English Literature I (2011/2012)

Learning outcomes

The course aims at making the students informed about authors and genre modes which are held to be representative of the English literature and culture belonging to the periodization scheduled for the first-year course syllabus, by making them familiar with tools necessary to critically approach literary texts and genres in their contexts.

“Terrible and exalting youth”: the redefinition of the formation novel from Hardy to Woolf.
After some classes meant to highlight the rhetorical-formal aspects of the novel as a genre, the course is meant to accompany the students along a study of the formal modes of survival and redefinition of the formation novel (with its qualifying themes, such as the generational-societal tensions, and the search for identity facing authority, desire, religion, politics) that, starting from the late-Victorian/early modernist experience of Thomas Hardy, goes through the fundamental, if different, inflections of it given by D.H. Lawrence, J. Joyce, and V. Woolf.

BIBLIOGRAFIA/BIBLIOGRAPHY
Testi primari/Primary sources
T. HARDY, Jude the Obscure (1895)
D.H. LAWRENCE, Sons and Lovers (1913)
J. JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (1917)
V. WOOLF, Jacob’s Room, (1922)

Testi secondary/Secondary sources
-B. HARDY, Thomas Hardy. Imagining Imagination. Hardy’s Poetry and Fiction, “Good Times in in Jude the Obscure: Constructing Fictions”, (ch.3), The Athlone Press, 2000
-M. BLACK, D.H. Lawrence. The Early Fiction, ch. 6, Macmillan, 1986, pp.150-187
-G. MELCHIORI, James Joyce. Il mestiere dello scrittore, cap. 5 , Einaudi, 1994
-L. PEACH, Virginia Woolf, ch.4 , Macmillan, 2000, pp.67-87

Handbooks
Il manuale di riferimento consigliato per il contesto storico-letterario (dal tardo Vittorianesimo al XX secolo), è:
A. Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, 2004
Per quanto attiene agli aspetti formali dei testi oggetto d’analisi si consigliano i seguenti testi di riferimento, del tutto facoltativi:
A. Marchese, L’officina del racconto: semiotica della narratività, Mondadori, 1983
A. Marchese, Dizionario di retorica e stilistica, Mondadori, 2002
B. Mortara Garavelli, Manuale di retorica, Bompiani, 1999
O. Reboul, Introduzione alla retorica, Bologna, 1996

BIBLIOGRAFIA SUPPLETIVA PER GLI STUDENTI NON-FREQUENTANTI
Gli studenti non-frequentanti sono tenuti ad integrare la suddetta bibliografia con i seguenti testi:
G. CIANCI (a cura di), Modernismo/Modernismi, Principato, 1991 (le sezioni dedicate agli autori in programma)
S. CHATMAN, Story and Discourse. Narrative structure in fiction and film, Cornell U.P., 1978, ch.3: 108-134; ch.4: 173-186; ch.5: 197-215
S. McNichol, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, ch. 3, Routledge, 1990
G. CAWTHRA, Cultural Climate and Linguistic Style: change in English fictional prose from the late Victorian to the early modern period, Macmillan, 1989, capitoli su D.H. Lawrence e V.Woolf.

Oral exam, possibly preceded by an optional written test at the end of the course.