Students are expected to possess an adequate level of English to be able to follow lectures, discuss literary topics, make an oral presentation, and write an essay in English. 

Students are also expected to already possess a sound knowledge of English literary history from its origins to the contemporary.

• Teaching will mainly consist in lectures, but class discussion will also be strongly encouraged; the last part of the semester will be devoted to oral reports.
• Elearning page of course: the course page on the elearning platform will be used to share materials (primary and secondary texts; material for oral report and written paper, information about timetables, deadlines, etc...).
• Teacher/student interaction: weekly office hours; email
• Language of course: English

This course consists of two different sections:

Module A: 54 class hours, Narratology at work: exploring tools for narrative analysis.

Module B independent work: list of primary and secondary sources

MODULE A:

The course intends to focus on the study of narrative by fully exploring narratological key concepts and applying them to the analysis and interpretation of some narrative texts, both novels and short stories. Analysed texts will range from the eighteenth century to the contemporary, so as to show how narrative choices may be traced back to the Weltanschauung of the different literary periods, whose cultural norms may either be fulfilled or programmatically subverted. The excursus will also provide an occasion for the illustration of different narrative genres and subgenres.

MODULE B

Module B consists of a list of readings to be contextualized within the panorama of English Literary and Cultural History.

MODULE A

a/ Primary sources

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, London, Penguin 1985.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, London, Penguin 1972.  

Charles Lamb, “The South-Sea House”, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire”, in The Essays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, London, OUP, 1961.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), episode I “Telemachus”, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1998.

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two Birds (1939), London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000.

Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001), London, Anchor Books, 2003.

Edgard Allan Poe, Ligeia, any edition.

Virginia Woolf, The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection, any edition.

b/ Secondary sources

Roberta Ferrari, “‘Dialogue in the Novel: Notes on Fielding’s Joseph Andrews” in A. Bertacca – M. Bertuccelli – S. Bruti (a cura di), Threads in the Complex Fabric of Language, Felici, Pisa 2008, pp. 655-664.

R. Ferrari, “Some Sickly Idiosyncrasy: ‘The South-Sea House’ e ‘Mackerey End in Hertfordshire’ di Charles Lamb”, in R. Ferrari (a c. di), Gli abissi di Alfeo. La dimensione memoriale nella letteratura in inglese, Pisa, ETS, 2003, pp. 69-91.

Martin Scofield, “Edgar Allan Poe”, in The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, Cambridge, CUP, 2006, pp. 31-42.

Laura Winkiel, Modernism. The Basics, London and New York, Routledge, 2017.

Dominic Head, “Virginia Woolf: experiments in genre”, in The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (1992), Cambridge, CUP, 2009, pp. 79-108.

Thomas B. O’Grady, “High Anxiety: O’Brien’s Portrait of the Artist”, Studies in the Novel, Vol. 21, No. 2 (summer 1989), pp. 200-208.

Ferrari, Ian McEwan, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2012 (Chapter on Atonement). 

Theory

David Herman, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 5th edition, London and New York, Routledge, 2016.

Viorica Patea, “The Short Story: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre”, in Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective”, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2012, pp. 1-24.

Further criticism will be suggested during the course

MODULE B

Primary sources:

Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in in P. Salzman, Elizabethan Prose Fiction, O.U.P., World’s Classics.

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, Oxford: OUP, 2008.

W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916" and "Sailing to Byzantium", any edition.

T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land/La terra desolata (1922), introduzione, traduzione e note di Alessandro Serpieri, Milano, Rizzoli, 1982.

T.S.Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; “Ulysses, Order and Myth”; “Hamlet”, any edition.

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, London, Faber & Faber, 1993.

Secondary sources:

Andersen, “Anti-Puritanism, Anti-Popery, and Gallows Rhetoric in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 43-63 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20476837Gozzi, Letture eliotiane, ETS, Pisa.

George Bornstein, "Yeats and Romanticism" and Daniel Albright "Yeats and Modernism", in M. Howes and J. Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats, CUP, 2009, pp. 19-35 and 59-76.

E. Brater, “Playing for Time (and Playing with Time) in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia”, Comparative Drama, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 157-168.

D. Guaspari, “Stoppard’s Arcadia”, The Antioch Review, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 222-238

Literary and cultural Theory:

Peter Barry, Beginning Theory. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Second Edition, Manchester UP, Manchester and New York, 2009.

Students who cannot attend classes will necessarily take an oral exam (Module A + B together), starting from the winter session (January – February 2018).

Module A will be assessed through an evaluation of the oral presentation and of the written paper.

The deadline for the submission of the written paper is the end of February 2018.  Students who intend to take their final oral exam in January 2018 are expected to submit their written paper at least 10 days before the date of the exam. 

Module B will be assessed by an oral examination in English, during which students will be expected to discuss the primary sources by analyzing them from a stylistic, thematic and linguistic point of view, as well as by contextualizing them within their literary period.  

Students are also expected  to be able to delineate and discuss in general terms the development of literary and cultural theory from Structuralism to Post-structuralism and the most recent trends.

It is also expected that students will have  a thorough knowledge of English Literary History from the beginnings to the contemporary. 

http://elearning.humnet.unipi.it/course/view.php?id=1732

INFORMATION ADDRESSED TO LINGTRA STUDENTS

Knowledge

At the end of the course the student will possess a thorough knowledge of :

• narrative genres and subgenres;
• theoretical concepts connected with specific narratological categories such as “distance”, “narrative instance”, “order”, etc.  in narrative texts;
• the cultural and literary background from the 18th to the 21st century;
• the cultural and literary theoretical debate from the early 20th century to the present;
• the major theories in the field of translation studies. 

Assessment criteria of knowledge

Acquired knowledge will be assessed through:

• an oral report in class and a written paper which will verify the acquisition of specific knowledge and understanding of English narrative fiction from the 18th century to the present, as well as the capability to discuss specific narratological issues in context;
• a final oral exam in which students will have to demonstrate a good knowledge of the major theories in the field of translation studies; they will also be expected to discuss different Italian translations of English  texts and to compare them in the light of the various theoretical approaches to translation practice.

Skills

At the end of the course  students will be able to:

• apply advanced methodological and theoretical tools to the analysis of narrative texts;
• read, analyse and report orally on critical or theoretical essays concerning literary and cultural issues variously connected with the central topics of the course;
• contextualize narrative texts within the cultural and literary background from the 18th to the 21st century;
• plan and write an argumentative essay in English on one of the topics of the course;
• gather and interpret relevant data;
• communicate, both orally and in written form, their conclusions, and the knowledge and rationale underpinning them,  in a clear and unambiguous way;
• comment on various aspects of literary texts;
• compare and discuss different translations of literary texts of the English canon. 

Assessment criteria of skills

Students will be required to prepare an oral report in English based on a critical essay dealing with one of the topics of the course. 

Students will also be asked to write a paper in English (2500 to 3000 words) discussing one of the course topics. 

The final oral exam will test the students' capability to compare different translations of canonical literary texts, and to discuss them in the light of the various theoretical approaches to translation practice.  

THE COURSE PROGRAMME FOR LINGTRA STUDENTS DIFFERS ONLY IN MODULE B

MODULE B FOR LINGTRA STUDENTS

Module B centers on the study and comparison of different Italian translations of two masterpieces of English Modernism, and their contextualisation within the most recent theories in translation studies.

Primary sources:

James Joyce, Ulysses,  London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1998, episode I “Telemachus”.

Two among the following Italian translations:

• Ulisse, tr. it. di Giulio De Angelis, Milano, Mondadori, 1960.
• Ulisse, tr. it. di Enrico Terrinoni, Roma, Newton Compton, 2012.
• Ulisse, tr.it. di Gianni Celati, Torino, Einaudi, 2013.

T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land. A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. by Valerie Eliot, London, Faber & Faber, 1971.

Two among the following Italian translations:

•  La terra desolata, in T.S. Eliot, Poesie, pref. e trad. di Roberto Sanesi, Milano, Bompiani, 1961.
• The Waste Land/La terra desolata, introduzione, traduzione e note di Alessandro Serpieri, Milano, Rizzoli, 1982.
• La terra desolata, in T.S. Eliot, La terra desolata e Quattro Quartetti, Traduzione e cura di Angelo Tonelli, Milano, Feltrinelli, 2014.
• La terra desolata, tr. di Erminia Passannanti, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.

Secondary sources:

Alessandro Serpieri, “Introduzione” in T.S. Eliot, La terra desolata, cit., pp. 5-47.

Francesco Gozzi, Fuori del labirinto: per una lettura di Ulysses, Pisa, ETS.

Enrico Terrinoni, “Per un Ulisse democratico”, Tradurre. Pratiche, teorie, Strumenti, n. 3 (2012). URL: http://rivistatradurre.it/2012/11/per-un-ulisse-%E2%80%8Bdemocratico

Translation studies:

Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, London, Routledge, 20053.

Jeremy Munday (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, London and New York, Routledge, 2009.