The aim of the course is to provide a critical-methodological introduction to the study of English literature and culture during the 19th and 20th century.
The course will analyse fashion’s mythic dimension and suggest that fashion is a language in itself. The methodological tools offered by fashion studies will be applied to the analysis of different novels in order to explore the impact and meaning of fashion in past and contemporary culture, and to investigate how fashion’s mythologies are constructed and disseminated through fictional texts. It will also examine how fashion, as a form of fiction, can be said to constitute a “power technology”: fashion can consort with hegemonic norms as a regulating force that can incite conformity, but sometimes resistance as well. The same topic will be examined in film studies.
F
A) TEXTS:
-Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
- Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979)
Film:
- David Frankel, The Devil wears Prada (2006)
B) CRITICAL TEXTS:
- Peter McNeil, Vicki Karaminas, Cathy Cole, Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in literature, Film, and Television (2009)
-Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, Translated by Andy Stafford Edited by Andy Stafford and Michael Carter Graham Allen, (2005) Chapters:
1 “History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations”
2 “Language and Clothing”
3 “Towards a Sociology of Dress”
C) Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, (from Chapter 7 to Chapter 10 ).
ashion and Fiction in English Literature
The lessons will be in English. The exam will be an oral discussion in English on the topic of the course and the texts in the program (parts A,B,C).
Students unable to attend the course are required to contact the lecturer.
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