ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE I
Students will gain up to date critical tools in both literary criticism and US war literature.
"Come Back with Your Shield or On It".
20th century US literary representations of war and homecoming.
Primary Sources:
Willa Cather - One of Ours (1923)
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: a Duty-Dance With Death (1969).
Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried – (1990), selected chapters.
Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds (2012)
Viet Than Nguyen - The Refugees (2017), selected chapters.
Students can choose their edition (in English!)
Secondary Sources:
- Scurati, Antonio, “Il sanguinoso desiderio di luce. Le forme della guerra come invenzione letteraria”, in Un fascino osceno. Guerra e violenza nella letteratura e nel cinema, edited by Stefano Rosso. Verona: Ombre corte, 2006, pp. 17-29.
- Mariani, Giorgio, “Anti-War? Notes on a Ghostly Concept” in Waging War on War. Peaefighting in American Literature. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 3-30.
- Mariani, Giorgio, “Gli Stati Uniti e il complesso militare-letterario. Un'introduzione alla letteratura americana sulle guerre del nuovo millennio”, in Ácoma 11 (autumn 2016), pp. 123-153.
- Rosso, Stefano, “Dalla guerra alla pace: Tim O'Brien”, in Musi gialli e Berretti verdi. Narrazioni Usa sulla Guerra del Vietnam. Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2003, pp. 119-139.
- Romero, Federico, "La Guerra Fredda: un'epoca nella storia degli Stati Uniti", in Ácoma 7 (Spring 1996), pp. 28-37.
- Botta, Enrico, "Dal Mar Egeo all'Oceano Atlantico: la saga epica di 300 e la nascita dell'impero americano, Ácoma 9 (Fall 2015), pp. 29-40.
See the detailed program below
Regular lessons, class presentations, individual research on specific topics.
The final exam will be composed of two parts: the first part implies the writing of a paper in English (10.000 to 15.000 types) on a topic that was previously decided with the instructor. The paper must be turned in one week before the oral examination.
The second part of the examination consists of an oral exam which will be in English. the oral will start from the paper and will be composed of 3-5 questions on the primary texts, on the critical bibliography, and on the combined approaches of traditional literary criticism and war literature. The final exam will assess: the student's knowledge of the primary texts, of their formal structure and symbolic language; the knowledge of the critical and methodological texts, as well as the student's ability to effectively employ and apply these approaches; the student's ability to integrate the different critical perspectives and subject areas of the course; the student's ability of elaborate personal insights into the fields and texts examined in class.
The grading scale goes from 1 to 30 cum laude (excellent). The exam is graded: excellent 30 cum laude-30; very good (27-29); good (24-26), fair (21 -23), sufficient (18-22), insufficient (17 or below).
Class and the final exam will be held in English. All textbooks are available at the university library, in bookshops or on the internet for some of them.
Check office hours are indicated on the department website.