a great tradition of national literature that runs smoothly through to the present and fosters a timeless ideal of France. However, this vision does not stand up to scrutiny – the “idea of France” turns out to be retroactive and fluid from the outset, then heavily contingent, in the post-medieval period, on changes of regime, on differences of class, gender, education or ethnicity, and on general cultural and political trends such as (to name but a few examples) Jacobinism, Romanticism, Republicanism, Fascism, Communism. This course examines how “France” and French national identity is constructed by studying a selection of key French literary texts from a variety of periods, including a postcolonial reflection on what it means to be “French.” 

This course examines how our place in the world is defined by gender. It introduces students to questions of gender in the culture and literature of Spanish America. The topic is studied through a number of cultural expressions, including prose, poetry, theatre and film, from a variety of countries and across various historical periods.

The course examines the ways in which Brazilian fiction has articulated and responded to the experiences of social, economic, and political upheaval in the second half of the 20th century, with a focus on Brazil's authoritarian tradition, in particular the traumatic military dictatorship of 1964-85 and the process of Democratic Transition in the 1980s and 90s. Themes explored include: anonymity and identity - personal and national; love, sexuality, and the family; censorship and repression; ideas of a Brazilian revolution or utopia; popular and mass culture; marginality and exile; history, journalism, and alternative approaches to narrative. 

This course uses a literary approach to political themes founded on the reflective and aesthetic values of certain works. This approach is supplemented by a philosophical, moral, and political reading of the works from an internal and external viewpoint which place them in their historical context and measure their weight outside of that context. This course develops a reflection on the political fable genre. After a general introduction (overview of Rabelais, Boccalini, Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Huxley), the course centers on a formal, structural, and moral analysis of two famous collections of fables which use a philosophical and ironical approach: the 12 books of La Fontaine's fables and the 33 chapters of Tchouang-tseu as an art on the variation. In these different philosophical, satirical, didactic fables, the course studies the following double dimensions: political/moral, lucidity/illusion, wisdom/folly, animal/human, direct allusion/indirect allusion, and irony/humor. The art of the variation is defined in the different arts and contexts.

This course is an examination of modern and contemporary English literature through the lens of multiculturalism. The focus of the course changes from semester to semester, foregrounding different sets of literary texts by writers concerned with issues of race, identity, and the multicultural dynamics of the English-language world. Possible topics include: race and sexuality, First Peoples’ literature and cultures, jazz and African American literature, cultural politics, immigration and literature, Asian American literature, and Hispanic literature and culture. Students read a variety of literary genres, including novels, plays, and creative non-fiction, by writers who are concerned with issues of colonialism, race, language, and identity within multicultural societies. Some of the important questions the course addresses are: what are the concerns of so-called “ethnic” writers in contemporary cultures of the English-language world, what is the relationship between identity politics and literature, and how can we use critical race analysis as a part of literary study?