English

In this course students explore the principles of the craft and theory of writing short narrative fiction. Students read a variety of fiction texts from the beginning of the modernist era to contemporary fiction, ranging from Gogol to Chekov, Hemingway, Faulkner, Munro, Garner, and others. Upon completion of the course students are able to demonstrate a broad understanding of recent developments and changes in published short fiction, make use of elements of the poetics of fiction-writing in producing their own pieces of short fiction, and are able to reflect on the influences, aims, and aesthetic decision underlying their own creative work.

The course focuses on Modern British Literature, and in particular the relationship between literary texts and their historical, linguistic, and artistic context. Special attention is placed on the critical methodologies useful for interpreting and analyzing literary texts. Students are expected to be able to elaborate complex analyses and formulate independent reflections on specific research topics. Students who write a research paper on a pre-approved topic are awarded 1 extra unit for the course. Maximum units for this course are 8. The course has two parts (A) and (B). The Spring 2022 topic is: Wilde in the Nineties: (PART A) PROSE and (PART B) POETRY. The course examines the various masks of the Oscar Wilde, the various fields in which he worked (poetry, theatre, novel, non-fiction, etc.) in an effort to determine if recent critical approaches obscure or illuminate his figure. The 1890s, caught between a dying Victorianism and a still uncertain Modernism, are the stage on which Wilde moves and acts, representing the contradictions of his era.

In this course, students "place" Austen in a number of different senses: socially, environmentally, and with a view to her lasting legacies and impact on our modern cultural industries. They attend to the treatment of place as a theme across her own novels, the way that her characters navigate space and that particular geographical locations bear witness to social interaction. Though Charlotte Brontë famously complained that Austen's works offered only a "highly cultivated garden" with "no open country", students discuss Austen's interest in a much wider range of settings, which in turns allows for a complex engagement with ideas of nature, colonialism, health, leisure, and mobility. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The student acquires historical and literary knowledge of women's popular culture with specific reference to travel literature and critical utopias, within a gender perspective. The course analyzes the strategies of representation of female identity, women's social role and agency in women's travel accounts such as letters, diaries and novels, from the 18th century to the present. It also investigates the double diversity of women travelers as different both from male travelers and from more socially conformist women. The course also explores to what extent these texts subvert or reinforce the position of women within the patriarchal social order and in the domestic sphere. For this reason, the texts chosen for the course are examined within their original cultural and social contexts, and in their interconnection with class, race, and gender discrimination.