Università Roma Tre

The course is divided into two parts. The sixty hours of lectures - both in presence and online - will be dedicated to the study of four female narrators, created by three female and one male writers. These narrators are representative of four different narrative forms but are also figures emblematic of the many problems associated with female writing and its critics. We will begin with Jane Austen's posthumous novel, Persuasion (post. 1818), then we will read Henry James's ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), in which the narrative is entrusted to a very young governess whose reliability as a source is repeatedly questioned by the author; Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, and finally the postcolonial novel by Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1967). There are four masterpieces of the English literary tradition and four novels. Students are advised to read at least Persuasion before the beginning of the course.
In the twelve hours of alternative teaching, the focus will be on English poetry written between 1800 and the mid-twentieth century. The teacher will offer students a choice of Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century poems, which will provide material for a collective experimentation on how to read and understand poetry in English. At the end of the twelve hours of work, the students attending and participating remotely will have to prepare an educational project in which they will explain how to read and understand one or more poems.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (post. 1818)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Jane Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1967)

The selection of poems and the critical materials will be made available before the beginning of the course. Please check the teacher's personal page on the Department website.
Those students who do not plan to follow the lessons will have to read a fifth novel, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Erasmus students are exempted from studying the poems.

The course “From Jane Eyre to The Eyre Affair: Expansions and Metamorphoses of the Realist Novel” aims to explore the transformations that, starting from a classic novel like "Jane Eyre" (1847), took place in the British literary and cultural landscape of the twentieth century and the early 2000s. The course will cover some fundamental stages in modernist, postcolonial and postmodernist culture and aesthetics, up to the overall reconfiguration of the novel, and of the literary in general, in the age of media convergence.

Novels:
Brontë Charlotte, "Jane Eyre", Norton Critical Editions, 2016
James Henry, "The Turn of the Screw", London, Signet, 2007
Rhys Jean, "Wide Sargasso Sea", Norton Critical Editions, 1999
Fforde Jasper, "The Eyre Affair", Hodder & Stoughton, 2001

Film & TV series:
"Jane Eyre", dir. Robert Stevenson, 1943
"Jane Eyre", TV series, dir. Susanna White, BBC, 2007