English

The fear of conspiracy functions as a recurring motif in many American cultural forms including novels, film, television, certain genres of music like hip-hop and rap, graphic novels, and social media. After considering early articulations of conspiracism in the US, this course focuses on 20th and 21st Century mediations and figurations of conspiracy fears and theories. The course considers conspiracism through key events that have unsettled epistemic certainty and fuelled hermeneutic activity, including the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the election of Barack Obama, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The course is an introduction to North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special focus on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and founding texts will be compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have molded US and Canadian realities, from European colonization to the end of the 19th century. Literature in this course is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, and inner/outer landscape, constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. The course discusses topics including: discovering, conquering and inventing North America; USA melting pot versus Canadian multiculturalism; puritan roots of American literary discourses; American pioneers, mapping the frontier; Canadian travelogues, female voices of the origins and contemporary interpretations; American transcendentalism/renaissance, eco-criticism, self-reliance, and new canons; the Civil War, slavery, freedom, and human Rights; the Gilded Age; and American proto-modernism.

This course introduces the poetic and literary features of English modernism through close study and discussion of a series of modern poets, beginning with G. M. Hopkins and ending with Seamus Heaney. Through analysis of perspectives and background, students learn about the relationship of modern poetry with its evolving cultural and political surroundings.