English

This course provides an overview of the fundamental works of British and American literature. It provides an opportunity to read and reread texts and analyze and argue both orally and in writing. The course includes reading and discussing two assigned works: William Shakespeare, TWELFTH NIGHT; and Vladimir Nabokov, PNIN.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course develops a deep knowledge of British Modern Literatures with particular regard to the relationships between literary texts and history, language and the arts. Students are able to use critical methodologies to read and analyze literary texts. Course topics vary each term, check the University of Bologna Course Catalog for the applicable course topic.

This course introduces students to performative events, dramatic representations, performance processes, and theater institutions in London. London has been a "dramatized society" as Raymond Williams once put it, a "society of the spectacle" as Guy Debord claimed in another capital context. But what might these general terms mean more specifically in London, now?  How does performance theory help us to read the behaviors and relationships of people that make up the city? What are the ways in which configurations of space, power, and movement determine what it is possible to think and feel in the city? This course uses ideas from performance, theater, and literary studies as a framework to think about our everyday experience as consumers, tourists, and citizens in the global city that is London. 

The first half of the course analyzes Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN in relation to its context within the African American tradition as well as the many narrative strategies Ellison uses to write about such a subject, including but not limited to his use of oral wordplay in a written work and the methods through which a person can attempt to identify themselves. For the second half of the course, students examine LEAVES OF GRASS in the epic and lyric traditions, its major themes, its modernity of form and content, and the Whitman legacy in modern American poetry. Discussion groups emphasize oral expression, the technique of close reading and textual commentary, and essay-writing strategies.

One of the tools required in order to successfully interpret a medieval Celtic text, is to know as much as possible about the circumstances under which it was produced. This historicist approach is common in the field of Celtic studies. In the first four lectures of this course, students are given a brief overview of medieval Irish literature; medieval Irish history; medieval Welsh literature, and medieval Welsh history. After this, important concepts and themes relating to medieval Welsh and Irish history and literature are examined, compared, and contrasted. This is done by reading background literature, and by closely analyzing texts relating to a particular weekly topic, for example the king, the hero, the role of women, the role of the poet, the saint, and children.