English

This course introduces scholarship, debates, methods, and professional trends in the field of literary studies, considering questions of theory, application, interdisciplinary, and textuality. It trains students in the methods used to conduct literary research in their papers and theses, giving careful attention to library resources and academic style. Thie seminar explores questions of who Indigenous peoples are, what Indigeneity is, and where Indigenous nations exist. It addresses these questions by reading a wide range of theory in the field of Indigenous Studies from around the world and also taking a look at some creative work. The course develops a comprehensive understanding of colonization and decolonization and incorporates that understanding into individual areas of study. 

This course provides students with an overview of innovative and experimental writing by women in the twentieth century – and beyond. The texts studied allow for a consideration of various kinds of formal, linguistic, generic, thematic and material experiment, and for discussions of diverse literary categories, practices and movements, such as modernism, postmodernism, multimodality, cut-up, lipogrammatic writing and the nouveau roman. Accompanying critical material facilitates a discussion of the various avant-gardes of the 20th century (such as Dada, Surrealism, and the Oulipo group), and their contextual and cultural significance.  

This course introduces students to the main narrative features of the novel tradition by concentrating on generic and formal approaches to reading novels. This course looks at novels from the late 18th century onwards and focuses on their generic form. The main objective of the course is to demonstrate the importance of narrative form in critical engagements with novels. Theoretical and historical study of the two dominant narrative forms in the novel tradition - romance and realism - is thus emphasized and students are encouraged to look at their approach to the novel with these theoretical perspectives in mind.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. EnrolLment is by permission of the instructor. This course presents to students the stylistic analysis of literature in English. In particular, students are guided through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of literature. This course proposes a mixture of theory and practice with the final aim to teach how to provide close readings of literary texts based on a stylistics approach. The aim of this course is to teach students the importance of style in relation to the meaning of a literature.

This course outlines the context for the emergence of Irish literature in English and to enable students to explore this literature through the introduction of key concepts and major authors. It focuses on the emergence of Irish literature in English, a literature that had its roots in conquest and colonization, but which proved to be highly dynamic, giving voice to diverse views and developing distinctive forms. The texts included give students an opportunity to explore literary expressions of Anglo-Irish identity, as well as critiques of the colonial process and early examples of hybrid texts that combine Anglo-Irish and Gaelic elements. Authors may include Swift, Edgeworth, Burke, Owenson and Somerville and Ross.

With attention focused on the question of independence, recent debates concerning Scottish culture and identity gain a heightened political charge. Literature has not only reflected but actively shaped such debate. In the year the new Scottish Parliament was established (1998), Christopher Whyte argued that "in the absence of elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers." But what influence have writers played in recent political change, and to what extent has Scottish culture escaped its own stereotypes? This course examines the literary and political currents shaping contemporary Scottish identity, introducing students to key 20th- and 21st century texts. Students encounter and explain a range of cultural debates concerning language, class, democracy, and nationhood, attending to the urgency as well as the complexity of recent Scottish writing.

This advanced course on postcolonial literature situates the representative texts of postcolonial literature in broader intellectual and historical contexts, exploring not only the works of literature under this category but also the important issues often associated with postcolonial studies in general by means of comparative, historical, and theoretical approaches.

This course looks at ways of writing throughout the long history of experimentation with critical form: from essays and auto-fictions to critical fabulations and diaries, the "personal" and the "political" in writing have often deeply intermeshed. The course considers ways of thinking about the relationship of formal innovation and structure to the content or air of the text; to ways writers enact performative relationships with their real or imagined interlocutors; and to ways we ourselves can examine and reinvent our own manners of shaping written thought. Affect, race, gender, aesthetics, and politics, as well as archives and documents occupy students' attention, as they navigate some radical and long-lasting experiments in the history of critical thought. 

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.