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

This course consists of two different sections:

Module A: 54 class hours, Alive and Kicking: Representations of the Author in Contemporary Literature. 

Module B independent work: list of primary and secondary sources

MODULE A: Alive and Kicking: Representations of the Author in Contemporary Literature

The course intends to illustrate a phenomenon which, though present in literature since its very beginnings, has become more and more frequent in the last century, starting with Modernism and its insistent focus on art and the artist. The author as character appears consistently in contemporary fiction, and the topos also sporadically surfaces in drama, its recurrence witnessing the centrality of the discourse on authorship, on the role of artists and their engagement with reality, as well as on their complex relationship with their readership. The chosen works, belonging to different moments in the long 20th century, are intended to provide a wide enough catalogue of the different manifestations of the “author as character” theme as to both phenomenology and functions. Text analysis will also allow the focalization on some specific theoretical and methodological points, from narratological issues to the semiotics of the theatre.

MODULE A

a/ Primary sources

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), episode IX “Scylla and Charybdis”, Penguin Modern Classics, 1998.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando, London, Penguin 2000. Ed. with an Introduction by Sandra Gilbert.

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

Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, London, Faber & Faber, 1982.

— with Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love. A Screenplay, Miramax 1999.

A.S. Byatt, “The Conjugal Angel”, in Angels and Insects (1992), London, Vintage, 1994.

Ian McEwan, Atonement, any edition.

b/ Secondary sources

Lois Feuer, “Joyce the Postmodern: Shakespeare as Character in Ulysses”, in Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, The Author as Character: Representing Historical Characters in Western Literature, Cranbury, London, Mississauga, Associated UP, 1999, pp. 167-180.

Ann Ronchetti, The Artist, Society and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Novels, New York, Routledge, 2004: “Introduction”, pp. 1-15 and “Orlando”, pp. 81-89.

Enrico Terrinoni, James Joyce e la fine del romanzo, Roma, Carocci, 2015.

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.

Christien Franken, “The Gender of Mourning: A.S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugal Angel’ and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam”, in Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, The Author as Character, cit., pp. 243-252.

Brian Finney, “Briony's Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan's Atonement", Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3, (Winter, 2004), pp. 68-82

R. Ferrari, Ian McEwan, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2012. 

Further criticism will be suggested during the course

MODULE B

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

Primary sources:

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

Henry Fielding, The Author’s Farce, ed. by Charles B. Woods, London, Arnold, 1967.

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.

Penelope Lively, A House Unlocked, London, Penguin, 2001.

Secondary sources:

L. 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/20476837

Thomas Keymer, “Fielding’s Theatrical Career”, in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding, CUP, 2007, pp. 17-37.

F. Gozzi, 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.

P. Cecconi, Seeing Through Places and Spaces: geografie contemporanee della scrittura del sé, Bologna, Emi 2015. 

Literary history/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 2017).

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 2017.  Students who intend to take their final oral exam in January 2017 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.