Università Roma Tre

The main aim of the course is to engage in a detailed study of modernism, paying particular attention to Irish modernism and to a number of signficant Irish modernist writers. The first decades of the twentieth century saw great changes in many fields. The hugh technological advances that marked the start of the century and the dramatic realities of the First World War changed the world and the perception of the world. The modernists felt the need to engage in a thorough overhaul of the means of literary expression in order to find a way to give adequate expression to the new modern world in which they lived. They questioned and challenged the traditions of the past and subjected them to new literary treatments. This process was further complicated in Ireland because it was closely linked to the effort to use culture to create a new definition of Irishness within the country’s complex political context of decolonization.

Materiali didattici
James Joyce, Ulysses (Gabler edition)
Select one of the following two novels
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot or Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
Yeats (Texts will be provided during the course)
Critical reading
John McCourt, ed., James Joyce in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009)
Vincent B. Sherry, Joyce: Ulysses - Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge UP, 2004)
Terence Killeen, Ulysses Unbound, A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Wordwell, Dublin, 2005.
John McCourt, James Joyce, Gli Anni Di Bloom. Mondadori, Milano, 2005 (or James Joyce, The Years of Bloom, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 2000).
Other critical readings will be assigned during the course