English literature 1 LM. Forms, genres, and critical approaches (2015/2016)

Learning outcomes

"Monsters and Monstrosity in English Literature from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first century"

The monster is the protagonist of the relationship between nature and revelation, as the connection between chance and necessity. It entails a problem of classification, but it is also a stylistic and expressive mode. It presents an aporia which denounces man’s fragile image of himself. The monster on one hand sets the limits of the human, but on the other hand it points to a transcendence to which man aspires. These are only some of the topics the course will deal with, in a diachronical progression from early Nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

TEXTS:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
William Golding, Darkness Visible (1979)
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979)
Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark (2014)

CRITICAL TEXTS:
--Marina Levina and Diem-My T.Bui eds, Monster Culture in the 21st Century, London, New York, Sidney, Bloomsbury, 2013.
--David A. Hedric Hirsch, “Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the family in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed, Monster Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, Chapter 6.
--E. Burke E.Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful , 1757

Oral

STUDENT MODULE EVALUATION - 2015/2016