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 Regency and the Victorian Age’s most relevant cultural and social contexts, of the problems of gender and class, of the propriety laws 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.

1) To be familiar with the development of the novel during the Regency and the Victorian Age;
2) to be familiar with the major theories of film adaptation;
3) to define Victorianism and American Transcendentalism in their social-historical, and philosophical contexts;
4) to explain and describe the major conventions of the Regency and Victorian novel;
5) to discuss problems of gender, class, property and marriage;
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 core stylistic features of the Regency Era, Victorianism, and 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 Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning 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 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 inheritance laws, 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
Jane Austen, SENSE AND SENSIBILTIY (1811)
Louisa May Alcott, LITTLE WOMEN (1868)
John Fowles, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1969)

Films
Ang Lee, SENSE AND SENSIBILTIY (1995)
Jane Campion, THE PIANO (1993)
Gillian Armstrong, LITTLE WOMEN (1994)
Karel Reisz, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1981)

Secondary Readings

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006, pp. 1-77.
“Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, ed. by D. Cartmell and I. Whelehan, London: New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-28.
Tanner, Tony. "Jane Austen", London: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 73-102.
Todd, Janet. "Jane Austen in Context", The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.
“Little Women”, ed. by Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein, A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 554-83;
K. Hollinger and T. Winterhalter, ‘A Feminist Romance: Adapting Little Women to the Screen’
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Vol. 18, No. 2 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 173-192.
Acheson, James, “John Fowles”, London: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 1-9 (Introduction); pp. 33-47;
Cooper, Pamela, "The Fictions of John Fowles”, Ottawa, Paris: University of Ottawa Press, 1991, pp. 103-141.
Loveday, Simon, “The Romances of John Fowles”, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp. 48-81.

Additional readings for non-attending students

Tanner, Tony. Jane Austen, London: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 1-42 (“Introduction”).
“The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen”, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 12-21; 33-48.
"Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Contemporary Critical Essays", ed. by R. Clark, St. Martin’s Press, 1994, pp. 1-23; pp. 26-36; pp. 53-65.
Y. Gooneratne, Jane Austen, Cambridge, CUP, 1970, pp. 63-80
“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.
S. Mahmoud, “John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism”, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.

Students will be assessed by an hour and a half final exam in English consisting of:

1) one open-ended 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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