28607 - English Literature I (First Language) L

Academic Year 2018/2019

  • Docente: Samuel Porter Whitsitt
  • Credits: 6
  • SSD: L-LIN/10
  • Language: English
  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Forli
  • Corso: First cycle degree programme (L) in Intercultural and Linguistic Mediation (cod. 8059)

Learning outcomes

The student will be acquainted with the basics concerning the literature of the Anglo-speaking world, and be able to identify and recognize those aspects as they appear in specific texts, as well as being able to independently develop additional knowledge of higher-level cultural and literary skills and apply them to other literary texts.

Course contents

My course can best be described as learning how to read. And the idea is that there is no better text to work with than the literary text. Perhaps one could call it the art of the “second look” – that wonderful moment when you have a sense that what you thought you saw the first time might not quite be what you thought, so it needs that second look. So maybe the course should really be called, the art of the second look, that second glance. The so-called “double-take.” And to help us along, we will work with those awfully named concepts like metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, that I hope to make, exciting!

Readings/Bibliography

Our primary texts will by short stories by a variety of authors (Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc.), some plays (M. Butterfly, and Doubt), a variety of films, often based on the works we have read, and the occasional short novel -- like Coetzee's Disgrace -- an example only.

Teaching methods

Lectures and discussions

Assessment methods

Usually the final grade is based on one final written exam

Teaching tools

Books, film, short stories (usually photocopied) -- and any text that lends itself to being "read"!

Office hours

See the website of Samuel Porter Whitsitt