English

This course introduces the history of American literature between 1492 and 1865.  

In 1620, John Winthrop pictured the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a model of Christian charity.” In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote down the principles of a new American nation, declaring “all men are created equal.” In 1837, Andrew Jackson ended his presidency celebrating that America was “honored and respected by every nation of the world.” 

To readers living a few centuries later, it is impossible to ignore that American “freedom” has gone hand-in-hand with the capture and enslavement of Black people, indigenous genocide and land dispossession, and inequality before the law and in the labor market for the vast majority of people. Importantly, the irony of Winthrop, Jefferson, or Jackson’s words was not lost on those living when they spoke them: political struggle has attended the development of American society, culture, and economy at every step.  Literature is a key window into the debate and bloodshed surrounding this struggle. Studying the development of language and narrative helps us to highlight the contradictions between American ideals and American reality, to understand the historical forces that produce these contradictions, and to study how everyday people try to build a better world, in the past as today.  

Working within the bounds of 1492 (the year Christopher Columbus “discovered” America) and 1865 (when the US Civil War ended), this course examines the early colonial period in the northeast and Virginia; the war for independence from Britain; the removal of the Five “Civilized” Tribes from the southeast; and the establishment, expansion, and abolition of slavery as US colonization crept westward. The course examines a range of primary source documents -- letters, journals, myths, speeches, sermons, laws, poems, songs, memoir, autobiography, confessions, and more -- to explore the early centuries of the United States. 

This course examines literary classics that have attracted controversy for reasons including political content; issues of morality/obscenity; transgressing conventions of form; polemical works; questions of authorial identity and authenticity; and controversies over prizes and literary merit.

This course explores arguably the most popular of secular literary forms from late medieval and early modern Europe. The course explores a range of chivalric romances alongside a variety of other literary, textual, and material productions that testify to a cultural fascination with the ideals of knighthood and with courtly values more generally. The course pays particular attention to the rise of romance literature in the late medieval period, with narratives that were repeatedly translated into English for socially diverse audiences. It explores particular tropes within romance literature and courtly lyric poetry, particularly in respect of the portrayal of women. It has long been recognized that romance literature was often read by mixed gender audiences and the course explores how the genre functioned to guide female behavior against patriarchal and social norms.

As possibly the oldest representation of embodied difference, monsters have always served as warnings not to stray off the beaten path. They might warn against the dangers that lurk in unknown territories or against engaging in aberrant behavior so as to avoid degenerating into something monstrous oneself. Monstrosity is thus not only a matter of those fantastical beings that we find in science fiction and fantasy narratives, but has always been attached to human bodies as well, or those who are designated as inhuman or less than human. In this seminar, we will engage with literary representations of monstrosity that blur the lines between the real and the fantastical and thematize monsters as both supernatural and otherworldly, as well as real material beings. Analyzing such literary constructions of monstrosity thus allows us to delve into an unconscious realm of social anxieties regarding human difference and non-normative embodiment with special attention to the intersections of race, gender, and disability.

This course develops students' advanced writing skills for academic attainment and employability. Students are introduced to key forms of writing from a variety of professional contexts. An initial focus on the academic essay enables students to develop writing from more familiar experience. Contrasting the academic essay with a variety of journalistic forms equips students with skills in writing to specific guidelines and briefs and craft their written voice. A project involving designing and promoting a virtual exhibition introduces students to the writing skills needed in heritage professions and group work. Real life writing and editing tasks introduced by industry professionals from the world of publishing provides students with practical experience to share with potential employers. Students are also introduced to the requirements of pitches, policy briefs, and the work of writing in the legal professions. 

This course introduces Chinese and Japanese literature through the works of best-known 20th-century poets (including songwriters) writing in Chinese or Japanese primarily to students from outside Chinese or Japanese-speaking cultures majoring in East Asian studies. East Asian Studies majors are encouraged to use this course as a complement to more specialized courses in Chinese and/or Japanese literature in their portfolio. 

Knowledge of Japanese and/or Chinese would be of great use, but is not a prerequisite for taking this course.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.

At the end of the 19th century, Britain was in many ways at the pinnacle of its power, having established global supremacy thanks to advances in industrialization and its vast colonial empire. However, cultural texts from the period project a number of profound anxieties about deviancy, degeneracy, decadence, and indistinct threats from adversaries both at home and abroad. Sociopolitical reasons for these uncertainties include the suffragette movement, socialist and anarchist action, campaigns for national self-determination in the form of e.g. Irish Republicanism or the Indian National Congress, as well as geopolitical tensions and technological changes. In this class, we examine narratives that represent, respond to, and process late Victorian cultural anxieties with a particular view to the violence that results from perceived threats to cultural hegemony. We situate a number of late Victorian novels in relation to emergent contemporary concepts such as (social) Darwinism, the unconscious, and (homo)sexuality, exploring how these concepts both shaped and were shaped by cultural anxiety. Additionally, we adopt frameworks from more recent theoretical approaches such as postcolonial and trans*queer studies to understand how cultural anxieties negotiate the boundaries between normative structures and their Other. Primary texts include Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 1891, Florence Marryat: The Blood of the Vampire, 1897, Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1899.