CINEMA IN ENGLISH

Upon successful completion of this course, students will hopefully be able to critically read novels and films, as well as to write a paper with coherent arguments and an analytic interpretation. They will also be encouraged to draw connections between their own experiences of cinema and film theory. In addition, at the end of this course students should have attained an awareness of the Victorian Age’s most relevant cultural and social contexts, of the problems of gender and class, and finally of the Victorian Age’s legacy to contemporary culture and film.
Students are also encouraged to actively participate in classroom discussions in order to articulate and defend positions, consider different points of view, and evaluate evidence.
This English-taught course is part of the JOINT DEGREE IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES, an international educational programme, which offers motivated students the opportunity to attend some courses at a foreign partner university.

Upon successful completion of this course, students are expected:

1) to provide an overview of the Victorian Age and of the Victorian novel;
2) to explain and define Victorianism and American Transcendentalism in their social-historical, and philosophical contexts;
3) to explain and describe the major conventions of the Victorian novel;
4) to identify the major forms of the Victorian novel;
5) to discuss problems of gender, class and empire in the Victorian Novel;
6) to identify the ways in which scientific discoveries and political thought influenced women’s status in society.

Students are required to possess a good degree of proficiency in both written and spoken English.
They are also expected to have some familiarity with the Victorian Age as well as with the core stylistic features of Postmodernism.

Title: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cinema

This module deals with the phenomenon of film adaptation of nineteenth and twentieth century literary classics and with the analysis of Campion’s film which combines Emily Brontë’s dark Romanticism and D.H. Lawrence’s intense eroticism.
After an introductory unit designed to investigate the main theories and methods of cinematic adaptation, this module will focus on a close reading and detailed analysis of the three novels and of the four films, which are characterised by an equally pervasive emphasis on the quest for romantic love, personal freedom, and self-fulfilment. Prevailing views on women, class prejudice and rigid social stratification in relation to gender, sexual politics, and marriage will be also investigated. By considering Reisz’s and Pinter’s superb adaptation of Fowles’s historiographic meta-fiction, other issues such as self-reflexive writing, authorial omniscience, open-endedness, postmodernist theory, and practice will be also examined.

Novels
Louisa May Alcott, LITTLE WOMEN (1868)
Henry James, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881)
John Fowles, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1969)

FILMS
Jane Campion, THE PIANO (1993)
Gillian Armstrong, LITTLE WOMEN (1994)
Jane Campion, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996)
Karel Reisz, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981)

Secondary Readings:

“Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, ed. by D. Cartmell and I. Whelehan, London: New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-28.

“Little Women”, ed. by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 554-83;

M. Bell, “Isabel Archer and the Affronting of Plot”, in “Meaning in Henry James", Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 80-122;

J. Acheson, “John Fowles”, London: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 1-9 (Introduction); pp. 33-47;

P. Cooper, "The Fictions of John Fowles”, Ottawa, Paris: University of Ottawa Press, 1991, pp. 103-141.

S. Loveday, “The Romances of John Fowles”, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp. 48-81.

Additional readings for non-attending students:

“Little Women”, ed. by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 593-623;

J. Fetterley, “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War”, Feminist Studies, Summer 1979, pp. 369-83;

“J. Campion’s the Piano” ed. by H. Margolis, Cambridge University Press, 2000;

“New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady”, ed. Joel Porte, Cambridge University Press, 1990;

S. Mahmoud, “John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism”, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.

Students will be assessed by a 2-hours final written exam in English consisting of:

1) one open question;
2) a critical analysis of three passages drawn from the novels indicated in the primary sources;
3) a short translation from English into Italian.

Non-native English speakers are not requested to do the translation, but to write a critical analysis of the given passage.

Front lectures, class discussions, and occasional lectures by renowned scholars.
The course is taught in English

English

Class attendance is not mandatory but is highly recommended.
Ideally, students should read the novels indicated in the syllabus before the beginning of the course in order to increase their participation in class discussions
As far as the examination is concerned, make sure that your answers are structured logically, that you write clearly and legibly, paying attention to grammar, spelling and punctuation. The level of linguistic knowledge will be also part of the assessment. The use of bilingual dictionaries in the examination is prohibited.

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