30649 - English Literature 2 (2nd cycle)

Learning outcomes

Students will have a deep knowledge of Modern British Literature, with particular regard to the relationships between literary texts and history, language and the arts. They will be able to use critical methodologies to read and analyze literary texts.

Course contents

Truth is Beauty?

 

Starting from "Ode on a Grecian Urn", the concept of beauty, its relationships with truth, the shapes it takes and the attempts to define it will be analysed from Romanticism to Modernism, focusing on the Aesthetic Movement in England and Oscar Wilde.

Readings/Bibliography

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

John Keats, Selection from his letters

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: “Preface” e “Conclusion”

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying or The Critic as Artist

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Critical texts

R.V. Johnson, Aestheticism, London, Methuen, 1969, pp. 149 and 72-86

 

P. Ackroyd, “Introduction”, in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, Penguin, 1985

B. Charlesworth, “Oscar Wilde”, in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York, Norton, 1988

L. Danson, “Wilde as critic and theorist”, in P. Raby, ed. by, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 80-95

R. Ellmann, “Oscar Wilde at Oxford”, in Four Dubliners, New York, Braziller, 1988

R. Mighall, “Introduction”, in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, London, Penguin, 2003

I. Murray, “Introduction”, in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oxford, Oxford U.P., 1981

J.P. Riquelme, “Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic Gothic”, in O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, New York, Norton, 2007

Teaching methods

Lectures and conferences.

Assessment methods

Erasmus or Overseas students could sit the exam as the Italian students or write an essay (about 10-15 pages), whose topic must be approved by the teacher.

Office hours

See the website of Gino Scatasta