Proficiency in the English language at the advanced level C1. Good knowledge of Anglo-American literature and culture.

The course aims at making the students acquire the following professional skills:

A. Knowledge of culture: 1. enhancement of knowledge of specific aspects of Anglo-American literature and culture; 2. enhancement of the ability to analyze and interpret the representations of gender identities in Anglo-American migrant literatures.

B. Theoretical, critical and linguistic skills: 1. specialized enhancement of the ability to critically analyze a literary text; 2. specialized enhancement of the ability to construct written and oral critical discourse; 3. specialized enhancement of the ability to translate literary texts from American English to Italian.

MOVING GENDERS: MIGRATIONS AND INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The course is entirely taught in English.

The course will deal with a series of texts of American literature which represent how gender identities are built in subjects belonging to migrant communities.

The first object of study will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), which depicts the beginning of the British colonization of North America focusing on the figure of Hester Prynne, a British woman who migrates to Massachusetts and falls victim to the system of patriarchal power dominating 17th-century Puritan culture. The declination of gender identity and belonging to a migrant community (in this case, Jewish-American) is central also in Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” (1883) and in Anzia Yezierska’s autobiographical story “America and I” (1923), while in John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939) the male chauvinist mentality of an Italian American writes must face the irreducibility to gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes of the chicana woman he is in love with. Reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) will help investigate the contradiction of the male identity of a non-born in the USA protagonist, who on the other hand is not the typical migrant “out of necessity,” but a professor of French literature born in France, who imagines himself as a “prey” to the perverse “charm” of a typically “American” teen-age girl. The course will end with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), a collection of “vignettes” that eventually becomes a novel and where gender identities and non-belonging to the dominant community produce unpredictable slippages of subjectivity, but of course in totally different directions than those drawn in Nabokov’s novel.

Some lessons will include workshops in literary translation from American English to Italian.

The program for the students that have to take the exam only for 6 CFU does not include The House on Mango Street.

Required (Adottati / A)

Primary Texts

·      Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, xlviii-302 pp. (available at the Biblioteca Statale – other editions available online)

·      Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883) – 1 p. (any online edition)

·      Anzia Yezierska, “America and I” (1923) – 10 pp. ca. (any online edition)

·      John Fante, Ask the Dust (1949), Canongate, Edinburgh, 2002, ix-198 pp. (available at the Library of Studi umanistici)

·      Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955), Penguin, London, 1995, 331 pp. (available at the Library of Studi umanistici)

·      Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), Bloomsbury, London, 2004, 110 pp. (available at the Library of Studi umanistici)

Secondary Texts

·      Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Lute, San Francisco, 1987, pp. 1-98 (available at the Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici)

·      Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Oxford Universirty Press, Oxford, 1986, xiii-294 pp. (available at the Library of the Dipartimento di Studi umanistici)

Suggested (Consigliati / C)

Other critical texts might be indicated during the course. As for their availability, and for further material that could be useful for the writing of the critical essay to be presented and discussed at the exam, please write to the teacher.

The course is entirely taught in English. Italian will be used only when translating the primary texts during the translation workshops.

• Front lessons with students’ participation and debate; workshops; translation drills; presentations, by the students, of analyses of critical texts on the primary texts; co-teaching with international visiting scholar.

• Presentation, at the end of the course or 15 days before the date of the exam, of a paper in English (10,000 types) on a topic to be chosen with the teacher + discussion of the paper and oral interview on the rest of the program, with a translation test from American English to Italian.

  Criteria: knowledge of the representations of the construction of gender identity in the literature of American migrations (1/3); ability to critically analyze the language of literary texts, and to translate American literary texts into Italian (1/3); organization of written and oral critical discourse (1/3).

The course is entirely taught in English, but Italian will be used for the translation exercises on the primary texts.

English