Proficiency in the English language at the B2 level. Fair knowledge of Anglo-American literature.

The teaching 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; 2. enhancement of the ability to analyze and interpret texts of Anglo-American literature and culture that make use of the fantastic dimension.

B. Theoretical, critical and linguistic skills: 1. enhancement of the ability to critically analyze a literary text; 2. enhancement of the ability to construct written and oral critical discourse.

American Ghosts: The Return of the (Historical) Repressed in US Literature and Culture

The course will be entirely taught in English.

The course will analyze texts of US literature and culture that use the dimension of the fantastic to delve into some of the darkest and most and controversial features of American history. The first text will be Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), the short story that establishes the initial coordinates of the “Gothic architecture” of the haunted house in American literature and culture, suggesting in an ambiguously indirect way, and maybe even unconsciously, that systematically removing the strategies of oppression and marginalization of non-hegemonic “racial”/ethnic and gender identities may lead to the self-destruction of American civilization as a whole. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is almost a re-writing of Poe’s tale in feminist terms, but it also betrays the possible presence of a racist mentality hidden inside the America reform movements that aim at promoting the rights of certain categories of subjects, but not of others (in this case, the members of the Asian migrant community), that are instead considered as a threat to American “progress.” In Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and maybe even more in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie adaptation, the haunted house becomes an enormous hotel containing the ghosts of the historical crimes that have characterized the history first of the British colonization of North America and then of the USA (the theft of native lands and the extermination of “Indians,” the ruthless exploitation and reduction to the condition of non-humans of African Americans through the “peculiar institution” of slavery), but also of the power dynamics inside the traditional patriarchal family, systematically represented by dominant culture as a positive model for the nation as a whole. The course will end with the analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), in which slavery becomes the ghost haunting American identity, on the one hand forcing the African American community to face the heritage of a culture of oppression and dehumanization that produced individual and collective traumas whose overcoming is still arduous and contradictory, and on the other keeping on creating in a part of “white” society suprematist fantasies that contribute to reinforce a systemic racism still alive and kicking.

Required / Adottati (A)

Testi primari / Primary Texts

·      Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), in Poetry and Tales, The Library of America, New York, 1984, pp. 317-336 (available at the Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici – other editions available online)

·      Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1901), in Catherine Golden (ed.), The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper”, The Feminist Press, New York, 1992, pp. 24-42 (available at the Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici – other editions available online)

·      Stephen King, The Shining (1977), Anchor, New York, 2012, 659 pp. (available at the Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici)

·      Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980) – film (any edition)

·      Toni Morrison, Beloved, Plume, New York, 1988, 275 pp. (available at the Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Studi umanistici)

Testi secondari / Secondary Texts

·      Charles L. Crow (ed.), A Companion to American Gothic, Wiley-Blackwell, New York, 2014, pp. 1-28, 71-83, 151-162, 177-188, 353-365, 378-391 (purchase requested to the Biblioteca del 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.

• Front lessons with students’ participation and debate; workshops; co-teaching with international visiting scholars.

• Presentation, at the end of the course or 15 days before the date of the exam, of a critical essay in English (about 7.500 types, spaces included) on one or more of the primary texts in the program. At the exam students will have to discuss their essay and answer to two or three questions on the tradition of the fantastic in Anglo-American literature and culture, on the use of ghosts and haunted houses as metaphors of the strategies of removal of the darkest aspects of American history (and of their failure), on the ways in which the resistance of US “non-hegemonic” groups manage to filter, or even to be more or less openly vindicated, in these representations.

  Criteria: full knowledge of the primary texts (1/3); ability to interpret the representation, in American literature and culture, of the strategies of removal of historical past through the use of the fantastic mode (1/3); ability to critically analyze literary texts and organization of critical discourse (1/3).

  
  

Italian.

English