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.

English

written