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 deal with the darkest sides of American history.

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.

“THE HORROR, THE HORROR”: REPRESENTING THE DARKEST SIDES OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN US LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The course is entirely taught in English.

The course will analyze texts of US literature and culture that deal with some of the darkest and most and controversial features of American history. The first text will be Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), which tells, through the narrative mode of discovery science fiction, the story of the exploration of a totally “black” world, represented from a blatantly racist perspective that on the other hand hides a series of self-deconstructive mechanisms. In Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 movie adaptation an enormous hotel contains 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). The course will end with the anaylsis of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now (1979), that will be compared to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922): Eliot’s poem, that should have had as epigraph the last world of the ivory trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899) (“The horror, the horror”), describes the catastrophic decadence of Western civilization, and its themes and language echo in Coppola’s movie, explicitly modeled on Conrad’s novella, to narrate the crisis of American conscience produced by the horrors of the Vietnam War.

Primary Texts

(A) Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in Poetry and Tales, The Library of America, New York, 1984, pp. 1003-1182

(A) Stephen King, The Shining (1977), Anchor, New York, 2012, 659 pp

(A) Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980)

(A) T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) – La terra desolata, a cura di Alessandro Serpieri, BUR, Milano, 2010, 219 pp.

(A) Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Secondari Texts

(A) Richard Gray, A Brief History of American Literature, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011, 410 pp.

The course is entirley taught in Englis. Other critical texts (suggested, not required) might be indicated during the course. As for their availability, and for further material that could be useful in writing the critical essay to be presented and discussed at the exam, please write to the teacher.

• Front lessons with students’ participation and debate; workshops.

• 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 texts in the program. At the exam students will have to discuss their essay and answer to two or three questions on the texts not analysed in the essay.

  Criteria: full knowledge of the primary texts (1/3); ability to interpret the representation, in American literature and culture, of the darkest sides of American history (1/3); ability to critically analyze literary texts and organization of critical discourse (1/3).

Italian.

English