67245 - LETTERATURA INGLESE / LETTERATURA DEI PAESI DI LINGUA INGLESE 2 (LM)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

Lo studente possiede conoscenze approfondite sulla storia della letteratura inglese moderna e sullo sviluppo delle letterature extraeuropee in lingua inglese, con particolare attenzione al rapporto tra i testi letterari e il contesto storico, artistico e linguistico. Possiede elevate capacità di comprensione e di analisi critica delle specificità culturali delle aree geografiche studiate, nonché delle dinamiche politiche e dei condizionamenti ideologici tra i diversi Paesi, con particolare attenzione ai rapporti tra l'Europa e le sue ex-colonie. Conosce e sa utilizzare le metodologie pratiche per l’analisi e l'interpretazione del testo letterario. E' in grado di elaborare analisi complesse e di formulare riflessioni autonome su tematiche di ricerca specifiche.

Contenuti

'Race', Gender, and the Ethics of Memory in Dystopian Fiction and Visual Texts.

The course intends to analyse the issue of  'race' and gender in the representations, transmissions and elaborations of traumatic events in literary and visual texts. It will explore the politics of identity and otherness, the relationship between human and non-human in dystopian fiction and visual texts. These texts will show how  'race', ethnicity, and gender have served to construct and stabilize a rhetoric of violence based on a normative notion of identity and otherness. The narratives expose fear, love, (self) deception, violence and (im)possible reconciliation as key elements to subvert the normative relationship between identity and difference/human-non human.

The discourse on trauma implies a dialogue between memory and oblivion, memories and counter-memories, between the ethics of bearing witness and (possible) manipulations or omissions of memory. The study of traumas reveals a complex dynamic between past, present and future, the private and the public spheres, remembrance and oblivion, power and lack of power, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, violence and riconciliation, politcs of the body, conscious and unconscious desires and fears. Within this perspective, the analysis of traumas will include the ways in which the individual and the collectivity are transformed, lacerated, disrupt, or unified, through traumatic events.

Recent traumatic events still expose 'race', 'ethnicity', together with the opposition human-non human as elements that, covertly or overtly, inform the rhetoric of conflicts and their representations in media, literature, cinema and visual arts.

The critical sources selected will provide methodologies, theoretical and epistemological tools for the study of  heritage/transmissions of memory in traumatic and post-traumatic contexts and the issue of dislocation, deconstruction and reconstruction of individual and collective memories. Section 1. Politics of identity and otherness, dislocation and translation/narratives of trauma. Section 2. Displacement of reality and technologies of memory.   

This course shares with the other programs of the Laurea Magistrale in Letterature moderne, comparate e postcoloniali (M.A in Comparative and Postcolonial Modern Literatures) the analysis of the intersections between identity, otherness, differences and diversity.

 

Testi/Bibliografia

Primary sources:

Burdekin, Katharine, Swastika Night, 1937, New York: The Feminist Press, 1985.

Butler, Octavia E., Kindred, 1979, Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

Faber, Michael, Under The Skin, 2000, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000

Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 2005, Vintage Books, 2010

Visual texts:

The Village (movie), U.S.A, director M. Night Shyamalan, 2004

Wayward Pines,  television series based on the Wayward Pines novels by Blake Crouch. Written and adapted by Chad Hodge, director M. Night Shyamalan, 2015- (selected episodes)

The Secret Life of Words, movie, Director Isabel Coixet, 2005

Analyses of images from Abu Ghraib.

Lessons will make reference to the following reading list :

Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan (ed.) Dark Horizons. Science Fiction and The Dystopian Imagination. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. (selected chapters) (available in the Library)

Spillers, Hortense J. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", in Diacritics. A Review of Contemporary  Criticism 17 (2), 1987, pp. 65-81. "Figli/e di madre, del padre forse: una grammatica Americana" in Critiche femministe e teorie letterarie . A cura di Raffaella Baccolini; M. Giulia Fabi, Vita Fortunati, Rita Monticelli. Bologna: CLUEB, 1997, pp. 255-279, trad. Lucia Gunella e Rita Monticelli. (available in the library)

Monticelli, Rita, 2007, "Contronarrazioni e memorie ri-composte negli studi di genere e delle donne" in Agazzi, Elena, Vita. Fortunati, a cura, Memoria e saperi. Percorsi transdisciplinari, Roma, Meltemi., pp 605-624. (available in the Library)

Monticelli, Rita "Oltre lo specchio: politiche e poetiche degli studi di genere e delle donne", MODERNA, 2013, 1-2 . 2012, pp. 219 - 233 (available in the Library)

Braidotti, Rosi "Difference, Diversity, and Nomadic Subjectivity" online document, http://women.ped.kun.nl , 2000.

Butler, Judith, 1993, Bodies that Matter. On the Discoursive Limits of  'Sex'. New York and London: Routledge, 1996, Corpi che Contano. I limiti discorsivi del 'sesso'. Trad. S. Capelli. Milano: Feltrinelli. (selected chapters and Italian Introduction by A. Cavarero) (available in the Library, introduction by Cavarero available in the Reader)

Fortunati, Vita, Gilberta Golinelli, Rita Monticelli (a cura di) Studi di genere e memoria culturale. Women and Cultural Memory. Bologna: Clueb, 2004. (selected chapters) (available in the Library)

Hall, Stuart, "Ethnicity, Identity, Difference" available online

Hall, Stuart, "New Ethnicity" 1988, 1996, available online

Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1995. Selected chapters. Available in the Reader and Library

Gilroy, Paul, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond The Color Line. Harvard UP, 2000. Selected chapters. Available in the Reader and Library.

Monticelli, Rita; A. Nadalini, Culture lines: la ‘razza’ come auto rappresentazione in contesti post-traumatici, in: Z. FRANCESCHI, Razza, razzismo e antirazzismo. Modelli, rappresentazioni e ideologie, BOLOGNA, I Libri di Emil, 2011, pp. 129 - 141. Available in the Reader and Library.

Kaplan, E., A.,Wang, B., 2004, "Introduction. From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity" in E. A. Kaplan, B. Wang, a cura, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, Hong Kong, Hong Kong UP, pp. 1-18. (available in the Reader)

Vecchi, Roberto, R. Monticelli,  cura di, Topografia delle culture, BOLOGNA, I Libri di Emil, 2011, pp. 284 . selected chapters (available in the Library)

Baccolini, Raffaella, "Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler." in Future Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 13-34. (available in the Reader)

Monticelli, Rita, "'Seeking Light in Darkness and Harmony in Confusion': Death, Memory, and Resistance in Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin and Kindred  by Octavia Butler". Dedalus, Revista Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada , N. 11-12, 2006-2008 (available in the Library)

Patai, Daphne, "Introduction" in K. Burdekin, Swastika Night, New York: The Feminist Press, 1985, pp. iii-xv.

Fabi, M. Giulia, "Postfazione", in O. E. Butler, Legami di Sangue, Firenze: Le lettere, 2005, pp. 327-341  (available in the Library)

Monticelli, Rita, "Crossing the boundaries between identity and otherness: an analysis of Michael Faber's Under the Skin", (paper available in the reader)

Gymnich, Marion, Segao Costa, Alexandre, "Of Humans, Pigs, Fish, and Apes: The Literary Motif of Human-Animal Metamorphosis and its Multiple Functions in Contemporary Fiction" in http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lesprit_createur/v046/46.2gymnich.html

McDonald , Keith, "Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go As 'Speculative Memoir'", in http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/biography/v030/30.1mcdonald.html

Mediazioni online, Special issue on The Village (available online), mediazioni online n. 2, 2006. www.mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it/index.php/no2-anno2006.html

Sargent, Lyman Tower, "The Problem of the 'Flawed Utopia': a Note on the Costs of Eutopia" in Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan (ed.) Dark Horizon. Science Fiction and The Dystopian Imagination . London and New York: Routledge, 2003 (available in the Library and in the Reader)

R. Monticelli, "Hooded Times" e travestitismi di genere: il corpo desacralizzato e le immagini di tortura da Abu Ghraib, in: Abito e identità. Ricerche di storia letteraria e culturale, volume XI, PALERMO, ROMA, SAO PAULO, ila Palma, Renzo e Rean Mazzone Editori, 2011, pp. 139 - 166

Sontag, Susan, "Regarding the Torture of Others" The New York Times, May 23, 2004 online

Zapf, Hubert "Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology, And Literary Studies" Ecozon 2010, online document

The final syllabus and final reading list of secondary sources will be available at the beginning of the course

Please do check this web page for further notice and information

Gli studenti e le studentesse di Letteratura Inglese/Letteratura dei Paesi di lingua inglese 2 LM dovranno analizzare 3 testi primari e saggi/ capitoli di volumi/articoli da scegliere tra le fonti in elenco per un numero di 200/220 pagine. E' inoltre richiesta l'analisi dei film proposti (con particolare riguardo a The Village), della serie TV e delle immagini da Abu Ghraib.

Students of the course Letteratura Inglese/Letteratura dei paesi di lingua inglese 2 LM are requested to analyse 3 primary texts and articles/essays/chapters (about 200/220 pages) to be chosen from the Reading list; the analysis of the movies (with specific reference to The Village) and tv series proposed in class, the analysis of the images from Abu Ghraib.

All students (divided in groups) are requested to present in class one text (to be chosen in accordance with the lecturer) within diverse critical perspectives, in a date to be confirmed.

Please do check this web page for further notice and information

 

 

 

Metodi didattici

Metodi didattici

Materiali bibliografici e indicazioni di strumenti critici verranno forniti anche nel corso delle lezioni. Sono previste lezioni frontali e seminariali, con la partecipazione attiva degli studenti. Per questa ragione la lista dei testi critici potrebbe variare durante lo svolgimento del corso. E' necessaria inoltre la conoscenza della lingua inglese e di quella italiana.

Eventuali studenti non frequentanti sono invitati a contattare la docente, presentandosi personalmente nell'orario di ricevimento, o inviandole una mail, entro e non oltre la fine del corso.

Gli studenti sono pregati di consultare il programma all'inizio e durante il corso, per eventuali cambiamenti e per informazioni ulteriori sulla reading list.

Non sono ammessi al corso studenti delle lauree triennali. Gli eventuali studenti Erasmus sono pregati di contattare la docente via email prima di iscriversi al corso.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Active participation in class discussions: 25%. By participation in class we mean the ability of the student to enter the debates, contributing with questions and/or elaborations of the topics proposed by the lecturer. This participation does not aim at testing students' specific preparation in the field, rather, they want to favor their ability to take part in discussions and their capability to discuss in group.

Students' presentation: 25% (students will be requested to discuss one selected text in groups and to present their works in the last part of the course).

Final oral exams: 50%

The final oral exam will test the student's critical capability, his/her knowledge of the methodologies employed, her/his ability to combine theories with the analyses of the texts chosen. The close reading of the primary texts aims at showing the student's critical ability, their knowledge not only of the texts but also of their context of creation together with the cultural politics that inform them. Students are requested to use an appropriate language, to be able to articulate their thought in English (high level)and to have an accurate knowledge of the bibliography chosen for the exam. ALL STUDENTS ARE REQUESTED TO KNOW THE PRIMARY TEXTS (NOVELS AND VISUAL TEXTS CHOSEN) IN GREAT DETAILS.

Grades:

Excellent: Students' high capability to elaborate on the exiting debates on the topics chosen, originality of thought and excellent knowledge of the theories and of the novels and visual texts chosen for the exam, their ability to read them also using the theories employed during the course and showing comprehension of the bibliography chosen, accurate and appropriate language.

Very good level:  Students' capability to elaborate on the exiting debates on the topics chosen, originality of thought and very good knowledge of the theories and of the novels and visual texts chosen for the exam, their ability to read them also using the theories employed during the course and showing comprehension of the bibliography chosen, and appropriate, accurate language.

Good level: Students' capability to elaborate on the exiting debates on the topics chosen, knowledge of the theories and of the novels and visual texts chosen for the exam, their ability to read them also using the theories employed during the course and showing comprehension of the bibliography chosen, and appropriate language.

Pass: Students' capability to enter the exiting debates on the topics chosen, knowledge of the theories and of the novels and visual texts chosen for the exam, their ability to read them also using the theories employed during the course and showing comprehension of the bibliography chosen, and appropriate language.

Fail: Student's lack of knowledge of the theories employed during the course, incapability to critical reading of the novels, inappropriate and inaccurate language.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

Texts: literary and visual; videos, power point, movies, TV series.

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Rita Monticelli