paolo.simonetti@uniroma1.it's picture

Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Americane III: Second Semester

Classes will begin Feb. 26 in the same classroom and at the same time as the first semester:
Mondays from 8 to 10 am in classroom T01
Fridays from 8 to 10 am in classroom T01

 

Corsi di letteratura angloamericana (laurea triennale) secondo e terzo anno (a.a. 2023-24) 

Anglo-American Literature courses (BA), second and third year (academic year 2023-24) + first year "Teatro, Cinema, Media"

 

Gli studenti interessati a seguire (anche da non frequentanti) l'insegnamento di laurea triennale in Lingue e letterature angloamericane II (6 CFU), "Letters & Mystery" (valido anche come insegnamento di Letteratura e cultura anglo-americana per il corso di laurea "Teatro, Cinema, Media"), devono necessariamente iscriversi alla pagina Classroom del corso (codice hp7wt7h) dove nelle prossime settimane verranno inserite indicazioni riguardo gli orari delle lezioni, il syllabus e un link ai testi critici di riferimento.

- Le lezioni inizieranno lunedì 2 ottobre

Students interested in taking (even without attending classes, as "studenti non frequentanti") the BA course in Anglo-American Literature II (6 CFU), "Letters & Mystery," (also valid as "Letteratura e cultura anglo-americana" for the "Teatro, Cinema, Media" curriculum) must necessarily register on the course's Classroom page (code hp7wt7h) where instructions regarding class schedules, syllabus, and links to critical reference texts will be posted in the coming weeks.  

- Classes will begin on Monday, October 2.

 

Gli studenti interessati a seguire (anche da non frequentanti) il corso di laurea triennale in Lingue e letterature angloamericane III (12 CFU), "War & Peace in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction," devono necessariamente iscriversi alla pagina Classroom del corso (codice xakgiyw) dove nelle prossime settimane verranno inserite indicazioni riguardo gli orari delle lezioni, il syllabus e un link ai testi critici di riferimento.

- Le lezioni inizieranno lunedì 2 ottobre.

Students interested in taking (even without attending classes, as "studenti non frequentanti") the BA course in Anglo-American Literature III (12 CFU), "War & Peace in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction," must necessarily register on the course's Classroom page (code xakgiyw) where instructions regarding class schedules, syllabus, and links to critical reference texts will be posted in the coming weeks.

- Classes will begin on Monday, October 2.

 

Richieste tesi di laurea/Thesis request

Si avvisano gli studenti interessati a laurearsi con me in letteratura americana che, nonostante finora abbia cercato il più possibile di dare ampia disponibilità a tutti, purtroppo non potrò soddisfare tutte le richieste, dato che per le prossime sessioni  ho già accettato di fare da relatore a più tesi di laurea di quante sia umanamente possibile seguire (senza contare i disagi dovuti ai vari slittamenti, le misteriose "sparizioni" di studenti e le loro magiche riapparizioni, i ritardi dovuti a esami non sostenuti o non superati, impedimenti vari, dimenticanze, ecc.). 

Per questo motivo sarò costretto a prendere in considerazione (sempre previa disponibilità) solo le richieste di chi ha sostenuto almeno tre esami di letteratura americana (triennale) o due esami di American Literature (magistrale). Vi prego di non chiedermi la tesi se non avete triennalizzato (o biennalizzato in magistrale) la materia. La prima sessione disponibile è marzo 2024.

Grazie per la comprensione e la collaborazione. 

---

Students interested in writing a thesis in American literature with me as an advisor should know that, though so far I have tried as much as possible to be available for everyone, I have already agreed to follow more theses than is humanly possible to handle (without counting the various delays, mysterious "disappearances" and "reappearances" of students, delays due to exams not taken or failed, other impediments, etc.).

Therefore, from now on, I will be forced to consider only requests from students who have taken at least three American literature exams (BA) or two American literature exams (MA). Please do not ask me to be your thesis advisor if you do not have this prerequisite. The first available session is March 2024.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Course Code Year Course - Attendance Bulletin board
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE II 1026079 2023/2024

Letters & Mystery:

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature

 

The course (6 CFU) is taught in the first semester and functions as an introduction to nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature, from the "American Renaissance" to the Gilded Age. The focus is on the literary and metafictional dimension as a privileged site of detection, in which the reader must become a detective in order to penetrate the mysteries of the text. After an examination of the cultural-historical context of the mid-nineteenth century, we will proceed with the reading of some writings by Poe - considered the initiator of the modern detective story - and then dwell on the works of central authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, privileging the investigative and metafictional junctures of some of their seminal texts.

 

Goals:

Understanding a literary text through close reading, textual analysis, and knowledge of the historical context of reference. Interpretation of textual linguistic, thematic, and formal macrostructures with the aim of making autonomous interpretations and judgments, including reflections on social, scientific, or ethical issues related to the texts and historical period. Development of communication skills aimed at rigorously discussing specific ideas, problems, and arguments with specialist and non-specialist interlocutors.  

 

Basic knowledge of early Anglo-American literature is preferred, as well as proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

Evaluation:

The oral exam (either in English and Italian or exclusively in English) will be useful to verify the students’ knowledge of the authors and the texts studied, as well as the notions acquired. Above all, it will be important to verify the students' ability to develop a critical-analytical discourse on the texts studied through a "close reading" of some significant passages and by highlighting intertextual links between different authors and contexts.

 

First question: the student reads in English a passage selected by the teacher from the texts studied in class; the student comments in English on the passage just read, provides some background information on the historical and cultural context in which it was written, and comments on the poetics of the author, before moving on to a stylistic and structural analysis of the passage and the text from which it is taken. The student then answers two more questions on other texts in the syllabus.

 

Primary Texts:

  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841); “The Purloined Letter” (1845); “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846).
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Edition.
  • Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Editions (Melville's Short Novels) or Tales, Poems and Other Writings (edited by John Bryant).
  • Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Edition or Penguin Classics.

Critical bibliography

(partially provided by the teacher):

On American Renaissance:

  • Mario Corona, “American Renaissance (1941): un’invenzione storiografica”, in Un rinascimento impossibile. Letteratura, politica e sessualità nell’opera di Francis Otto Matthiessen, Ombre Corte, Verona 2007, pp. 122-150.
  • Sharon M. Harris, “Whose Renaissance? Women Writers in the Era of the American Renaissance”, in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 49, n. 1-2 (2003), pp. 59-80.
  • Richard Gray, “Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800-1865”, in A Brief History of American Literature, Wiley Blackwell, 2011, pp. 115-158.

On detective fiction:

  • Antoine Dechene, Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Especially chapter 1: “Introduction” e Chapter 2: “From the Metaphysical Detective Story to the Metacognitive Mystery Tale”.

On Edgar Allan Poe:

  • Ugo Rubeo, Genio in bilico. Testo, contesto e intertesto in Edgar Allan Poe, Mimesis, Roma 2021. Especially chapter 1 “Edgar Allan Poe: un genio in bilico” (pp. 11-24), 2 “La poesia e i saggi sulla versificazione” (pp. 25- 59) e 5 “I racconti della maturità” (pp. 117-150).
  • John Gruesser, “Never Bet the Detective (or His Creator) Your Head: Character Rivalry, Authorial Sleight of Hand, and Generic Fluidity in Detective Fiction”, in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 9, n. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 5-23.
  • Paul Hurh, “‘The Creative and the Resolvent’: The Origins of Poe’s Analytical Method”, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 66, n. 4 (March 2012), pp. 466-493.

On Nathaniel Hawthorne:

  • Valerio De Angelis, La prima lettera. Miti dell’origine in The Scarlet Letter di Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lozzi & Ross, Roma 2001. Specialmente il capitolo 1: “An American Re-Naissance”, pp. 15-34.
  • Sacvan Bercovitch, “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter”, in New Literary History, vol. 19, n. 3 (Spring 1988), pp. 629-654. (Included in the Norton Edition of the novel)
  • Millicent Bell, “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter”, in The Massachusetts Review, vol. 23, n. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 9-26. (Included in the Norton Edition of the novel).
  • Nina Baym, “Revisiting Hawthorne’s Feminism”, in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 30, (Spring & Fall 2004), pp. 32-55. (Included in the Norton edition of the novel).

On Herman Melville:

  • Giorgio Mariani, Leggere Melville, Carocci, Roma 2013. Specialmente capitolo 1: “Herman Melville autore americano e globale”, capitolo 3: “Moby-Dick: il gran libro di Ishmael” e capitolo 4: “Da Pierre a Il truffatore di fiducia”).
  • Anna Scacchi, A una voce sola. Il racconto della storia in Benito Cereno, Lozzi & Rossi, Roma 2000. Specialmente capitolo 1: “Dal grigio al bianco e nero” e capitolo 2: “La vera storia della San Dominick”.
  • Ruth B. Mandel, “The Two Mystery Stories in ‘Benito Cereno’”, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 14, n. 4 (Winter 1973), pp. 631-642.
  • Paolo Simonetti, “Silence is the Only Voice: Le Lettere a Hawthorne di Herman Melville e la scoperta di una nuova voce femminile”, in LEA. Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, vol. 9 (2020), pp. 1-12.

On Mark Twain:

  • Cinzia Schiavini, Leggere Twain, Carocci, Roma 2013. Especially chapter 3: “Il ritorno al Grande Fiume”.
  • Malcolm Bradbury, “Introduction” to Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Penguin, 1969, pp. 7- 44.
  • John S. Whitley, “Pudd’nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection”, in Journal of American Studies, vol. 21, n. 1 (April 1987), pp. 55-70.
  • Ann M. Ryan, “Standing in Some True Relation: Mark Twain Visits ‘The Custom House’”, in The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 15, n. 1 (2017), pp. 145-161.

The course alternates traditional lecture-style lessons (where the teacher will provide the historical context and the authors' background) with sessions involving active participation by students through presentations and discussions in class.

 

Attendance, though not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

Non-attending students, in addition to reading very carefully the primary texts in  English, should read ALL critical texts indicated in the bibliography and demonstrate familiarity with nineteenth-century American literature through a detailed study of the chapter in Richard Gray's textbook indicated in the bibliography.

LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE III 1032148 2023/2024

War and “Peace” in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

This 12 CFU course, taught over two semesters, offers a panoramic look at twentieth-century American fiction through a number of works that reflect on the war/peace dichotomy. The first part of the course will be devoted to three novels that respectively address the Civil War (Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, 1895), World War I (Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, 1929), and World War II (Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969) through narrative techniques and strategies typical of naturalism (Crane), modernism (Hemingway) and sci-fi postmodernism (Vonnegut). The second part of the course will focus on scenarios of war and violence proposed in the latter part of the twentieth century through hybrid literary genres, such as the episodic narrative/fictional memoir (Tim O'Brien’s The Things They Carried, 1990), magic realism and neo-slave narratives (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 1987), and postmemorial graphic novel (Art Spiegelman’s Maus, 1980-1991).

 

Goals:

Refinement of knowledge and ability to comprehend mid-advanced literary texts through close reading, textual analysis, and knowledge of the main trends of interpretation (state of the art). Development of mature and autonomous critical reflection (making judgements) on the linguistic and stylistic macro-structures of the text reached through the study of critical bibliography as well as through autonomous reflections and class discussions. Ability to organize and communicate these reflections (communication skills) through the writing of a number of abstracts to be presented in class and possibly developed into a final paper.

 

Basic knowledge of Anglo-American literature from its origins to the second half of the nineteenth century is preferred, as well as proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

Evaluation:

The oral exam (either in English and Italian or exclusively in English) will be useful to verify the students’ knowledge of the authors and the texts studied, as well as the notions acquired. Above all, it will be important to verify the students' ability to develop a critical-analytical discourse on the texts studied through a "close reading" of some significant passages and by highlighting intertextual links between different authors and contexts. At the end of the first semester, students who have actively participated in at least 80% of the lessons will be allowed to submit a written paper, valid as an exemption from the first part of the program. Attending students who have turned in a paper will discuss it during the oral examination, which will still include questions related to the second part of the course.

 

First question: the student reads in English a passage selected by the teacher from the texts studied in class; the student comments in English on the passage just read, provides some background information on the historical and cultural context in which it was written, and comments on the poetics of the author, before moving on to a stylistic and structural analysis of the passage and the text from which it is taken. The student then answers two more questions on other texts in the syllabus.

 

Primary texts (first semester):

  • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 1895. Recommended edition: Norton Critical Edition, 2008.
  • Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929. Recommended edition: The Hemingway Library Edition, Scribner, 2014.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969. Recommended edition: 50th Anniversary Edition, Modern Library, 2009.

Primary texts (second semester):

  • Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991 (1990).
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved, Vintage International, 2004 (1987).
  • Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus, Penguin, 2003 (1980-1991).

Critical bibliography:

(mostly provided by the teacher)

  • Giorgio Mariani, Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature, University of Illinois Press, 2015.
  • Jennifer Haytock, The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature, Routledge, 2018: chapter 2: “Literature of the American Civil War”, chapter 3: “Literature of World War I”, chapter 4: “Literature of World War II”, chapter 5: “Literature of the wars in Korea and Viet Nam”.
  • Paolo Simonetti and Alice Balestrino, “Narrating World War II: Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media”, in Status Quaestionis, vol. 18 (2020), pp. 13-25.
  • Stephen Weiner, “The Development of the American Graphic Novel”, in Stephen E. Tabachnick (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 41-57. 

First semester:

  • Lee Clark Mitchell (ed.), New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, Cambridge UP, 1986.
  • Max Westbrook, “The Progress of Henry Fleming: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, in CEA Critic, Winter and Spring/Summer 1999, vol. 61, n. 2/3, pp. 71-82.
  • Scott Donaldson (ed.), New Essays on A Farewell to Arms, Cambridge UP, 1990.
  • Michael Reynolds, Hemingway’s First War, Blackwell, 1987, *or* Luca Briasco, Retoriche del conflitto. Identità, amore e guerra in A Farewell to Arms di Ernest Hemingway, Lozzi & Rossi, 2001.
  • Paolo Simonetti, “Hemingway: il senso della fine”, in E. Hemingway, Addio alle armi, Oscar Mondadori, 2016, pp. 295-325.
  • Robert T. Tally, JR, “Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five”, in Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel. A Postmodern Iconography, Continuum Literary Studies, 2011, pp. 71-84.
  • Maurice J. O’Sullivan, Jr., “Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut’s Anti-Memoirs”, in Leonard Mustazza (ed.), Critical Insights. Slaughterhouse-Five, Salem Press 2011, pp. 179-189.
  • Arnold Edelstein, “Slaughterhouse-Five: Time Out of Joint”, in Leonard Mustazza (ed.), Critical Insights. Slaughterhouse-Five, Salem Press 2011, pp. 132-147.
  • Charles B. Harris, “Time, Uncertainty, and Kurt Vonnegut, JR.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse-Five”, in The Centennial Review, vol. 20, n. 3 (Summer 1976), pp. 228-243.

Second semester:

  • Robin Silbergleid, “Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical Metafiction”, in Contemporary Literature, vol. 50, n. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 129-155.
  • John H. Timmerman, “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage’”, in Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 46, n. 1 (Spring 2000), pp. 100-114.
  • Alex Vernon, “Salvation, Storytelling, and Pilgrimage in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried”, in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, December 2003, vol. 36, n. 4, pp. 171-188.
  • Susan Farrell, “Tim O’Brien and Gender: A Defense of The Things They Carried”, in CEA Critic, Fall 2003, vol. 66, n. 1, pp. 1-21 *or* Milton J. Bates, “Tim O’Brien’s Myth of Courage”, in Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 1987, vol. 33, n. 2, pp. 263-279.T
  • Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard. Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019: “On Beloved”, “The Site of Memory”, “Rememory”, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction”.
  • Claudine Raynaud, “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory”, in Justine Tally (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 43-58.
  • Dana Mihăilescu, “Photography and Prose Pictures in Beloved: The Frames of Emotional Memory”, in Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika et al., Toni Morrison, Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2015, pp. 175-194.
  • Michael Rothberg, “Introduction” to Traumatic Realism. The Demands of Holocaust Representation, U of Minnesota P, 2000, pp. 1-15.
  • Hillary Chute, “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus”, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 52, n. 2 (2006), pp. 199-230.
  • Art Spiegelman, passages from MetaMaus, Pantheon, 2011.

The course alternates traditional lecture-style lessons (where the teacher will provide the historical context and the authors' background) with sessions involving active participation by students through presentations and discussions in class. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novels or short stories in the syllabus and to write abstracts or short presentations to be discussed in class.

 

Attendance, though not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

Attending students who sent and discussed abstracts during the first semester may submit a written paper valid for the first part of the course.

Non-attending students, in addition to reading very carefully the primary texts in English, should study ALL the critical bibliography indicated in the syllabus and demonstrate familiarity with the main critical interpretations of the authors' works.

LETTERATURA E CULTURA ANGLO-AMERICANA 10606728 2023/2024

Letters & Mystery:

Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature

The course (6 CFU) is taught in the first semester and functions as an introduction to nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature, from the "American Renaissance" to the Gilded Age. The focus is on the literary and metafictional dimension as a privileged site of detection, in which the reader must become a detective in order to penetrate the mysteries of the text. After an examination of the cultural-historical context of the mid-nineteenth century, we will proceed with the reading of some writings by Poe - considered the initiator of the modern detective story - and then dwell on the works of central authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain, privileging the investigative and metafictional junctures of some of their seminal texts.

 

Goals:

Understanding a literary text through close reading, textual analysis, and knowledge of the historical context of reference. Interpretation of textual linguistic, thematic, and formal macrostructures with the aim of making autonomous interpretations and judgments, including reflections on social, scientific, or ethical issues related to the texts and historical period. Development of communication skills aimed at rigorously discussing specific ideas, problems, and arguments with specialist and non-specialist interlocutors.  

 

Basic knowledge of early Anglo-American literature is preferred, as well as proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

Evaluation:

The oral exam (either in English and Italian or exclusively in English) will be useful to verify the students’ knowledge of the authors and the texts studied, as well as the notions acquired. Above all, it will be important to verify the students' ability to develop a critical-analytical discourse on the texts studied through a "close reading" of some significant passages and by highlighting intertextual links between different authors and contexts.

First question: the student reads in English a passage selected by the teacher from the texts studied in class; the student comments in English on the passage just read, provides some background information on the historical and cultural context in which it was written, and comments on the poetics of the author, before moving on to a stylistic and structural analysis of the passage and the text from which it is taken. The student then answers two more questions on other texts in the syllabus.

 

Primary Texts:

  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841); “The Purloined Letter” (1845); “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846).
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Edition.
  • Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Editions (Melville's Short Novels) or Tales, Poems and Other Writings (edited by John Bryant).
  • Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). Recommended edition: Norton Critical Edition or Penguin Classics.

Critical bibliography

(partially provided by the teacher):

On American Renaissance:

  • Mario Corona, “American Renaissance (1941): un’invenzione storiografica”, in Un rinascimento impossibile. Letteratura, politica e sessualità nell’opera di Francis Otto Matthiessen, Ombre Corte, Verona 2007, pp. 122-150.
  • Sharon M. Harris, “Whose Renaissance? Women Writers in the Era of the American Renaissance”, in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 49, n. 1-2 (2003), pp. 59-80.
  • Richard Gray, “Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800-1865”, in A Brief History of American Literature, Wiley Blackwell, 2011, pp. 115-158.

On detective fiction:

  • Antoine Dechene, Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Especially chapter 1: “Introduction” e Chapter 2: “From the Metaphysical Detective Story to the Metacognitive Mystery Tale”.

On Edgar Allan Poe:

  • Ugo Rubeo, Genio in bilico. Testo, contesto e intertesto in Edgar Allan Poe, Mimesis, Roma 2021. Especially chapter 1 “Edgar Allan Poe: un genio in bilico” (pp. 11-24), 2 “La poesia e i saggi sulla versificazione” (pp. 25- 59) e 5 “I racconti della maturità” (pp. 117-150).
  • John Gruesser, “Never Bet the Detective (or His Creator) Your Head: Character Rivalry, Authorial Sleight of Hand, and Generic Fluidity in Detective Fiction”, in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 9, n. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 5-23.
  • Paul Hurh, “‘The Creative and the Resolvent’: The Origins of Poe’s Analytical Method”, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 66, n. 4 (March 2012), pp. 466-493.

On Nathaniel Hawthorne:

  • Valerio De Angelis, La prima lettera. Miti dell’origine in The Scarlet Letter di Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lozzi & Ross, Roma 2001. Specialmente il capitolo 1: “An American Re-Naissance”, pp. 15-34.
  • Sacvan Bercovitch, “The A-Politics of Ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter”, in New Literary History, vol. 19, n. 3 (Spring 1988), pp. 629-654. (Included in the Norton Edition of the novel)
  • Millicent Bell, “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter”, in The Massachusetts Review, vol. 23, n. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 9-26. (Included in the Norton Edition of the novel).
  • Nina Baym, “Revisiting Hawthorne’s Feminism”, in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, vol. 30, (Spring & Fall 2004), pp. 32-55. (Included in the Norton edition of the novel).

On Herman Melville:

  • Giorgio Mariani, Leggere Melville, Carocci, Roma 2013. Specialmente capitolo 1: “Herman Melville autore americano e globale”, capitolo 3: “Moby-Dick: il gran libro di Ishmael” e capitolo 4: “Da Pierre a Il truffatore di fiducia”).
  • Anna Scacchi, A una voce sola. Il racconto della storia in Benito Cereno, Lozzi & Rossi, Roma 2000. Specialmente capitolo 1: “Dal grigio al bianco e nero” e capitolo 2: “La vera storia della San Dominick”.
  • Ruth B. Mandel, “The Two Mystery Stories in ‘Benito Cereno’”, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 14, n. 4 (Winter 1973), pp. 631-642.
  • Paolo Simonetti, “Silence is the Only Voice: Le Lettere a Hawthorne di Herman Melville e la scoperta di una nuova voce femminile”, in LEA. Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, vol. 9 (2020), pp. 1-12.

On Mark Twain:

  • Cinzia Schiavini, Leggere Twain, Carocci, Roma 2013. Especially chapter 3: “Il ritorno al Grande Fiume”.
  • Malcolm Bradbury, “Introduction” to Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Penguin, 1969, pp. 7- 44.
  • John S. Whitley, “Pudd’nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection”, in Journal of American Studies, vol. 21, n. 1 (April 1987), pp. 55-70.
  • Ann M. Ryan, “Standing in Some True Relation: Mark Twain Visits ‘The Custom House’”, in The Mark Twain Annual, vol. 15, n. 1 (2017), pp. 145-161.

The course alternates traditional lecture-style lessons (where the teacher will provide the historical context and the authors' background) with sessions involving active participation by students through presentations and discussions in class.

Attendance, though not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

Non-attending students, in addition to reading very carefully the primary texts in English, should read ALL critical texts indicated in the bibliography and demonstrate familiarity with nineteenth-century American literature through a detailed study of the chapter in Richard Gray's textbook indicated in the bibliography.

LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE III 1032148 2022/2023

"Mysterious Strangers" in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

 

This 12-CFU course (84 teaching hours spread over two semesters), offers a panoramic view of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, focusing on the figure of the "mysterious stranger", a central trope that, in its various social, philosophical, ethnic, religious, and political implications (the tempting devil, the ghost, the double, the veteran, the slave, the migrant, the outcast, the parvenu, the scapegoat - the "other" in all its manifestations) crosses the entire century and is still relevant today.

 

Basic knowledge of Anglo-American literature from its origins to the second half of the nineteenth century is preferred, as well as proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

The course alternates traditional lecture-style lessons (where the teacher will provide the historical context and the authors' background) with sessions involving active participation by students through presentations and discussions in class. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novels or short stories in the syllabus and to write abstracts or short presentations to be discussed in class.
For this reason, attendance, though not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary literary texts for the first and second semesters (any unabridged English edition of the texts is fine, though versions with parallel texts that I have suggested are preferable because of the critical apparatus):

 

Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (1908) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house)
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home” (1925), “The Killers” (1927), “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house).

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930)
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird” (1963), “Talking Horse” (1972)
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979)
Toni Morrison, "Beloved" (1985)

 

Mandatory Critical texts (some will be provided by the teacher): 
(non-attending students must choose an additional text for each author from those in the "further readings" section).

 

- Chapters from A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914 (ed. Robert P. Lamb): John Matteson, “America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain”; John Carlos Rowe, “Henry James in a New Century”.
- Chapters from A Companion to Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction (ed. David Seed): Susan Hegelman, “U.S. Modernism”; Sharon Monteith, “Southern Fiction”; David Brauner, “Jewish American Fiction”; Peter Messent, “Ernest Hemingway”; William Blazek, “F. Scott Fitzgerald”; Charles A. Peek, “William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha”; Timothy Parrish, “Philip Roth”; Jennifer Terry, “Toni Morrison”.
- Eric Savoy, “Flannery O’Connor and the Realism of Distance”, in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, ed. S. Castillo Street and C. L. Crow, Palgrave Macmillan 2016.
- Paolo Simonetti, “Malamud: secondo atto”, in B. Malamud, Romanzi e racconti vol. 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2015.
- Paolo Simonetti, “Philip Roth: un monologo a più voci”, in P. Roth, Romanzi vol. 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2019.
- Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken. The Afro-American Presence in American Literature”.

 

Further readings:

 

Twain:
- Cinzia Schiavini, Leggere Twain, Carocci, Roma 2013 (cap. 5. “Il Novecento di Twain”). 
- R. S. Pressman, “The Man Who Confused Hadleyburg (and Everybody Else)”, The Mark Twain Annual, 5 (2007), pp. 131-40.
- Lawrence I. Berkove, “The Dark Hoaxes of ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’”, The Mark Twain Journal, 52,1 (2014), pp. 91-103. 
- Cynthia Ozick, “Mark Twain and the Jews”, in Judaism, May 1995.

James:
- Alide Cagidemetrio, “Introduzione” a L’angolo bello, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Claude Forray, “Foreigness and the Alter Ego in H. James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’”, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (Autumn 1997).
- Eric Savoy, “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner’”, The Henry James Review, 20.1 (Winter 1999), pp. 1-21.

Hemingway:
- Steven Trout, “Where Do We Go from Here? E. Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’ and American Veterans of WWI”, The Hemingway Review 20.1 (Fall 2000).
- W. J Stuckey, “‘The Killers’ as Experience”, The Journal of Narrative Theory 5.2 (1975).
- Warren Bennett, “Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clear, Well-Lighted Place’”, American Literature 42.1 (1970).

Fitzgerald:
- Gianfranca Balestra, “Introduzione” a Il grande Gatsby, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Ronald Berman, “The Great Gatsby and the Twenties”, The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, a cura di Ruth Prigozy, Cambridge UP 2006.
- John W. Aldridge, “The Life of Gatsby”, in F. Scott Fitzgerald (a cura di Harold Bloom), Chelsea House 2006.

---

Faulkner:
- John L. Skinner, “‘A Rose for Emily’: Against Interpretation”, The Journal of Narrative Technique 15.1 (Winter 1985).
- Edmond L. Volpe, “A Rose for Emily” in A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner, New Publisher 2021.

O’Connor:
- Margaret Earley Whitt, “Chapter 3: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’”, in Understanding Flannery O’Connor, University of South Carolina Press 1995.
- Douglas N. Leonard, “Experiencing F. O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’”, Interpretations 14.2 (Spring 1983).

Malamud:
- Paolo Simonetti, Notizie sui testi: “L’uccello ebreo” e “Cavallo parlante”, in Bernard Malamud, Romanzi e racconti voll. 1 e 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2014, 2015. 
- Philip Hanson, “Horror and Ethnic Identity in ‘The Jewbird’, Studies in Short Fiction 30.3, 1993.
-  B. Burch and P. W. Burch, “Myth on Myth: B. Malamud’s ‘The Talking Horse’”, Studies in Short Fiction 16.4, 1979.

Roth:
- Aimee Pozorski, "How to Tell a True Ghost Story: 'The Ghost Writer' and the Case of Anne Frank", in Derek Parker Royal (a cura di), Philip Roth. New Perspectives on an American Author, Praeger Publishers 2005.
- Evelyn Avery, "Roth on Malamud: From 'The Ghost Writer' to a Post-Mortem", in Philip Roth Studies 4.1 (Spring 2008).
- Elèna Mortara, "Notizie sui testi. Lo scrittore fantasma", in Roth, Romanzi vol. 1, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2017.

Morrison:
- Linda Krumholz, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in T. Morrison’s Beloved”, in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. A Casebook, eds. W. L. Andrews and N. Y. McKay.
- Claudine Raynaud, “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory”, in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, ed. Justine Tally, Cambridge UP 2007.
- Reginald Watson, “Derogatory Images of Sex: The Black Woman and Her Plight in T. Morrison’s Beloved”, in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Literary Criticism 2009.

 

Evaluation

 

The oral exam (either in English and Italian or exclusively in English) will be useful to verify the students’ knowledge of the authors and the texts studied, as well as the notions acquired. Above all, it will be important to verify the students' ability to develop a critical-analytical discourse on the texts studied through a "close reading" of some significant passages and by highlighting intertextual links between different authors and contexts. 

At the end of the first semester, students who have actively participated in at least 80% of the lessons will be allowed to write a short paper, valid as an exemption from the first part of the program. 

ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE I-M 1047508 2022/2023

Reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: intertextuality, interpretations, adaptations

 

This 6 CFU course focuses on The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Herman Melville during his lifetime. When it first came out in 1857, the book was mostly ignored by the public and reviled by the few reviewers who cared to read it, destroying Melville’s reputation. This complex and highly ambivalent novel has baffled readers and scholars for more than a century, but today many critics regard it as the first American postmodern novel – Melville’s greatest achievement after Moby-Dick. The text will be read and discussed in its entirety in class, by paying close attention to its genesis, its structure, and its styles, and by unraveling all its philosophical, political, theological, cultural, and metafictional references. Finally, reading and discussing The Confidence-Man along with Melville’s works of the period as well as through the novel’s subsequent theatrical and musical adaptations not only clarifies the reasons for the work’s failure at the time of its publication, but it enables us to investigate its relationship with the culture and the society of the times while illuminating how Melville’s work relates to our present culture and sensibility.

 

Fluency in spoken and written English is obviously needed;
knowledge of the main authors, texts, and themes of Anglo-American literature from the colonial age to the first half of the twentieth century is preferred; knowledge of Herman Melville's main works is useful.

 

The course, taught in English, is organized as a seminar and will alternate traditional lecture-style classes with readings/discussions/presentations involving the active participation of students. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novel that they will discuss in class and to finally deliver a Power Point presentation. For this reason, attendance, while not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary Texts (all mandatory):

(provided by the teacher)

 

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853).
Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855).
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (recommended editions: the Norton Critical Edition or the Northwestern Newberry Edition).

 

Critical Bibliography (provided by the teacher)

 

Jonathan A. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville's The Confidence-Man, Praeger, 1996.


Choose at least one of these three introductory essays:

 

Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Oxford Classics 1989.
Elizabeth S. Foster, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Hendrick House 1954.
Watson Branch et al., “Historical Note” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Northwestern UP 1984.

 

Choose at least 5 of these texts (or others provided by the teacher according to the subject of the paper):

(Non-attending students should read all these texts): 

 

Elizabeth Renker, “‘A ––––––!’: Unreadability in The Confidence-Man, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 1998. 
Maurice S. Lee, “Skepticism and The Confidence-Man”, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 2014.
Samuel Otter, “Discerning The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
Meredith Farmer, “The Confidence-Man and the Avatar”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
John Bryant, “Citizens of a World to Come: Melville and the Millennial Cosmopolite”, American Literature 59.1, March 1987.
Justine S. Murison, “Paranoid Reading, Surface Pleasures, and Deadpan Humor in The Confidence-Man”, in C. Marrs (ed.), The New Melville Studies, Cambridge UP 2019.
Micheal S. Reynolds, “The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man”, PMLA 86.5, October 1971.
Edward H. Rosenberry, “Melville’s Ship of Fools”, PMLA 75.5, December 1960.
Tom Quirk, Melville’s Confidence Man. From Knave to Knight, University of Missouri Press 1982.
Yoshiaki Furui, “‘Secret Emotions’: Disability in Public and Melville’s The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.2, June 2013.
Paolo Simonetti, “‘Something Further May Follow’: Melville’s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.3, October 2013.

 

Film to see:
Woody Allen, Zelig (1983).

 

Evaluation

Students who attend the course will be asked to prepare a short Power Point presentation to deliver in class. All students will be required to write a paper on a specific aspect of the text, to be agreed upon in advance with the teacher. The paper must be submitted at least 10 days before the date of the oral exam and will be evaluated according to the following criteria: insufficient (failed exam), sufficient (18-22), good (23-26), very good (27-30), excellent (30 cum laude). 
The oral exam will focus on a discussion of the paper and will also serve to assess the students' oral expository skills in English. The final grade, consisting of the evaluation of the paper and the discussion, will have a maximum score of thirty points (a minimum of 18 points is required to pass the exam).

LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2022/2023

Reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: intertextuality, interpretations, adaptations

 

This 6 CFU course focuses on The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Herman Melville during his lifetime. When it first came out in 1857, the book was mostly ignored by the public and reviled by the few reviewers who cared to read it, destroying Melville’s reputation. This complex and highly ambivalent novel has baffled readers and scholars for more than a century, but today many critics regard it as the first American postmodern novel – Melville’s greatest achievement after Moby-Dick. The text will be read and discussed in its entirety in class, by paying close attention to its genesis, its structure, and its styles, and by unraveling all its philosophical, political, theological, cultural, and metafictional references. Finally, reading and discussing The Confidence-Man along with Melville’s works of the period as well as through the novel’s subsequent theatrical and musical adaptations not only clarifies the reasons for the work’s failure at the time of its publication, but it enables us to investigate its relationship with the culture and the society of the times while illuminating how Melville’s work relates to our present culture and sensibility.

 

Fluency in spoken and written English is obviously needed;
knowledge of the main authors, texts, and themes of Anglo-American literature from the colonial age to the first half of the twentieth century is preferred; knowledge of Herman Melville's main works is useful.

 

The course, taught in English, is organized as a seminar and will alternate traditional lecture-style classes with readings/discussions/presentations involving the active participation of students. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novel that they will discuss in class and to finally deliver a Power Point presentation. For this reason, attendance, while not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary Texts (all mandatory):

(provided by the teacher)

 

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853).
Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855).
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (recommended editions: the Norton Critical Edition or the Northwestern Newberry Edition).

 

Critical Bibliography (provided by the teacher)

 

Jonathan A. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville's The Confidence-Man, Praeger, 1996.


Choose at least one of these three introductory essays:

 

Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Oxford Classics 1989.
Elizabeth S. Foster, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Hendrick House 1954.
Watson Branch et al., “Historical Note” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Northwestern UP 1984.

 

Choose at least 5 of these texts (or others provided by the teacher according to the subject of the paper):

(Non-attending students should read all these texts): 

 

Elizabeth Renker, “‘A ––––––!’: Unreadability in The Confidence-Man, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 1998. 
Maurice S. Lee, “Skepticism and The Confidence-Man”, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 2014.
Samuel Otter, “Discerning The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
Meredith Farmer, “The Confidence-Man and the Avatar”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
John Bryant, “Citizens of a World to Come: Melville and the Millennial Cosmopolite”, American Literature 59.1, March 1987.
Justine S. Murison, “Paranoid Reading, Surface Pleasures, and Deadpan Humor in The Confidence-Man”, in C. Marrs (ed.), The New Melville Studies, Cambridge UP 2019.
Micheal S. Reynolds, “The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man”, PMLA 86.5, October 1971.
Edward H. Rosenberry, “Melville’s Ship of Fools”, PMLA 75.5, December 1960.
Tom Quirk, Melville’s Confidence Man. From Knave to Knight, University of Missouri Press 1982.
Yoshiaki Furui, “‘Secret Emotions’: Disability in Public and Melville’s The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.2, June 2013.
Paolo Simonetti, “‘Something Further May Follow’: Melville’s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.3, October 2013.

 

Film to see:
Woody Allen, Zelig (1983).

 

Evaluation

Students who attend the course will be asked to prepare a short Power Point presentation to deliver in class. All students will be required to write a paper on a specific aspect of the text, to be agreed upon in advance with the teacher. The paper must be submitted at least 10 days before the date of the oral exam and will be evaluated according to the following criteria: insufficient (failed exam), sufficient (18-22), good (23-26), very good (27-30), excellent (30 cum laude). 
The oral exam will focus on a discussion of the paper and will also serve to assess the students' oral expository skills in English. The final grade, consisting of the evaluation of the paper and the discussion, will have a maximum score of thirty points (a minimum of 18 points is required to pass the exam).

LETTERATURA E CULTURA ANGLO-AMERICANA 10606728 2022/2023

"Mysterious Strangers" in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

 

This 6-CFU course (42 teaching hours spread over two semesters), offers a panoramic view of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, focusing on the figure of the "mysterious stranger", a central trope that, in its various social, philosophical, ethnic, religious, and political implications (the tempting devil, the ghost, the double, the veteran, the slave, the migrant, the outcast, the parvenu, the scapegoat - the "other" in all its manifestations) crosses the entire century and is still relevant today.

 

Basic knowledge of Anglo-American literature from its origins to the second half of the nineteenth century is preferred, as well as proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

The course alternates traditional lecture-style lessons (where the teacher will provide the historical context and the authors' background) with sessions involving active participation by students through presentations and discussions in class. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novels or short stories in the syllabus and to write abstracts or short presentations to be discussed in class.
For this reason, attendance, though not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary literary texts for the first and second semesters (any unabridged English edition of the texts is fine, though versions with parallel texts that I have suggested are preferable because of the critical apparatus):

 

Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (1908) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house)
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home” (1925), “The Killers” (1927), “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house).

 

Mandatory Critical texts (some will be provided by the teacher): 
(non-attending students must choose an additional text for each author from those in the "further readings" section).

 

- Chapters from A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914 (ed. Robert P. Lamb): John Matteson, “America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain”; John Carlos Rowe, “Henry James in a New Century”.
- Chapters from A Companion to Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction (ed. David Seed): Susan Hegelman, “U.S. Modernism”; Peter Messent, “Ernest Hemingway”; William Blazek, “F. Scott Fitzgerald”.

 

Further readings:

 

Twain:
- Cinzia Schiavini, Leggere Twain, Carocci, Roma 2013 (cap. 5. “Il Novecento di Twain”). 
- R. S. Pressman, “The Man Who Confused Hadleyburg (and Everybody Else)”, The Mark Twain Annual, 5 (2007), pp. 131-40.
- Lawrence I. Berkove, “The Dark Hoaxes of ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’”, The Mark Twain Journal, 52,1 (2014), pp. 91-103. 
- Cynthia Ozick, “Mark Twain and the Jews”, in Judaism, May 1995.

James:
- Alide Cagidemetrio, “Introduzione” a L’angolo bello, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Claude Forray, “Foreigness and the Alter Ego in H. James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’”, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (Autumn 1997).
- Eric Savoy, “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner’”, The Henry James Review, 20.1 (Winter 1999), pp. 1-21.

Hemingway:
- Steven Trout, “Where Do We Go from Here? E. Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’ and American Veterans of WWI”, The Hemingway Review 20.1 (Fall 2000).
- W. J Stuckey, “‘The Killers’ as Experience”, The Journal of Narrative Theory 5.2 (1975).
- Warren Bennett, “Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clear, Well-Lighted Place’”, American Literature 42.1 (1970).

Fitzgerald:
- Gianfranca Balestra, “Introduzione” a Il grande Gatsby, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Ronald Berman, “The Great Gatsby and the Twenties”, The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, a cura di Ruth Prigozy, Cambridge UP 2006.
- John W. Aldridge, “The Life of Gatsby”, in F. Scott Fitzgerald (a cura di Harold Bloom), Chelsea House 2006.

 

Evaluation

 

The oral exam (either in English and Italian or exclusively in English) will be useful to verify the students’ knowledge of the authors and the texts studied, as well as the notions acquired. Above all, it will be important to verify the students' ability to develop a critical-analytical discourse on the texts studied through a "close reading" of some significant passages and by highlighting intertextual links between different authors and contexts. 

At the end of the semester, students who have actively participated in at least 80% of the lessons will be allowed to write a short paper, valid as an exemption from part of the program. 

Anglo-American Literature III-M 1047488 2022/2023

"Mysterious Strangers" in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

 

This 12-CFU course (84 teaching hours spread over two semesters), offers a panoramic view of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, focusing on the figure of the "mysterious stranger", a central trope that, in its various social, philosophical, ethnic, religious, and political implications (the tempting devil, the ghost, the double, the veteran, the slave, the migrant, the outcast, the parvenu, the scapegoat - the "other" in all its manifestations) crosses the entire century and is still relevant today.

 

Basic knowledge of Anglo-American literature from its origins to the second half of the nineteenth century is preferred, as well as a proficiency in written and spoken English.

 

Primary literary texts for the first and second semesters (any unabridged English edition of the texts is fine, though versions with parallel texts that I have suggested are preferable because of the critical apparatus):

 

Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (1908) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house)
Ernest Hemingway, “Soldier’s Home” (1925), “The Killers” (1927), “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) (suggested edition: parallel text edition by Marsilio publishing house).

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930)
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird” (1963), “Talking Horse” (1972)
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1985)

 

Mandatory Critical texts (some will be provided by the teacher): 

 

- Chapters from A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914 (ed. Robert P. Lamb): John Matteson, “America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain”; John Carlos Rowe, “Henry James in a New Century”.
- Chapters from A Companion to Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction (ed. David Seed): Susan Hegelman, “U.S. Modernism”; Sharon Monteith, “Southern Fiction”; David Brauner, “Jewish American Fiction”; Peter Messent, “Ernest Hemingway”; William Blazek, “F. Scott Fitzgerald”; Charles A. Peek, “William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha”; Timothy Parrish, “Philip Roth”; Jennifer Terry, “Toni Morrison”.
- Eric Savoy, “Flannery O’Connor and the Realism of Distance”, in The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, ed. S. Castillo Street and C. L. Crow, Palgrave Macmillan 2016.
- Paolo Simonetti, “Malamud: secondo atto”, in B. Malamud, Romanzi e racconti vol. 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2015.
- Paolo Simonetti, “Philip Roth: un monologo a più voci”, in P. Roth, Romanzi vol. 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2019.
- Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken. The Afro-American Presence in American Literature”.

 

Further readings (choose at least one text for each author. Non-attending students must choose at least two texts for each author):

 

Twain:
- Cinzia Schiavini, Leggere Twain, Carocci, Roma 2013 (cap. 5. “Il Novecento di Twain”). 
- R. S. Pressman, “The Man Who Confused Hadleyburg (and Everybody Else)”, The Mark Twain Annual, 5 (2007), pp. 131-40.
- Lawrence I. Berkove, “The Dark Hoaxes of ‘The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg’”, The Mark Twain Journal, 52,1 (2014), pp. 91-103. 
- Cynthia Ozick, “Mark Twain and the Jews”, Judaism, May 1995.

James:
- Alide Cagidemetrio, “Introduzione” a L’angolo bello, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Claude Forray, “Foreigness and the Alter Ego in H. James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’”, Journal of the Short Story in English, 29 (Autumn 1997).
- Eric Savoy, “The Queer Subject of ‘The Jolly Corner’”, The Henry James Review, 20.1 (Winter 1999), pp. 1-21.

Hemingway:
- Steven Trout, “Where Do We Go from Here? E. Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’ and American Veterans of WWI”, The Hemingway Review 20.1 (Fall 2000).
- W. J Stuckey, “‘The Killers’ as Experience”, The Journal of Narrative Theory 5.2 (1975).
- Warren Bennett, “Character, Irony, and Resolution in ‘A Clear, Well-Lighted Place’”, American Literature 42.1 (1970).

Fitzgerald:
- Gianfranca Balestra, “Introduzione” a Il grande Gatsby, Marsilio, Venezia 2011.
- Ronald Berman, “The Great Gatsby and the Twenties”, The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, a cura di Ruth Prigozy, Cambridge UP 2006.
- John W. Aldridge, “The Life of Gatsby”, in F. Scott Fitzgerald (a cura di Harold Bloom), Chelsea House 2006.

Faulkner:
- John L. Skinner, “‘A Rose for Emily’: Against Interpretation”, The Journal of Narrative Technique 15.1 (Winter 1985).
- Edmond L. Volpe, “A Rose for Emily” in A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner, New Publisher 2021.

O’Connor:
- Margaret Earley Whitt, “Chapter 3: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’”, in Understanding Flannery O’Connor, University of South Carolina Press 1995.
- Douglas N. Leonard, “Experiencing F. O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’”, Interpretations 14.2 (Spring 1983).

Malamud:
- Paolo Simonetti, Notizie sui testi: “L’uccello ebreo” e “Cavallo parlante”, in Bernard Malamud, Romanzi e racconti voll. 1 e 2, I Meridiani Mondadori, 2014, 2015. 
- Philip Hanson, “Horror and Ethnic Identity in ‘The Jewbird’, Studies in Short Fiction 30.3, 1993.
-  B. Burch and P. W. Burch, “Myth on Myth: B. Malamud’s ‘The Talking Horse’”, Studies in Short Fiction 16.4, 1979.

Roth:

Morrison:
- Linda Krumholz, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in T. Morrison’s Beloved”, in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. A Casebook, eds. W. L. Andrews and N. Y. McKay.
- Claudine Raynaud, “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory”, in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, ed. Justine Tally, Cambridge UP 2007.
- Reginald Watson, “Derogatory Images of Sex: The Black Woman and Her Plight in T. Morrison’s Beloved”, in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Literary Criticism 2009.

ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE - ADVANCED COURSE 10588755 2022/2023

Reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: intertextuality, interpretations, adaptations

 

This 6 CFU course focuses on The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Herman Melville during his lifetime. When it first came out in 1857, the book was mostly ignored by the public and reviled by the few reviewers who cared to read it, destroying Melville’s reputation. This complex and highly ambivalent novel has baffled readers and scholars for more than a century, but today many critics regard it as the first American postmodern novel – Melville’s greatest achievement after Moby-Dick. The text will be read and discussed in its entirety in class, by paying close attention to its genesis, its structure, and its styles, and by unraveling all its philosophical, political, theological, cultural, and metafictional references. Finally, reading and discussing The Confidence-Man along with Melville’s works of the period as well as through the novel’s subsequent theatrical and musical adaptations not only clarifies the reasons for the work’s failure at the time of its publication, but it enables us to investigate its relationship with the culture and the society of the times while illuminating how Melville’s work relates to our present culture and sensibility.

 

Fluency in spoken and written English is obviously needed;
knowledge of the main authors, texts, and themes of Anglo-American literature from the colonial age to the first half of the twentieth century is preferred; knowledge of Herman Melville's main works is useful.

 

The course, taught in English, is organized as a seminar and will alternate traditional lecture-style classes with readings/discussions/presentations involving the active participation of students. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novel that they will discuss in class and to finally deliver a Power Point presentation. For this reason, attendance, while not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary Texts (all mandatory):

(provided by the teacher)

 

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853).
Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855).
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (recommended editions: the Norton Critical Edition or the Northwestern Newberry Edition).

 

Critical Bibliography (provided by the teacher)

 

Jonathan A. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville's The Confidence-Man, Praeger, 1996.


Choose at least one of these three introductory essays:

 

Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Oxford Classics 1989.
Elizabeth S. Foster, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Hendrick House 1954.
Watson Branch et al., “Historical Note” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Northwestern UP 1984.

 

Choose at least 5 of these texts (or others provided by the teacher according to the subject of the paper):

(Non-attending students should read all these texts): 

 

Elizabeth Renker, “‘A ––––––!’: Unreadability in The Confidence-Man, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 1998. 
Maurice S. Lee, “Skepticism and The Confidence-Man”, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 2014.
Samuel Otter, “Discerning The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
Meredith Farmer, “The Confidence-Man and the Avatar”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
John Bryant, “Citizens of a World to Come: Melville and the Millennial Cosmopolite”, American Literature 59.1, March 1987.
Justine S. Murison, “Paranoid Reading, Surface Pleasures, and Deadpan Humor in The Confidence-Man”, in C. Marrs (ed.), The New Melville Studies, Cambridge UP 2019.
Micheal S. Reynolds, “The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man”, PMLA 86.5, October 1971.
Edward H. Rosenberry, “Melville’s Ship of Fools”, PMLA 75.5, December 1960.
Tom Quirk, Melville’s Confidence Man. From Knave to Knight, University of Missouri Press 1982.
Yoshiaki Furui, “‘Secret Emotions’: Disability in Public and Melville’s The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.2, June 2013.
Paolo Simonetti, “‘Something Further May Follow’: Melville’s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.3, October 2013.

 

Film to see:
Woody Allen, Zelig (1983).

 

Evaluation

Students who attend the course will be asked to prepare a short Power Point presentation to deliver in class. All students will be required to write a paper on a specific aspect of the text, to be agreed upon in advance with the teacher. The paper must be submitted at least 10 days before the date of the oral exam and will be evaluated according to the following criteria: insufficient (failed exam), sufficient (18-22), good (23-26), very good (27-30), excellent (30 cum laude). 
The oral exam will focus on a discussion of the paper and will also serve to assess the students' oral expository skills in English. The final grade, consisting of the evaluation of the paper and the discussion, will have a maximum score of thirty points (a minimum of 18 points is required to pass the exam).

ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES - ADVANCED COURSE 10589164 2022/2023

Reading Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: intertextuality, interpretations, adaptations

 

This 6 CFU course focuses on The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Herman Melville during his lifetime. When it first came out in 1857, the book was mostly ignored by the public and reviled by the few reviewers who cared to read it, destroying Melville’s reputation. This complex and highly ambivalent novel has baffled readers and scholars for more than a century, but today many critics regard it as the first American postmodern novel – Melville’s greatest achievement after Moby-Dick. The text will be read and discussed in its entirety in class, by paying close attention to its genesis, its structure, and its styles, and by unraveling all its philosophical, political, theological, cultural, and metafictional references. Finally, reading and discussing The Confidence-Man along with Melville’s works of the period as well as through the novel’s subsequent theatrical and musical adaptations not only clarifies the reasons for the work’s failure at the time of its publication, but it enables us to investigate its relationship with the culture and the society of the times while illuminating how Melville’s work relates to our present culture and sensibility.

 

Fluency in spoken and written English is obviously needed;
knowledge of the main authors, texts, and themes of Anglo-American literature from the colonial age to the first half of the twentieth century is preferred; knowledge of Herman Melville's main works is useful.

 

The course, taught in English, is organized as a seminar and will alternate traditional lecture-style classes with readings/discussions/presentations involving the active participation of students. Each week, students will be asked to read chapters from the novel that they will discuss in class and to finally deliver a Power Point presentation. For this reason, attendance, while not mandatory, is strongly recommended.

 

Primary Texts (all mandatory):

(provided by the teacher)

 

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853).
Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855).
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (recommended editions: the Norton Critical Edition or the Northwestern Newberry Edition).

 

Critical Bibliography (provided by the teacher)

 

Jonathan A. Cook, Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville's The Confidence-Man, Praeger, 1996.


Choose at least one of these three introductory essays:

 

Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Oxford Classics 1989.
Elizabeth S. Foster, “Introduction” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Hendrick House 1954.
Watson Branch et al., “Historical Note” to H. Melville, The Confidence-Man, Northwestern UP 1984.

 

Choose at least 5 of these texts (or others provided by the teacher according to the subject of the paper):

(Non-attending students should read all these texts): 

 

Elizabeth Renker, “‘A ––––––!’: Unreadability in The Confidence-Man, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 1998. 
Maurice S. Lee, “Skepticism and The Confidence-Man”, in R. S. Levine (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to H. Melville, Cambridge UP 2014.
Samuel Otter, “Discerning The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
Meredith Farmer, “The Confidence-Man and the Avatar”, Leviathan 21.3, October 2019.
John Bryant, “Citizens of a World to Come: Melville and the Millennial Cosmopolite”, American Literature 59.1, March 1987.
Justine S. Murison, “Paranoid Reading, Surface Pleasures, and Deadpan Humor in The Confidence-Man”, in C. Marrs (ed.), The New Melville Studies, Cambridge UP 2019.
Micheal S. Reynolds, “The Prototype for Melville’s Confidence-Man”, PMLA 86.5, October 1971.
Edward H. Rosenberry, “Melville’s Ship of Fools”, PMLA 75.5, December 1960.
Tom Quirk, Melville’s Confidence Man. From Knave to Knight, University of Missouri Press 1982.
Yoshiaki Furui, “‘Secret Emotions’: Disability in Public and Melville’s The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.2, June 2013.
Paolo Simonetti, “‘Something Further May Follow’: Melville’s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man”, Leviathan 15.3, October 2013.

 

Film to see:
Woody Allen, Zelig (1983).

 

Evaluation

Students who attend the course will be asked to prepare a short Power Point presentation to deliver in class. All students will be required to write a paper on a specific aspect of the text, to be agreed upon in advance with the teacher. The paper must be submitted at least 10 days before the date of the oral exam and will be evaluated according to the following criteria: insufficient (failed exam), sufficient (18-22), good (23-26), very good (27-30), excellent (30 cum laude). 
The oral exam will focus on a discussion of the paper and will also serve to assess the students' oral expository skills in English. The final grade, consisting of the evaluation of the paper and the discussion, will have a maximum score of thirty points (a minimum of 18 points is required to pass the exam).

AMERICAN LITERATURE II-M 10589755 2021/2022

(Un)Stuck in Time: Memory and Postmemory in US Fiction

 

The 12 CFU course focuses on the key notions of memory and postmemory as thematic issues and structural devices in selected modernist and postmodernist U.S. literary works. The first part of the course concentrates on the South of the United States and tackles the dynamics of remembering and the passing of time in "A Rose for Emily" and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The second part of the course will focus on the traumatic memory and postmemory of World War II and the Holocaust in postmodernist and contemporary literary works such as Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, and the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman.

 

Fluency in spoken and written English is necessary, as well as knowledge of the main authors, texts, and themes of Anglo-American literature from the colonial age to the first half of the twentieth century.

 

The course, taught in English, will alternate traditional lecture-style classes with readings/discussions involving the active participation of students, both online and face-to-face. 

 

Primary texts (all mandatory):

 

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (1930); The Sound and the Fury" (1929); “Appendix: Compson 1699-1945” (1946);
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); “On Beloved”, “The Site of Memory”, “Faulkner and Women”, “Rememory”, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction”, in The Source of Self-Regard. Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019;
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006).

 

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969);
Philip Roth, “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting: Looking at Kafka” (1973); The Plot Against America (2003); “My Uchronia”, in Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013, The Library of America, 2017, pp. 336-345;
Art Spiegelman, Maus (1980-1991); excerpts from MetaMaus, Pantheon, 2011.

 

Critical Texts:

 

David Seed (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010: Susan Hegeman, “U.S. Modernism” (pp. 11-23); Sharon Monteith, “Southern Fiction” (pp. 84-95); Charles A. Peek, “William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha” (pp. 302-312); Jennifer Terry, “Toni Morrison” (pp. 480-488);
John L. Skinner, “‘A Rose for Emily’: Against Interpretation”, The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 15, n. 1 (Winter 1985), pp. 42-51;
Cleanth Brooks, “Man, Time, and Eternity (The Sound and the Fury)”, William Faulkner. The Yoknapatawpha Country, Louisiana State UP, 1963, pp. 325-348;
Marjorie Pryse, “Textual Duration against Chronological Time: Graphing Memory in Faulkner’s Benjy Section”, The Faulkner Journal, vol. 25, n. 1 (Fall 2009), pp. 15-46;
John N. Duvall, “Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence”, in Carol A. Kolmerten et. al. (eds.), Unflinching Gaze. Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, UP of Mississippi, 1997, pp. 3-16;
Claudine Raynaud, “Beloved or the Shifting Shapes of Memory”, in Justine Tally (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 43-58;
Dana Mihăilescu, “Photography and Prose Pictures in Beloved: The Frames of Emotional Memory”, in Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika et al., Toni Morrison, Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2015, pp. 175-194;
Kristjan Mavri, “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Revisited: Memory and Language in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction”, in Politics of Memory, n. 2, year 3 (June 2013), pp. 1-14;
Laura Gruber Godfrey, “‘The World He’d Lost’: Geography and ‘Green’ Memory in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”, in Critique, vol. 52, 2011, pp. 163-175;
Christopher J. Walsh, “The Road”, in In the Wake of the Sun. Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy, Newfound Press, 2009, pp. 253-294.
---
David Seed (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010: David Brauner, “Jewish American Fiction” (pp. 96-108); Jerome Klinkowitz, “Kurt Vonnegut” (pp. 420-427); Timothy Parrish, “Philip Roth” (pp. 455-461);
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory”, in Poetics Today, vol. 29, n.1 (2008), pp. 103-128; “An Interview” (https://cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/hirsch-generation-postmemory);
Paolo Simonetti and Alice Balestrino, “Narrating World War II: Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media”, in Status Quaestionis, vol. 18 (2020), pp. 13-25;
Paolo Simonetti, “Inventing (Post)Memory, Writing (Non)Fiction. Jerzy Kosinski, Philip Roth and the Legacy of World War II”, in Status Quaestionis, vol. 18 (2020), pp. 17-28;
Robert T. Tally, JR., “Eternal Returns, or, Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five”, in Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel. A Postmodern Iconography, Continuum Literary Studies, 2011, pp. 71-84;
Arnold Edelstein, “Slaughterhouse-Five: Time Out of Joint”, in Leonard Mustazza (ed.), Critical Insights. Slaughterhouse-Five, Salem Press 2011, pp. 132-147;
Stefanie Boese, “‘Those Two Years’: Alternate History and Autobiography in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America”, Studies in American Fiction, vol. 41, n. 2 (2014), pp. 271-292;
Andrew S. Gross, “It Might Have Happened Here: Real Anti-Semitism, Fake History, and Remembering the Present”, Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 55, n. 3 (2010), pp. 409-27;
Stephen Weiner, “The Development of the American Graphic Novel”, in Stephen E. Tabachnick (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 41-57. 
Michael Rothberg, “Introduction” to Traumatic Realism. The Demands of Holocaust Representation, U of Minnesota P, 2000, pp. 1-15.
Hillary Chute, “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus”, Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 52, n. 2 (2006), pp. 199-230.

 

Students must submit two short papers (on topics agreed upon in advance with the teacher) at least 10 days before the date of the "appello". The oral exam will also deal with a discussion of the papers.

 

LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE I 1025806 2021/2022
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2021/2022
IN-DEPTH COURSE IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES 10588718 2021/2022
IN-DEPTH COURSE IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES II 10589181 2021/2022
ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES - ADVANCED COURSE 10589164 2021/2022
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2021/2022
AMERICAN LITERATURE II-M 10589755 2020/2021
LETTERATURA E CULTURA ANGLO-AMERICANA 10589624 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE I 1026078 2020/2021
ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES - ADVANCED COURSE 10589164 2020/2021
IN-DEPTH COURSE IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES 10588718 2020/2021
IN-DEPTH COURSE IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURES II 10589181 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE II 1026079 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE I 1025806 2020/2021
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE I 1026078 2019/2020
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2019/2020
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE I 1025806 2019/2020
LETTERATURA E CULTURA ANGLO-AMERICANA 10589624 2019/2020
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2019/2020
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE II 1026079 2019/2020
Anglo-American Literature II-M 1047478 2018/2019
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE 1026812 2018/2019
CROSS ATLANTIC: 20TH-CENTURY ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE B 1047575 2018/2019
CROSS ATLANTIC: 20TH-CENTURY ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE B 1047575 2018/2019
Anglo-American Literature II-M 1047478 2017/2018
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE II 1025809 2017/2018
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE I 1025807 2017/2018
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO AMERICANE II 1026079 2017/2018
LINGUE E LETTERATURE ANGLO-AMERICANE I 1025807 2016/2017
Anglo-American Literature II-M 1047478 2016/2017

Monday 10am-12pm
Room 337 (Marco Polo building, 3rd floor)
By appointment only. Please send me an email to schedule an appointment.

PAOLO SIMONETTI

TITOLI ACCADEMICI

2019: Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN) a Professore Associato (10/L1).
2014: Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN) a Professore Associato (10/L1).
2008: Dottorato di ricerca in Letterature di Lingua Inglese, Sapienza Università di Roma.
2003: Laurea (v.o.) in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (110 e lode), Sapienza Università di Roma.

ATTIVITÀ DIDATTICA E SCIENTIFICA

03/08/2020-oggi: Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato tipo B in Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Americane (L-LIN/11): Sapienza Università di Roma (Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali).

01/04/2019-31/03/2019: Assegno di Ricerca (L-LIN/11): Sapienza Università di Roma (Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali). Truthful Fictions: The Fiction of New Sincerity in Literature .

Aprile-maggio 2019: titolare del workshop Reading Postmodernist Fiction , valido per l assegnazione di 3 CFU per attività formative. Sapienza Università di Roma.

2018-2019: Docente a Contratto per English and Anglo-American Studies , L-LIN/10: Sapienza Università di Roma.

2017-2018: Docente a Contratto per Lingue e Letterature Anglo-Americane II, L-LIN/11: Sapienza Università di Roma.

01/08/2017-31/07/2018: Assegno di Ricerca (L-LIN/11): Sapienza Università di Roma (Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali). Meraviglia e poesia: indagini sulla storia europea di un idea .

Aprile-maggio 2017: Visiting Scholar presso Columbia University, New York (USA).

01/06/2016-31/05/2017: Assegno di Ricerca (L-LIN/11): Sapienza Università di Roma (Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali). The Postmemory of World War 2 in European and American Literature, Cinema, and Popular Culture .

01/01/2015-31/12/2015: Assegno di Ricerca (L-LIN/11): Sapienza Università di Roma (Dipartimento di Studi Europei, Americani e Interculturali). Dopo la balena: l eredità di Herman Melville tra Ottocento e Novecento .

2011-2012: Docente a Contratto per Letteratura Angloamericana III, L-LIN/11: Università di Roma Tor Vergata (Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia).

2009-2010: Docente a Contratto per Lingua e Cultura Anglo-Americana, L-LIN/11: Sapienza Università di Roma (Scienze della Comunicazione; Polo di Pomezia).

ELENCO DELLE PUBBLICAZIONI

Monografie, curatele, edizioni critiche:

Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, Lettere, Mondadori, Milano 2023 (traduzione e curatela).

Philip Roth, I Meridiani Mondadori, Milano 2017-19 (3 volumi):
Romanzi 1959-1986 ( Notizie sui testi );
Romanzi 1991-1997 (edizione critica: curatela; introduzione: Philip Roth: un monologo a più voci ; Notizie sui testi );
Romanzi 1998-2010 (curatela; Notizie sui testi ).
Bernard Malamud, I Meridiani Mondadori, Milano 2014-15 (2 volumi):
Romanzi e racconti 1952-1966 (curatela; Cronologia ; Notizie sui testi ; Bibliografia ;
Romanzi e racconti 1967-1986 (edizione critica: curatela; introduzione: Malamud: secondo atto ; cronologia ; Notizie sui testi ; Bibliografia .
Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails. Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon s V., a cura di Paolo Simonetti e Umberto Rossi, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2015:
introduzione: Dream Tonight of Thomas Pynchon , pp. 1-10;
capitolo X: He Could Go to Malta and Possibly End It : Malta as Prime Location in the Epilogue of V. , pp. 153-172.
Paranoia Blues. Trame del postmodern americano, Aracne, Roma 2009 (monografia).

Saggi e articoli:

Sight and the City: Arthur Miller s Focus and Philip Roth s Nemesis , in Ugo Rubeo (a cura di), Bad Cities. Literature and Urban Violence, Mimesis International, Milano 2023, pp. 103-116.
Sounds Like Jew Talk to Me : Assimilation and Alienation in Bernard Malamud s The People , in Dorothy M. Figueira (a cura di), Minor Minorities and Multiculturalism. Italian American and Jewish American Literature, EUM, Macerata 2022, pp. 253-263.
You Dare to Compare Yourself to Shakespeare? : Philip Roth, American Bard , in Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies, vol. 8 (2021), pp. 265-298.
Pubblicare Pynchon in Italia: percorsi, protagonisti, prospettive , in Ácoma nuova serie, vol. 21, anno XXVII (autunno-inverno 2021), Letteratura americana tradotta in Italia , pp. 138-164.
The Self in/and History: Historiographic Autofiction in Contemporary US Literature , in RSA Journal. Rivista di Studi Americani, Mapping the Contemporary US Novel: Theories, Forms and Themes , a cura di Pia Masiero e Virginia Pignagnoli, vol. 32 (2021), pp. 87-103.
Hello America: Mr. Ballard va a Las Vegas , in C. Bruna Mancini e Paolo Prezzavento (a cura di), Millennium Ballard, Morlacchi Editore, Perugia 2020, pp. 81-110.
Dopo la caduta: il romanzo americano oltre il postmoderno , in Giuseppe Di Giacomo e Ugo Rubeo (a cura di), Il romanzo del nuovo millennio, Mimesis, Roma 2020, pp. 923-945.
Inventing (Post)Memory, Writing (Non)Fiction: Jerzy Kosinski, Philip Roth and the Legacy of World War II , in Paolo Simonetti e Alice Balestrino (a cura di), Narrating World War II. Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media. Status Quaestionis, vol. 18 (2020), pp. 27-38.
(con Alice Balestrino): Introduction. Narrating World War II: Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media , in Paolo Simonetti e Alice Balestrino (a cura di), Narrating World War II. Transcultural Articulations of Postmemory in Literature and Other Media. Status Quaestionis, vol. 18 (2020), pp. 13-25.
Silence is the Only Voice : Le Lettere a Hawthorne di Herman Melville e la scoperta di una nuova voce femminile , in LEA Lingue e Letterature d Oriente e d Occidente, Università degli Studi di Firenze, (luglio 2020).
The Nineteenth Century , in Inger H. Dalsgaard (a cura di), Thomas Pynchon in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 2019, pp. 82-88.
It Did Happen Here: Politics and Literature in Trump s America , in Ugo Rubeo (a cura di), The New Language of American Democracy, in Costellazioni, anno III, n. 8, gennaio 2019, pp. 35-51.
La partita Hemingway : Hemingway e l editoria italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi , in Novecento Transnazionale, vol. 1, n. 3 (2019), pp. 62-76.
Ritratto di Salinger , in Enciclopedia italiana, Treccani, anno I, n. 1 (2018), pp. 58-65.
Hecklers, Hackers, and Hijackers: Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis and Thomas Pynchon s Bleeding Edge , in Ettore Finazzi-Agrò (a cura di), Toward a Linguistic and Literary Revision of Cultural Paradigms: Common and/or Alien, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Tyne 2018, pp. 9-18. Ed. it. Contestatori, programmatori e dirottatori: Cosmopolis di Don DeLillo e Bleeding Edge di Thomas Pynchon , in Ettore Finazzi-Agrò (a cura di), Il comune e/o l estraneo. Per una revisione del lessico concettuale euro-americano, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2018, pp. 23-37.
Daniel Quinn , in Eric Sandberg (a cura di), 100 Greatest Literary Detectives, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London 2018, pp. 151-52.
The Old Melville and the Sea: Ideas of Harbor in Melville s Literary Career , in Vincenzo Bavaro, Serena Fusco, Giovanna Fusco, Donatella Izzo (a cura di), Harbors, Flows, and Migrations: The Usa in/and the World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle Upon Tyne 2017, pp. 75-94.
Frammenti da uno scrittoio. Le donne, i cavallier, l arme, gli amori del giovane Melville , in Herman Melville, Frammenti da uno scrittoio, Galaad Edizioni, Teramo 2016, pp. 7-52.
Caccia grossa e scrittura: Hemingway contro tutti , in Ernest Hemingway, Verdi colline d Africa, Mondadori, Milano 2016, pp. 215-228.
11 settembre: Il ground zero dell informazione. Terrorismo e cospirazioni in Bleeding Edge di Thomas Pynchon , in Paolo Prezzavento (a cura di), Complotti e cospirazioni. Da Mussolini all 11 settembre, Capponi Editore, Ascoli Piceno 2016, pp. 213-255.
Hemingway: il senso della fine , in Ernest Hemingway, Addio alle armi, Mondadori, Milano 2016, pp. 295-325.
Pynchon Leads McHale Through Postmodernism s Underworld (and The Journey Is Really Worth It!) , in Orbit, Writing Around Pynchon, vol. 4, n. 1 (2016), pp. 1-7.
Retrospettiva: al posto del postmoderno , in Ugo Rubeo (a cura di), Parodie della fine. Letteratura e postmodernità, Roma, Aracne, 2015, pp. 245-263.

Schooled by the Inhuman Sea : Maritime Imagination and the Discourses of Emancipation in Herman Melville s Clarel , in Leonardo Buonuomo e Elisabetta Vezzosi (a cura di), Discourses of Emancipation and the Boundaries of Freedom, Trieste, EUT, 2015, pp. 195-202.

Il dramma del genio (in quattro atti): Melville Hawthorne. Bacon Shakespeare! , in Mario Faraone, Gianni Ferracuti. Valentina Oppezzo (a cura di), La più nobile delle arti: saggi, racconti e riflessioni su bugia, falsità, inganno e menzogna, LULU 2015, pp. 139-153.

Something Further May Follow : Melville s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man , in Leviathan, vol. 15, n. 3 (October 2013), pp. 117-130. (FASCIA A)

Il circo della storia: The Public Burning di Robert Coover , in Donatella Montini (a cura di), Asimmetrie letterarie. Studi in Onore di R. M. Colombo, Roma, Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2013, pp. 133-162.

Portraits of the Artist as an Undergraduate Prankster: Images of Youth in Pynchon s Writing , in Bénédicte Chroier-Fryd e Gilles Chamerois (a cura di), Thomas Pynchon, Montpellier, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013, pp. 193-222.

Why Are Comics No Longer Comic? Graphic Narratives in Contemporary America , in Giovanna Covi e Lisa Marchi (a cura di), Democracy and Difference: The US in Multidisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives, Trento, Edizioni Università degli Studi di Trento, 2012, pp. 289-299.

The Maniac in the Garden: Lolita and the Process of American Civilization , in Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fictions, vol. 53, n. 2 (2012), pp. 149-163. (FASCIA A)

Ritratto dell artista da scienziato. Arte, scienza e utopia nella narrativa di Nathaniel Hawthorne , in Letterature d America, vol. 141-142 (2012), pp. 5-46. (FASCIA A)

Prefazione a F. Scott Fitzgerald, L amore dell ultimo milionario, Padova, Alet 2012, pp. 13- 27.

Questa mascherata potrà avere un seguito . Rileggere The Confidence-Man attraverso gli adattamenti contemporanei , in Glocal Melville. Ácoma nuova serie, vol. 2 (2012), pp. 136-150. (FASCIA A)

A Mystery s Redemption: Thomas Pynchon and the Inherent Vice of Detective Fiction , in Zofia Kolbuszewska (a cura di), Thomas Pynchon & the (de)Vices of Global (Post)Modernity, Lublino, Wydawnictwo KUL, 2012, pp. 287-296.

Historical Fiction After 9/11: Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day. Modern Language Studies, 41,1 (Summer 2011), 27-41.

Postmoderno / Postmodernismi. Appunti bibliografici di teoria e letteratura dagli Stati Uniti , in Status Quaestionis, vol. 1, n. 1 (2011), pp. 127-182. (FASCIA A)

Loss, Ruins, War: Paul Auster s Response to 9/11 and the War on Terror , in Stefania Ciocia e Jesùs A. Gonzalez Lopez (a cura di), The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 13-38.

Translating Comics into Literature and Vice Versa: Intersections between Comics and Non- Graphic Narratives in the United States , in Marina Camboni et al. (a cura di), Translating America.The Circulation of Narratives, Commodities, and Ideas between Italy, Europe, and the United States, Bern, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 217-238.

Bye Bye Black Dahlia : Pynchon, Coover e il vizio intrinseco della detective fiction , in Fictions, vol. X (2011), pp. 45-53. (FASCIA A)

Vetri incrinati. La narrativa di J. G. Ballard , Prefazione a Simone Brioni, J. G. Ballard. Il futuro quotidiano, Roma, Prospettiva Editrice, 2011, pp. 9-29.

Peace Tower , in Italian Americana, vol. 29, pp. 116-117. (FASCIA A)

Translating a Book Into Another Book? Graphic Novels between Comics and Literature , in Marina Camboni, Andrea Carosso, Sonia Di Loreto (a cura di), Translating America. Importing, Translating, Misrepresenting, Mythicizing, Communicating America. Proceedings of the 20th AISNA Biennial Conference, Torino, September 24-26, 2009, Otto, Torino, pp. 378-385.

Supereroi postmoderni: letteratura e graphic novel negli Stati Uniti , in Fictions, vol. IX (2010), pp. 31-58. (FASCIA A)

There s an Empty Space Where America Used to Be : Art and Terrorism in Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day and Don DeLillo s Falling Man, in: Marina Camboni et al. (a cura di), USA: Identities Cultures and Politics in National Transnational and Global Perspectives, EUM, Macerata, 2009, pp. 555-565.

L arcobaleno della paranoia. Dalla paranoia di Gravity s Rainbow alla dietrologia di Underworld , in Ácoma, vol. 35, n. XV (Winter 2008), pp. 61-76. (FASCIA A)

Strade-geroglifico e paranoia postmoderna , in Fictions, vol. VI (2008), pp. 39-50. (FASCIA A)

Like Metaphor, Only Different. A Reading of Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day , in GRAAT, vol. 3 (March 2008), pp. 56-64.

She Stands Before Me as a Living Child : W. B. Yeats e Sylvia Plath tra modernismo e postmodernismo , in Giuseppe Massara (a cura di), Di specchio in specchio. Studi su W. B. Yeats, Roma, NEU, 2008, pp. 67-86.

INTERVENTI A SEMINARI E CONFERENZE INTERNAZIONALI
2022:
Clodia, Cleopatra, Cytheris: Women s Voices in Thornton Wilder s The Ides of March (1948) . International Conference and Translation Workshop: Audio/Visual Romans: Women Speak Up. Roma, 3-6 maggio 2022.

Convers(at)ion in The Confidence-Man: Herman Melville s Dialogue with Pierre Bayle . 13° International Melville Society Conference: Melville s Energies: Aesthetics, Politics, Ecologies. Parigi, 27-30 giugno 2022.

2019:
Publishing Pynchon in Italy, or, The Bompiani Papers . International Pynchon Week: Pynchon in Rome (co-organizzatore), Sapienza Università di Roma, 11-14 giugno (Chair).

Sight and the City: Arthur Miller s Focus and Philip Roth s Nemesis . International Conference: Bad Cities. Literature & Urban Violence, Sapienza Università di Roma, 3-4 giugno.

2018:
Inventing (Post)Memory, Writing (Non)Fiction: Jerzy Kosinski, Philip Roth, and the Legacy of World War II . International Conference: Past (Im)Perfect Continuous: Trans-Cultural Articulations of the Postmemory of WWII, Sapienza Università di Roma, 26-28 giugno.

Circumambulate the City of a Dreamy Sabbath Afternoon : Herman Melville s New York . International Conference on Urban Studies: Metropolitan Identities, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, London (UK), 12 maggio.

2017:
Brag No More, Old England! Melville, Hawthorne, and their English Ambiguities . International Conference: Melville at King s. The Eleventh International Melville Society Conference, King s College, London (UK), 27-30 giugno.

Sounds like Jew Talk to Me : Assimilation and Alienation in Bernard Malamud s The People . International Conference: Multicultural Migrant Fictions. Italian-American, Jewish-American and Indian-American Literary Representations. University of Georgia, Athens (GA), 10-11 aprile.

2016:
Hecklers, Hackers, and Hijackers: Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis and Thomas Pynchon s Bleeding Edge. Convegno internazionale: Common and/or Alien, Sapienza Università di Roma, 30-31 maggio.

History of Futures Past: Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis and Thomas Pynchon s Bleeding Edge . International Conference: Fiction Rescues History, Parigi (FR), 18-20 febbraio.

2015:
Ruin Your Life: Draw Study Comics! Il fumetto secondo Chris Ware . Il contesto ibrido, Venezia, 30 novembre-2 dicembre.

The Old Melville and the Sea: The Idea of the Harbor in Melville s Literary Career . XXIII AISNA International Conference: Harbors: Flows and Migrations of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas. The U.S.A. in/and the World, Napoli, 24-26 settembre.

Peacock Tails and Spouter Whales: Is Thomas Pynchon Really Herman Melville? . International Pynchon Week: Pynchon on the Edge, Atene (GR), 8-12 giugno.

2014:
Whose Old Home? Ideas of England in the Fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville . Hawthorneurope: Transatlantic Conversation, Università di Macerata, 22-24 ottobre.

2013:
Better to Brave the Immense of Sea : Maritime Imagination and the Discourse of Emancipation in Herman Melville s Clarel . XXII AISNA International Conference: Discourses of Emancipation and the Boundaries of Freedom, Trieste, 19-21 settembre.

Was There Nothing for It but Valletta? Malta as Prime Location in Thomas Pynchon s V. International Pynchon Week: Lines, Legacies, Anniversaries, Durham (UK), 5-8 agosto.

2011:
Asterios Polyp and the Institutionalization of Comics: A Perspectivist Vision . I International Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels: Sites of Visual and Textual Innovation, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (Spagna) 9-12 novembre.

Why Are Comics No Longer Comic? Graphic Narrative in Contemporary America . XXI AISNA International Conference: Democracy and Difference. The United States in Multidisciplinary and Comparative Perspectives, Trento, 26-29 ottobre.

Something Further May Follow of this Masquerade : Reading The Confidence-Man Through Its Contemporary Adaptations . The Eight International Melville Conference: Melville and Rome. Empire Democracy Belief Art, Roma, 22-26 giugno.

2010:
Bye Bye Black Dahlia : Thomas Pynchon and the Inherent Vice of Detective Fiction. International Pynchon Week: Of Pynchon and Vice: America s Inherent Others, Lublino (Polonia), 9-12 giugno.

Uncharted Landscapes of American Youth: Vladimir Nabokov s Lolita. EAAS Biennial Conference, Dublino (Irlanda), 26-29 marzo.

2009:
Bye Bye Black Dahlia : Thomas Pynchon e il vizio intrinseco della detective fiction, International Conference: Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction. Teorie e applicazioni didattiche, Viterbo, 3-4 dicembre.

Translating a Book into Another Book? Graphic Novels between Comics and Literature. XX AISNA International Conference: Translating America. Importing, Translating, Misrepresenting, Mythicizing, Communicating America, Torino, 24-26 settembre (Co-chair).

Against that Day: Thomas Pynchon s Deconstruction of 9/11 Representations. 2009 NeMLA Annual Conference, Boston, MA, (USA) 26-28 febbraio.

2008:
A Schizophrenic Manner of Talking : Postmodernist Fiction and Political Discourse. XIX AISNA International Conference, What Language(s) For What Politics? American Ideologies and Rhetorics in a Multicultural Society, Università degli Studi di Catania, Ragusa, 3-4 ottobre.

Empty Space Where America Used to Be: DeLillo s Deconstruction of 9/11 Rhetoric. XIX Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA (USA) 22-25 maggio.

2007:
There s an Empty Space Where America Used to Be: Art and Terrorism in Thomas Pynchon s Against the Day (2006) and Don DeLillo s Falling Man (2007). XIX AISNA International Conference, USA: Identities Cultures and Politics in National, Transnational and Global Perspective, Università degli Studi di Macerata, 4-6 ottobre.

2006:
Two, of Course There Are Two: The Divided Art of Sylvia Plath. Disjunctions 2006: Lost in Translation, University of California, Riverside, CA (USA), 7-8 aprile.

ALTRE ATTIVITÀ DI COLLABORAZIONE EDITORIALE, RECENSIONI, EDITING E TRADUZIONI

Collaborazione con il quotidiano Il Manifesto in qualità di critico letterario e recensore sul supplemento culturale Alias Domenica (dal 2016 a oggi).
Collaborazione con la casa editrice Arnoldo Mondadori Editore in qualità di traduttore e per la stesura di apparati critici e bio-bibliografici di volumi Oscar Mondadori relativi ad autori inglesi e americani (dal 2010 a oggi).
Collaborazione con l agenzia di servizi editoriali Clarel in qualità di consulente, traduttore e editor.
Redattore per la rivista Costellazioni .

Curriculum redatto in conformità a quanto prescritto dall'art. 4 del Codice in materia di protezione dei dati personali e dall art. 26 del D. Lgs. 14 marzo 2013, n. 33, al fine della pubblicazione.
Roma, 3 aprile 2023