English

In this course, students explore a double and interrelated focus: connecting theories of place with readings of poems in which place is more than just a setting and instead gains poetological significance. From the more accessible approaches of poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald or, in the postcolonial context, Arun Kolatkar, to the more experimental poetics of Allen and Roy Fisher or Wendy Mulford and Geraldine Monk, the course analyzes a variety of place-based poetics from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century. Topics include how to think of place in the context of a globalizing world, phenomenological approaches of place and how globalization has disrupted it, identities of places, geological materialities and the social and communal process. Students examine how poets have not only recognized the multidimensional complexity of places and the culturally as well as politically critical ways of determining the boundaries and identities of places, but have used explorations into how to represent places in their various material and semiological layers also for reflecting on, and experimenting with, poetic forms and the materiality, historicity as well as performativity of poetic signification. 

This course offers an intensive reading experience and lively seminar discussions about Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929 and is the best-known big-city novel in the German language, a work of literary modernism frequently compared with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925). Students explore its literary, cultural, and political content and how the narrative technique of the novel, groundbreaking in its time, is fast-paced and experimental and montage-passages capture a cacophony of urban voices and disembodied discourses (politics, popular culture, advertising) of the so-called Golden Twenties. 

Structured as a chronological survey, this class provides a historical overview of British and Commonwealth spoken word poetry from the late 1960s to the present day. Beginning with US American influences from beat poetry and the Liverpool poets, the class moves on to the “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke and dub poetry by Benjamin Zephaniah and Linton Kwesi Johnson from the 1970s and 1980s. It then discusses work from the 1990s and early 2000s by spoken word performers such as Roger Robinson and Malika Booker, ending with Jay Bernard’s contemporary archival poetry. Students use these primary texts to introduce and revise concepts from literary studies such as intertextuality, reader-response theory, the archival turn, and autotheory. Incorporating modes of writing like Saidya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Antonio Gramsci’s and Stuart Hall’s figure of the “organic intellectual” into the discussion, the class attempts to conceptualize spoken word poetry as a uniquely ephemeral and performative form of knowledge production. In addition to discussing the role of spoken word poetry for marginalized communities and identities, the class attempts to understand how it challenges categories like authorship and genre, as well as distinctions between e.g. fiction and nonfiction or high and popular culture.

The course introduces essential writing skills and techniques across fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. It explores storytelling, imagery, sentence craft, readability, and clarity of expression. The course examines ethical representation and cultural sensitivity through examples and exercises and explores the significance of Indigenous writing in Australian culture. It also introduces the basic principles of copyediting and proofreading and develops skills in applying these principles to written work by identifying grammatical errors, suggesting improvements, and implementing revisions.

The seminar focuses on contemporary narratives of migration, border crossings, and cultural encounters in a variety of media (short stories, novels, comics, and films). Discussions include the stories told by the migrants themselves as well as narratives about migrants, about the relationship between home and host country, questions of identity and difference, and the relation between the individual and the community. In many cases, such narratives deal with suffering, loss, and trauma.

This course examines one of the most influential and still current imaginative traditions in English literature, gothic, which specializes in the macabre, the horrifying, the sensational, and the fantastical. It explores key works by (amongst others) Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker.

Shakespeare’s plays remain fundamental to an understanding of a vast array of masterpieces of world literature. In this course we will read closely two plays from Shakespeare Hamlet (1600-1) and King Lear (1604-5). Our reading will be structured around a set of main themes.  We will also examine other materials that help our understaning of these plays.

As an introduction to cultural and literary studies, this course examines an array of modes of expression to understand how texts of various kinds accomplish their acts of meaning making and persuade their readers. Attention is given to the impact of a text’s form and context in shaping its message, as well as its content. In trying to understand the rhetorical effects of any given text, the course examines examples from across a variety of genres that use words, images, and even sound to engage their audience or readers, within a variety of historical and political contexts. Objects of study include texts that use sound as well as words (such as contemporary ballads, performance poetry and hip hop, or contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays), visual images (such as posters in a protest action, photographs that document war and suffering, and historical maps that retraced the shape the world), and words collated and presented in particular ways on the page (such as the archived documents from the apartheid censors, the published journal of a fugitive slave, the extended prose of a stream-of-consciousness novel). By drawing on key theoretical insights into the politics of representation, the course develops the critical skills needed to become savvy readers of contemporary culture and politics. DP requirements: All written work to be handed in and at least 75% attendance at tutorials. Assessment: Continuous assessment (coursework essays, projects, tasks etc.) counts 60%; end-of semester examination counts 40%.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. In this course, students acquire deep knowledge of British cultural, political, philosophical, socio-economic history. They develop high ability to elaborate on texts and their cultural contexts, favoring critical thought. The course analyzes diverse forms of British Orientalism(s) in literature, visual art, and cultural theories, with specific reference to late 19th century and 20th century. Lessons investigate Orientalism as part of the cultural history of England, connected to colonialism and imperialism, but also to (albeit ambiguous) processes of intercultural exchanges. The course takes into consideration diverse literary genres where the notions of cultural difference and diversity, racism, and sexism intertwine with issues connected to gender, 'race', social positioning, and identity. It is introduced by lessons on cultural, postcolonial and intercultural studies.

This course explores the morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the grammatical category of gender. It examines what kids of gender systems exist, how gender is morphologically manifested on different grammatical categories, what the relation between gender and agreement is, how gender is interpreted and how this all varies across different languages. The class compares English with languages with different gender systems, such as German, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, or those of Bantu languages, in order to gain a comprehensive overview of its crosslinguistic variation.