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Letteratura e cultura anglo-americana I/M
- CFU 6, 9
- Prerequisiti
Capacità di leggere testi letterari e critici in profondità, familiarità con i dizionari etimologici in lingua inglese e in lingua italiana.
- Obiettivi formativi
Il corso si propone di approfondire la conoscenza del primo poeta moderno Walt Whitman, leggendo i suoi testi nel contesto offerto dagli altri due maggiori scrittori americani dell'ottocento, E.A. Poe e E. Dickinson. L'enfasi dell'analisi cadrà sulla loro modernitò e sulla loro influenza in Europa fino ai nostri giorni.
- Programma del corso
E.A. Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson: Nineteenth Century Moderns.
I semester
These three major American authors will be read as masters of modernity and modern forms, and as inspirers of twentieth century European readers and authors. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of its publication, the 1860 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will constitute the main focus of the course. This edition presents features closer to our present than the last, ‘deathbed’, edition of 1892. It registers Walt Whitman’s most daring experiments with the English language, and particularly with multilingual English, with democratic cohesiveness and articulation, with open and yet complex poetic forms, with collage-like textual construction. It also expresses his vision of the poet as the creator of a text that would be the foundation of American democratic culture and man, and of the modern human being. Leaves of Grass will be read in the context of the achievements of the two other major innovators of the nineteenth century: Edgar Allan Poe, the city man whose story “Man of the Crowd” inspired Charles Baudelaire and Walter Beniamin’s flaneur, composer of some of the most important poems in English poetry and the inventor of the detective story as well as the theorizer of artistic composition; Emily Dickinson, the explorer of regions of the mind and of the silences in/ of language.
To better perceive the relevance of these writers in our time, criticism will focus mainly on twentieth century readings of their work by major writers and critics.
Students of Letteratura e cultura IM will read all three authors.
Students of Letteratura e cultura II M will focus on Walt Whitman.
Students attending the course are required to read regularly and to participate in the discussion. During the course the students will be introduced to research problems connected to different editions of the same text and editorial interventions. They will also work on various Italian translations of the chosen texts.
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Testi (A)dottati, (C)onsigliati
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1.
(A)
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (original edition in the Whitman web archive)
Thayer & aldridge
1860
» Pagine/Capitoli: Selected Clusters and Poems
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2.
(A)
Emily Dickinson
Tutte le poesie. a cura di M. Bulgheroni/ or internet edition
Mondadori
1997
» Pagine/Capitoli: selected poems
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3.
(A)
E.A. Poe
"The Man of the Crowd", "The Purloined Letter", "The Philosophy of Composition" "The Raven"
Original edition
1849
» Pagine/Capitoli: 2 short stories, 1 poem, 1 essay
- Altre informazioni / materiali aggiuntivi
Criticism
?Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in Illuminations, ed. and intr. by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, New York, 1968.
?Gregory Eiselein, Introduction to Leaves of Grass 1860, in J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), (see website)
?Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on The Purloined Letter”. (see website)
?D.H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe” e “Whitman”, in Studies in Classic American Literature.
(see website)
?Ruth L. Bohan, “ ‘I Sing the Body Electric’: Isadora Duncan, Whitman and the Dance”, The Cambridge Companion to Whitman, Ezra greenspan, ed. , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
?Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “ A Woman – White: Emily Dickinson’s Yarn of Pearl”, in Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1978.
?Sandra M. Gilbert, “ ‘Now in a Moment I know what I am For’: Rites of Passage in Whitman and Dickinson”, Methodologies of Gender, Atti dell’ XI Convegno Biennale AISNA, Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani, Roma, Herder, 1993, pp. 13-31.
?Cesare Pavese, “Whitman – Poesia del far poesia”, in La letteratura americana e altri saggi, Torino, Einaudi, 1951.
Theoretical texts on Literature and Culture
?Marina Camboni, “Networking Women: A Research Project and a Relational Model of the Cultural Sphere”, in Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890-1939. Towards a Rewriting of Cultural History, ed. by M. Camboni, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma 2004, pp. 1-26.
?Jonathan Culler, Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, London, Routledge, 1992.
Itamar Even-Zohar, “Laws of Cultural Interference” in Papers in Culture research 2005.
(see website)
?Toril Moi, Sexual-textual Politcs: Feminist Literary Theory, London, Routledge, 1995.
- Metodi didattici
- lezione frontale lavoro individuale guidato
- Modalità di valutazione
- scritto orale Students of IM are required to write 2 short papers on Poe and Dickinson (1500 words) and an essay of 3000 words on Whitman in English. IIM on Whitman only.
- Lingue, oltre all'italiano, che possono essere utilizzate per l'attività didattica
English
- Lingue, oltre all'italiano, che si intende utilizzare per la valutazione
English
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