English

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 focuses on gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts. Notions of identity and otherness, difference and diversity are analyzed with specific reference to the politics of the body. The course intends to favor the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, visual). 

This course covers literary texts, with specific reference to speculative fiction, and discusses diverse politics of the body in black feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, posthuman, and trans* studies. In particular, the course tackles the historical and discursive construction and "framing" (J. Butler) of the non-human: how it has been culturally appropriated; but investigates also different forms of resistance as well as transversal and transcultural (and trans-species) forms of alliances, questioning the possibility of imagining an episteme that expands the very category of the human, not only to those subjectivities that have never had complete access to it (R. Braidotti), but also to a series of new "bodies" that have never been associated with the idea of human, and therefore of life.

The course gives an overview of the most common tools used when transcribing and editing texts, primarily from manuscripts; the different forms of digital presentation of texts; and the types of projects related to corpuses, databases, and editions of premodern texts in which memory institutions (libraries and archives) interact with scholars and the general public. 

This course introduces students to the past 250 years of Scottish literary history through a combination of celebrated and neglected texts. Focusing on poetry and prose, and featuring pirates, fairies, monsters, devils, and the full gamut of loves, joys, sorrows, and traumas, this course examines the range of ways in which people have imagined themselves in, through, or otherwise associated with Scotland. This means confronting both the comfortable stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the horrors we are liable to reveal.

This course explores the emerging writers in Britain from 1950 onwards. It analyzes the relationship between their work and modernism, as well as their role in the global canon of British tradition. Additionally, this course examines the interaction between contemporary English fiction and other characteristics of post-modern cultural events.