Università Roma Tre

This course explores the theme of the master-servant relationship in two canonical English texts, William's Shakespeare "The Tempest" and Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", and the metamorphoses of this theme across two contemporary rewritings, J.M. Coetzee's "Foe" and Margaret Atwood's "Hag-seed".

William Shakespeare, "The Tempest" (1611) (recommended edition: Arden, Penguin or Garzanti con testo a fronte);
Daniel Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) (recommended edition: Oxford World's Classics or Penguin Classics);
J.M. Coetzee, "Foe" (1986) (any edition in English);
Margaret Atwood, "Hag-seed. The Tempest retold", Hogarth Shakespeare, 2016.

Film:
"The Tempest", BBC, dir. John Gorrie (1980).
"The Tempest", dir. Julie Taymor
"Man Friday", dir. Jack Gold, screenplay by Adrian Mitchell (1975) (full movie on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rPXjCy83zg)

This course provides an overview of English literature through the study of a variety of texts by some of the most representative authors writing in English. Highlighting the topos of the impossible/forbidden love, students will explore a series of texts belonging to different literary genres and different historical and literary contexts with a view to isolating and analyzing typologies of norm and otherness (from a gender, cultural, ethnical, national, social point of view) explicitly or implicitly dealt with in the texts studied.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet [play]
John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Bright Star [poems]
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [novel]
Rudyard Kipling, Lispeth, Beyond the Pale [short stories]
James Joyce, The Dead [novella]

Lessons will be held in Italian but the texts used will be in English; you are nevertheless free to use Italian translations. You can find the above texts online at: Project Gutenberg and Poetry Foundation's websites.

Voyages and shipwrecks
This first-year course will provide a historical and cultural overview of English literature through contextualization and analysis of some canonical texts of travel literature. Starting from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Conrad’s sea voyages, the course means to focus on the polisemy of travelling as a mark of epistemological changes by exploring the contexts, contents and formal strategies of the texts.

PRIMARY SOURCES

All the volumes and articles indicated below (primary and secondary sources) are compulsory reading for all students and will be discussed during the final exam.
Students should buy the suggested editions of the texts when indicated and are expected to read the primary sources before the beginning of the course.

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest/La tempesta, introduzione e traduzione di Alessandro Serpieri, note di Clara Mucci, con testo a fronte, Marsilio, Venezia, 2006.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels/I viaggi di Gulliver, a cura di Masolino d’Amico, con uno scritto di Walter Scott, Mondadori, Milano, 2015 [English version: any Wordsworth Classics o Penguin].
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner/La ballata del vecchio marinaio, a cura di Rocco Coronato, con testo a fronte, Marsilio, Venezia, 2018.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Beach of Falesà/La spiaggia di Falesá, a cura di Richard Ambrosini, con testo a fronte, Marsilio, Venezia, 2011.
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Il compagno segreto, a cura di Francesco Giacobelli, con introduzione di Andrea Zanzotto, con testo a fronte, BUR, Milano, 1975.