ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE I
Students will gain up to date critical tools in both literary criticism and tourism studies.
Transatlantic American Travel Writing from Modernism to World War II.
Primary Texts:
- Wharton, Edith, from Collected Stories 1891-1910 (Library of America, NY: 2001): “Souls Belated,” “The Duchess at Prayer,” “The House of the Dead Hand.”
-Wharton, Edith, from Collected Stories 1911-1937 (Library of America, NY: 2001): “A Glimpse,” “Roman Fever.”
- Wright, Sarah Bird, ed., from Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings (St. Martin’s Griffin, NY: 1996): “Italian Backgrounds” pp. 87-112).
-Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Penguin 2004.
-Cheever, John, from Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, NY: 2009): “The Bella Lingua,” “The Duchess,” “Brimmer,” “The Golden Age,” “The Death of Justina,” “Clementina,” “Boy in Rome,” “Marito in città.”
Critical Biliography:
-CULLER, Jonathan, "Semiotics of Tourism" (1981-1990, available online);
-MACCANNELL, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1976-1999, Introduction (pp.1-16); Chapts.
5 (pp. 91-107), 6 (pp. 109-133);
-URRY, John, and LARSEN Jonas, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, SAGE, 1990-2011,
Chapt. 1 (pp.1-30).
-Thompson Carlo, Travel Writing Routledge, London: 2011, Chapts 2 (pp. 9-33), 6 (pp. 130-167), 7 (pp. 168-198).
-Zuelow, Eric G.E., A History of Modern Tourism, Palgrave, 2016.
-Peel, Robin, “Wharton and Italy,” in Rattray, Laura, ed., Edith Wharton in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2012, pp. 285-292.
-Peel, Robin, “Realism and Ritual in the Italian Short Stories of Edith Wharton,” Journal
of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012 (available online)
Prampolini, Gaetano, “Italy in John Cheever’s Fiction,” Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani, 1984-1985, (4-5), pp. 153-169.
-De Biasio Anna, “The Gaze and the Iceberg: War Tourism in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929)”, RSAJournal, 28 (2017), pp. 37-55 (available online).
-Francescato, Simone and Martinez, Carlo, “Introduction,” RSAJournal, 28 (2017), pp. 9-20 (available online).
See the detailed program below
Regular lessons, class presentations, individual research on specific topics.
The final oral exam will be in English. 3-5 questions on the primary texts, on the critical bibliography, and on the combined approaches of traditional literary criticism and tourism studies. The final exam will assess: the student's knowledge of the primary texts, of their formal structure and symbolic language; the knowledge of the critical and methodological texts, as well as the student's ability to effectively employ and apply these approaches; the student's ability to integrate the different critical perspectives and subject areas of the course; the student's ability of elaborate personal insights into the fields and texts examined in class.
The grading scale goes from 1 to 30 cum laude (excellent). The exam is graded: excellent 30 cum laude-30; very good (27-29); good (24-26), fair (21 -23), sufficient (18-22), insufficient (17 or below).
Class and the final exam will be held in English. All textbooks are available at the university library, in bookshops or on the internet for some of them.
Check office hours are indicaated on the department website