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 critical representations of the ideologies and mythologies of the “American Dream.”

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.

DREAMING THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: COUNTER-NARRATIVES OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

The course, entirely taught in English, will examine a series of texts of American literature and culture which critically represent and deconstruct the ideologies of the “American Dream”.

The first object of study will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), that portrays the origins of Anglo-American civilization as the reversal of the utopian “New Beginning,” starting from the very first pages of the romance, which denounce the stark contrast between the dream of creating a new Paradise on Earth and the actual reality of a society dominated from the very beginning by the repressive practices iconically represented by the red badge of shame the protagonist, Hester Prynne, is condemned to bear on her breast for having committed the sin/crime of adultery. Equally interpretable as the reversed image of the myth of a new virgin land – founded with the establishment of the first British colony in North America, Virginia – that if the South of the USA becomes the dream of a new aristocracy, the experience of African American slavery is told by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), in which the life in the New World of those who had been forcibly deported across the Atlantic Ocean seems not the dream of a new birth (the ideal of so many “voluntary” migrant subjects in America), but the nightmare of social death. Among the dreams of rebirth, in the 20th century the Italian Americans’ has a central role: but it soon reveals itself, in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), an ironically tragic inversion of the resurrection par excellence, because the father of the teenage protagonist dies on Good Friday, buried under the edifice he is building at to gain what he needs to build his dream, that of a house of his own – his death does not imply a rebirth, but the sinking into the nightmare of the most ferocious exploitation for his son Paul, who must take his place at the worksite. For the Native American community too the “American Dream” translates into a nightmare, even after the end of the most violent phase of the expropriation of Indian lands by the whites, in the post-World War II USA in which Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) is set: the novels revolves around the search of some rebirth by the mixed-blood Tayo, traumatized both by the contingent experience of the war and by the structural nightmare of not being recognized as a legitimate member either by white or Native society. The course will conclude with the analysis of the movie Civil War (2024) by Alex Garland, prefiguration of a future soon to come in which the “American Dream” will explode once and forever.

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 Ceremony.

Primary Texts

(A) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, xlviii-302 pp.

(A) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Penguin, New York, 1986, 159 pp

(A) Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939), Signet Classics, New York, 1993, xviii-236 pp.

(A) Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Penguin, London, 1986, 262 pp.

(A) Alex Garland, Civil War (2024)

Secondary Texts

(A) Paul, Heike, The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, Transcript, Bielefeld, 2014, 450 pp.

The course is entirely taught in English. 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; translation drills; presentations, by the students, of analyses of critical texts on the primary texts; co-teaching with an 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 critical representation and deconstruction of the “American Dream” in texts of American literature and culture (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).

Italian.

English