31146 - English Literature 2 (M-Z)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students will be familiar with canonical texts from the Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian periods and they will be able to situate these texts within English Literary History. They will be able to read, understand and translate texts from English into Italian, and to deal with some basic critical methods and tools, in order to elaborate comments and critical opinions on the literary texts read during the course.

Course contents

Literature between Art and Science: Genre and Representation Forged by Skill and by Practice

The course, taught in English, will examine the development of English Literature from the Restoration to the Victorian Age through an interdisciplinary and inter-artistic approach allowing students to be acquainted and critically engage with several texts and literary and artistic genres produced during this period, including poetry, fiction, dramas, essays, scientific treaties, paintings and engravings.

This course will focus more specifically on the development of English literature during the “Romantic century” 1750–1850, analysing it through its interactions with science and art. As Jon Klancher has recently argued, the Romantic period was central to the forging of the differences between science and art. On the one hand, the traffic between art and science was more vigorous than now because both shared an interest in imaginative discovery, and both recognized that figurative language, including metaphors, similes, and analogies, could help generate creative and scientific discoveries and knowledge alike. Artists could consort with scientists, because artists had to be trained in anatomy and know how to convey knowledge, and scientists were surprisingly expected to feel. Science did not become professionalized and specialized until the early nineteenth century.

Besides the complementarity of science and art, the course also intends to explore the conjunction between literature and visual culture, and how the debate over the Horatian axiom ‘ut pictura poesis’, revived by the publication of Lessing’s Laokoön (1766), was interpreted and problematized in Romantic literature. As Peter de Bolla has observed, mid-eighteenth-century Britain was obsessed by “visibility, spectacle, display” [69]: theatrical performances, fairs, art exhibitions, scientific demonstrations, and even public hangings, as well as a multitude of concurrent factors, contributed to the widespread taste for visibility. The course will explore how acts of seeing and acts of imagination informed both literary and dramatic texts and how they interacted with visual artefacts.

Readings/Bibliography

A) English Literary History

For the history of English literature, students are expected to read the following textbook:

L. M. Crisafulli and K. Elam (eds), Manuale di letteratura e cultura inglese, Bologna, BUP, 2009 (from the eighteenth century to the end of the Victorian age: pp. 139-326).

 

International students and non-native speakers of Italian may read the relevant sections (from the eighteenth century to the Victorians) of the following:

A Brief history of English Literature, ed. John Peck and Martin Coyle, Palgrave, 2002, pp. 114-223 (B. Dip. Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, Coll.: Sala cons. 820.9 PEC).

The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler,
Cambridge University press, 2009, pp. 427-506 (B. Dip. Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, Coll.: Sala cons. 820.9007 CAM).

 

Primary texts and critical readings

Students are asked to read two novels, all extracts from primary texts read and commented in class, and the suggested critical texts. All extracts will be uploaded on-line and will be made available to students through the IOL platform.

Novel:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (any reliable edition in English)

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (any reliable edition in English)

 

Primary texts (extracts):

D. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

S. Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

L. Sterne, Tristram Shandy

J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

T. Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

H. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

A. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France

A. L. Barbauld, Select Poems

M. Robinson Lyrical Tales

J. Baillie, De Monfort

W. Blake, Songs of Innocence; Songs of Experience; Engravings

W. Wordsworth, Prelude, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; Rime of the Ancient Mariner

G. G. Byron selections from Don Juan, Cantos 1, 2, 9

G. G. Byron, Manfred

S. T. Coleridge, Selections from Biographia

J. Keats, Odes

P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

C. Lamb, Essays

W. Hazlitt, Essays

Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata

 

Critical readings:
Chico, Tita. “Introduction,” The Experimental Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.

Galperin, William H. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [extracts will be provided in IOL].

Jessica, Riskin. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 [extracts will be provided in IOL].

Johnson, Barbara. A Life with Mary Shelley. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014. [Chapter: “My Monster/My Self”]

Liberto, Fabio. “Shakespeare’s Visual Memorability during Romanticism”. In The Romantic Stage: A Many-Sided Mirror, a cura di Lilla Maria Crisafulli e Fabio Liberto, 87–110. Amsterdam; New-York: Rodopi/Brill, 2015.

Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. Picture Theory Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. [extracts will be provided in IOL]

Sha, Richard C. Imagination and Science in Romanticism. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. [extracts will be provided in IOL]

Thomas, Sophie. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. New York: Routledge, 2010. [extracts will be provided in IOL]

 

Teaching methods

Lectures in English; Textual Analysis of primary sources. The course will be co-taught with Prof. Richard C. Sha (American University, Washington).

Assessment methods

Students will be assessed and evaluated through a written test, which will be divided in two parts:

1. Multiple-choice and open questions on English literary history (from the eighteenth century to the Victorian Age);

2. Short essay and textual analysis of selected primary texts studied during the course.

Students who will attend classes regularly will be given the possibility to hand in a written essay on one of the studied topics before the end of the course. This may substitute the second part of the final exam.

The written exam aims at evaluating the student’s critical and methodological skills and knowledge of literary history, critical approaches, and primary texts and authors analysed during classes. Students must first demonstrate an appropriate knowledge of the literary history from the Eighteenth century to the Victorian period in order to carry out the exam with the second part, which consists in a short essay and the analysis of a given text and its critical contextualization.

Assessment Criteria. To be awarded a final mark between 27 and 30 cum laude students are expected to: show the ability to analyse in depth literary texts following the methodology introduced by the lecturer and/or in the set critical readings; possess and be able to present a thorough and organic knowledge of the topics discussed in class and/or in the set readings; show an excellent standard of expression; show the ability to use properly the technical language of philology and literary criticism. A mark between 23 and 26 will be awarded to students who will show: a good knowledge of the course contents; the ability to provide an accurate analysis of literary texts (although there might be some minor imperfections); a good standard of expression (with occasional minor flaws in the presentation and/or in the use of technical language). Students obtaining a mark between 18 and 22 will typically show: an adequate but superficial knowledge of the contents; a basic understanding of the texts and a limited ability to analyse them, an acceptable standard of expression with a fairly competent (although not always accurate) use of technical language. Poor knowledge of the set texts and course topics, inadequate ability to analyse literary texts; inaccurate and inappropriate expression with major problems in the use of technical language will result in a fail.

In some cases (for instance: non-native speakers of Italian), students might be allowed to substitute the written exam with a 3,000-word essay, whose topic must be agreed in advance with the lecturers.

Teaching tools

Frontal lectures with Power Point presentations, films, video-documentaries..

Office hours

See the website of Fabio Liberto