English

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.
 

The 'Gothic novel', which originated in mid-18th-century England, took the world by storm as a form of weird and terrifying fiction reflecting the medieval taste of the time. There were many variations, and the most common in the early years were bizarre adventure stories, such as the tale of a maiden locked in an old castle and the young man who rescues her. Other typical variations include tales of a wise man who sells his soul to the devil and falls into hell; tales of an artificial man such as Frankenstein; tales of a man who transforms into a monster such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; vampire tales such as Dracula, and many other types. Furthermore, up to the present day, the Gothic tale continues to be reproduced and re-created in a variety of media, not limited to the novel, while further diversifying. The mystery novel, a significant genre, is one of the tributaries that branched off from the Gothic novel.

English Literature 7 and 8 traces the Gothic novel's development over a year. This course is the first half, which will begin with the beginnings of the Gothic novel in the 18th century, the medieval taste that formed its background, and the establishment of a new tourism culture. Then it moves on to the new developments of the Gothic novel in the 19th century and its relationship to psychic studies of the same period.

The New Woman, a controversial figure who became prominent in British literature in the late 19th century, challenged traditional views of femininity and represented a more radical understanding of women's nature and role in society. She was associated with a range of unconventional behavior – from smoking and bicycle-riding to sexuality outside marriage and political activism. This course examines some of the key literary texts identified with the New Woman phenomenon including women’s journalism in the period. The course’s reading are organized around central thematic concerns such as sexuality and motherhood, suffrage and politics, and career and creativity. Students consider to what extent the New Woman was a media construction or whether the term reflected the lives of progressive women in the period. 

We live in an age of multiple crisis where basic gender equality is as much under threat as the earth’s climate. Why not combine different approaches to think through the looming Armageddon in search for alternatives to humanity’s demise – or at least a better understanding of it? The course uses Cara Daggett conceptualisation of Petromasculinity (2018) as a starting point to explore the intersection of Gender Studies and Ecocriticism. We will discuss the dualism of culture and nature uncovering the importance of gender in our perception of these two organizing concepts. From there, we will turn to Energy Humanities and Ecofeminism to understand how the extraction of non-renewable energies relates to discourses of The End of Man (Joanna Zylinska 2018) and see where that path will lead us. The primary texts for the course will come predominantly from African, South Asian, and Southeast Asian creatives and where not easily accessible will be made available through a course reader.

One of the key features of postmodernist thinking is the assertion of the fuzzy boundaries between reality and fiction: the realization that in everyday lives fictions, projections or hypothesis-building constantly interact with objects and facts of life (you can call this constructivist thinking); the realization that people’s identities are negotiations between social demands and imaginary projects; the realization that people’s senses of reality are heavily influenced by certain hegemonic (dominating) posits in terms of gender, labor (and consumption), media, race and ethnicity. Brian McHale has characterized the resultant tensions, as they are enacted in literature as “worlds in collision.” Cinema, as an art of montage and suturing, seems predetermined to enact these clashes. In this seminar we will explore the fuzzy boundaries discussing postmodern obsessions such as identities, surfaces, worlds, play, parody, high & low, consumer culture, media, gender performances and difference.