Università Roma Tre

This course provides an overview of English literature through the study of a variety of texts by some of the most representative authors of the British canon. The course will focus on topics, contexts and textual strategies with a view to underlining the literary representation of the female characters in the texts we will analyze.

Compulsory readings:

Literary texts:
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (any unabridged English edition);
Joseph Conrad, The Return
James Joyce, The Dead
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace

Critical essays: a list of essays on the above authors/texts will be provided during the course. References will be available on my website.

Reading list (one of your choice):
1. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
3. Selection of Victorian poetry: Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses; Robert Browning, My Last Duchess; Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese: sonnets 1 and 43; Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (if you make this choice you have to read all the poems)
4. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” and Mrs Dalloway
5. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Literary history (one of your choice):
P. Bertinetti (ed.), Storia della letteratura inglese, vol. II, chap. II-III-IV, Einaudi, 2000
or
A. Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, chap. 7-8-9, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994.

Textual analysis (one of your choice):
Roland Bourneuf, Réal Ouellet, L’universo del romanzo, Torino, Einaudi 1976 (I ed. 1972) or
Gérard Genette, Figure III. Discorso del racconto, Torino, Einaudi 1976 [I ed. 1972] or
Roland Barthes, L’analisi del racconto, Milano, Bompiani, 2002 [I ed. 1969], or
Angelo Marchese, L’officina del racconto. Semiotica della narratività, Milano, Mondadori, 1990 [I ed. 1983] , or
Loredana Chines, Carlo Varotti, Che cos’è un testo letterario, Roma, Carocci, 2001

The coming of age novel

Programme: Through the reading of a selection of novels written between the 1860's and the present, the course will explore the many ways in which Anglophone culture has given expression to the European Bildungsroman. With the aid of critical and anthropological theorization, and of feminist studies, the course will investigate four "coming of age" novels and the different ways in which their authors have represented the crucial passage from childhood or adolescence to adult life.

Literary texts:
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) (any English edition);
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915) (any English edition);
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) (any English edition).

Film:
Great Expectations, director David Lean (1946) (available at Videoteca del Dipartimento).

Secondary readings:
Rachel Bowlby, A Child of One’s Own. Parental Stories, Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 115-131 (in pdf in my web page).
Abel, E., M. Hirsch, and E. Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983 (select chapters, in pdf).
Other readings will be announced at the beginning of the course.

Elements of literary history:
P. Bertinetti (a cura di), Breve storia della letteratura inglese (chap. VII-VIII-IX), Einaudi, 2004.

This course provides an overview of English literature through the study of a variety of texts by some of the most representative authors of the British canon.

Obligatory Reading material
Novels:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis (any complete edition in English); James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (any complete edition in English);
Other texts. Students will be provided with a selection of short texts that must be read. Among them will be extracts and poems by (among others) John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold (“Dover Beach), Alfred Lord Tennyson (“Ulysses”), W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock".
Critical Texts:
Paul Poplawski, English Literature in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. (pages 403-592.
The full critical reading list will be supplied during the course.