English

This course offers a study of fiction and cinema including intertextuality, dialogism, and adaptation. It discusses a selection of authors, literary works, and their film adaptations.

This course examines the history and development of the fairytales in Europe from the 16th century to the present day. The course begins with an overview of the most well-known fairytales collections by Giovanni Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, before exploring modern retellings in children’s picturebooks, young adult literature, and children’s film. The course is grounded in contemporary psychological and socio-historical fairytale theory and encourages students to reflect on the form, purpose and content of classic fairytales over time.

This course aims to provide an in-depth exploration and analysis of various significant literary works devoted to such utopian agendas, with special focus on the ways in which the works intersect with the socio-economic, political, religious, and scientific thoughts of the times. By reading a variety of utopian writings (from ancient to modern), this course seeks to help students better to understand and reassess utopianism as an essential topic of literary studies.

This course explores British literature of the 17th through 19th centuries, including the relevant historical and cultural contexts. Topics include: the 17th century after restoration of the English monarchy; the 18th century; the romantic period; the Victorian era.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. Students master a variety of North American literary productions in relation to their cultural, social, and technological realities. Students learn to appreciate literary productions as part of complex, trans-media, and inclusive contexts. Course topics vary each term. For the most up to date course topics, access the University of Bologna Online Course Catalog. The fall 2023 course topic is on “Counterecycling: Science Fiction and Cognitive Pollution.” Through an assessment of traditional North American Science Fiction stories (and media adaptations), this course investigates whether using (in fact reusing) this genre traditional literary language helps to truly understand new complex phenomena or whether, instead, it induces cognitive pollution, therefore inhibiting our ability to observe. Recycling is certainly a useful action for the environment, but recycling literary language is not necessarily useful for seeing the limits and potential of a situation, especially where ontological levels are confused through a shared semantic. Among the themes discussed are: inventing the future: literature and technology; the evolving semantics of Science Fiction; the evolving semantics of Technology; environmental explorations: from cyberspace to metaverse; and artificial or artful Intelligence.

In this course students read two great works of the 14th century: Geoffrey Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES and SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (author's name unknown). Chaucer wrote his famous CANTERBURY TALES in the 1370s and 1380s and this last great work of his is one of the most exciting and varied in the English language. Obscenity and profanity jostle with piety as 23 characters tell tales of fornication, magic, war, love, philosophy, religious devotion, and virtue. The 14th-century alliterative poem SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT is a striking example of the genre of medieval Arthurian romance. Chivalric worth, testing, temptation, religious devotion, games, and nature are among the themes which permeate this tale of one knight's quest to uphold the honor and integrity of the Round Table.

One of the first forms of mass media, the power of the periodical was tremendous. It shaped readerships, politics, morality, and some of our best-loved works of fiction. With a focus on literary magazines, this course allows students to engage with literature in its original published form and to work with original artefacts. In the first week, students are given the intellectual and practical tools needed to handle and interpret physical and digitized periodicals through a series of seminars and workshops. Students then have two weeks of seminars, workshops, and excursions based around Victorian and Modernist periodicals, discovering familiar names in new contexts.