ENGLISH LITERATURE

Upon successful completion of this course, students will hopefully be able to critically read the texts indicated in the reading list and to write a paper with coherent and analytic arguments. 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, as well as an understanding of the experimentation of English Modernism and of its dominant voices.
Students are 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 different genres and narrative techniques deployed in the novels by Austen, Brontë, and Gaskell;
2) To be familiar with the major characteristics of Modernism in Virgini Woolf's novel (interior monologue, stream of consciousness technique, narrative voice, free indirect speech, etc.);
3) To define Victorianism and Modernism in their social-historical and philosophical contexts;
4) To define the major conventions of the Victorian novel as well as the formal innovations of the modernist novel;
5) To discuss problems of gender, class, property and marriage, as well as the response to the devastating trauma of World War I;
6) To identify the ways in which scientific discoveries and specific historical circumstance 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, of Victorianism, and of Modernism.

The Evolution of the Novel from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf

This course traces the development of the realist novel from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by analysing the works by four writers who are among the most influential in the Western literary canon. Though written in different times and style, all these works challenge in varying degrees patriarchal society, economics, and traditional gender roles. The quest for love and self-fulfilment is often accompanied by the fear of confinement and mental illness. The emphasis on the education of the self, emerging from the interplay between social and psychological forces, as well as from the opposition between passion and reason, permeates "Sense and Sensibility" and "Jane Eyre", while "Mrs. Dalloway" showcases not just the disillusionment with reality at the heart of "Cousin Phillis", but the psychological demise of those who witnessed the World War I.

Jane Austen, SENSE AND SENSIBILTIY (1811)
Charlotte Brontë, JANE EYRE (1847)
Elizabeth Gaskell, COUSIN PHILLIS (1864)
Virginia Woolf, MRS DALLOWAY (1925)

Secondary Readings

T. TANNER. "Jane Austen", London: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 73-102.
R.P. IRVINE, ”Jane Austen”, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp. 48-56.
A. LEIGHTON, ‘Sense and Silences’ in “Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice”, ed. R. Clark, London: Palgrave, 1994, pp. 53-65.
P. BOUMELHA, “Charlotte Bronte”, New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, pp. 58-77.
A.E.DYSON, ‘Introduction’ in “Jane Eyre and Villette”, ed. A.E.Dyson, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983, pp. 13-40.
W. GERIN, “Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography”, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 231-239.
D. LODGE, ‘Virginia Woolf’, in “Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse”, New Casebooks, ed. S. Reid, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, Red Globe Press, 1993, pp. 23- 32.
J. HILLIS MILLER, ‘Mrs Dalloway: Repetition as Raising of the Dead’, in “Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse”, New Casebooks, ed. S. Reid, Red Globe Press, 1993, pp.45-55.
M. WHITWORTH, ‘Virginia Wollf and modernism, in “The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf”, ed. S. Roe and S. Sellers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 146-163.

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

1) two open-ended questions;
2) two 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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