Università Roma Tre

FORM AS CONTENTS IN 20TH-CENTURY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE: POETRY, FICTION, ESSAYS

Programme
This year’s course will begin and end with two great poets, W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott, who – it will be argued – expressed in memorable ways through the forms of their creations not only their personal vision but also the history of their people and the politics of their times. An Irishman and a Caribbean, they lived through their countries’ transition from colony to nationhood, contributing along the way to decolonize the cultures around them while resisting the siren calls of nationalism and race identity. This is why the two remain still today emblematic of how in art forms are expressive of content. Certainly they cannot be defined as “political” poets, and yet their poetic opus reflects a unique balance between aesthetics, ethics and politics.
The course will try to retrace a similar balance in four explicitly “political” 20th-century novels, published between 1911 and 1999. Have their authors succeeded in transcending their personal prejudices by creating forms of universal significance? This is what we will try to discover during the course.

Texts
Selections of poems by W. B. Yeats e Derek Walcott

Novels
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911)
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941)
George Orwell, 1984 (1948)
E. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

Essays
A selection of essays will be available in late February

Reading List
Novels which will not be taught in depth during the course but that must be studied for the exam. Choose one among the following two:
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (1992)

Criticism and Historical Background
The students who have not attended the course will find all the critical materials at the copy shop "Copyando"