30125 - Comparative Literatures (LM)

Learning outcomes

Students must attain a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. They are capable to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). Students attain the capacity for autonomous reflection and they are invited to formulate autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues.

Course contents

TOPIC

Solid Objects. Commodities, consumerism, collecting, material and visual culture in the Nineteenth century novel

The advent of modernity and capitalism brings about an increasing centrality of commodities, an unprecedented spread of “things” as catalysts of desire, and - thanks to reproduction technologies and a pervasive visual culture – fosters their circulation in the form of images, or their exhibition, in a new regime of visibility (museums, shop windows ...). The course aims to investigate some of the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves - from consumption to collecting - and to measure, starting from literary experience, the radical changes they produce: changes that radically affect the relationships between subject and object, between identity and otherness, between the animated and the inanimate, between the symbolic and the material.

Readings/Bibliography

1. Literary texts:

► Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues

► Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

► Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton

2. Critical texts:

► Francesco Orlando, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura, Torino, Einaudi, nuova edizione riveduta e ampliata (solo i capitoli I-II-II-IV, pp. 1-242).

► Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press.

► Jacques Rancière, “La mise à mort d'Emma Bovary", in Politique de la littérature.

►Erich Auerbach, “All’Hôtel de La Mole”, in Id., Mimesis. Il realismo nella letteratura occidentale, Torino, Einaudi, pp. 220-268.

► Gérard Genette, “Frontières du récit", in Figures II.

Assessment methods

The assessment methods will be an oral exam. Students who prefer a written examination (writing a paper), are invited to contact prof. Meneghelli at the beginning of the course.

Office hours

See the website of Donata Meneghelli