At the end of the course, students will have an acquaintance with the key points of the historical and cultural background to modern and contemporary English literature. In light of the course’s thematic proposal, they will also have acquired transdisciplinary methods for the analysis of literary texts, with specific reference to the interrelations among literature, the arts and the human sciences.
None
The prevailing form of teaching will be the lecture format, with occasions for students to intervene in discussions in the classroom.
Oral exam. There will be a written test at the end of the course for regular attenders.
The skills requested are:
1) Critical readings of the primary texts proposed by the course;
2) Knowledge of the cultural and literary background to the texts proposed;
3) Acquisition of interdisciplinary methods in the analysis of literary texts.
The optional written test will last two hours and provides a choice of three questions out of five on the contents of lessons; it will include also an open question that invites students to apply the methods and skills acquired to a text of their choice which is not on the syllabus. Each question will be graded from 6 to 10 points, taking into account: 1) the relevance of the answer to any given question; 2) the student’s ability to get the gist of an argument and/or to provide interdisciplinary connections 3) linguistic accuracy. No prior registration is required to take the test, and its results may be registered or integrated by further discussion at an oral exam, which does require on-line registration.
The course examines some key moments in English literary culture by way of the paradigm of the body, exploring its cultural, political, artistic and performative metamorphoses at the crossroads of tradition and the contemporary.The first part is given over to “politics” and concentrates on the body’s political and social mise-en-scène, and on the tension between norm and transgression that underlies the theatre of power. The genres of the Elizabethan tragedy, the crime novel and the Gothic will be illustrated by a range of literary, cinematic, artistic and historical materials that sustain an on-going dialogue amongst different fields of knowledge and of representations of the body from the Early-Modern period to today. The second part explores the “poetics” of bodiliness as a creative act, as prosthesis and as a malleable fabric. This poetics, which arose as heterodox forms in the nineteenth century, will be investigated in its historical relations with the notion of subjectivity and with the arts, as well as in its ghostly return as body art, and in contemporary theory and fashion. Given its transdiciplinary character, the course is aimed at students interested in a cultural and comparative study of English literature.
The program is the same for attenders and non-attenders. Students are invited to consult the e-learning area of the course for communication and relevant materials. Eramus students and students with PDP o PEI are advised to get in touch with the teacher at the beginning of the course.
