LETTERATURA INGLESE COMPARATA

The course intends to enhance and/or consolidate the students’ general historical-literary knowledge and their critical awareness of key issues of the twentieth-century British literary culture, with a special attention being paid to women’s fiction and Anglophone postcolonial literature through a close reading of some relevant primary texts supported by ad-hoc critical-methodological tools. The course intends to advance the students’ reading and interpretive skills with the aim of developing a more mature critical competence concerning the aesthetic configurations and ethico-political implications of literary texts.

Lectures.

Module A (3 ECTS): The “queer design” of Modernist Fiction: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This module will offer a reading of Virginia Woolf’s theoretical texts on “Modern Fiction” and various critical interpretations of her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in order to explore the complexity of British and European Modernism and its innovative impulse on the literary production of the 20th century, which will extend its influence on postmodernism.

We will examine the formal, structural, thematic and narrative elements of Woolf’s text through a variety of critical approaches: our aim is to discover the consonance between Woolf’s modernist narrative experimentalism – her project to radically “re-form” literary conventions and genres – and her socio-political vision in the historical context of Great Britain and Europe between the wars. Mrs Dalloway, as a “city symphony” novel, allows for a multiplicity of readings which reveal its rich tapestry of themes and visions: pacifism, anti-imperialism, critique of hetero-patriarchy, resistance to medical, psychiatric and sexological discourses, all of which are intertwined with poetical and philosophical musings on time, reality, life and death.

Module B (3 ECTS): Stories in the Margins: Postcolonial Palimpsests of the Imperial Archive

As a set of opposing cultural practices, postcolonial writing has often interrogated the verbal and visual representations of the West’s imperial archive with the aim to expose its discursive mystifications and historical erasures, thus giving voice to the silenced experience of the colonial other. The intermedial engagement with literature and the visual arts by the British Indo-Caribbean writer David Dabydeen is particularly apt to retrace the elusive contours of a colonial past haunted by those others it seeks to forget. The ekphrastic textualisation of his epic poem “Turner” (1994) deconstructs the ways in which the visual syntax of J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship obliquely memorialises the horrors of the Middle Passage by the very mechanism of their concealment. The novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999) – ostensibly inspired by William Hogarth’s engravings by the same title – partly re-visions Dabydeen’s own earlier poem through ekphrastic prose that inserts itself into the blank spaces of Hogarth’s engravings and Turner’s painting.

Module B will closely examine the specific aesthetic processes of intermedial selection, transformation, rearrangement, and displacement by which Dabydeen’s texts excavate the covert intricacies of colonialism in order to create a culturally productive re-vision of its blind spots, thus reinvesting with presence the forgotten others of the West’s imperial past.

Module A (3 ECTS)

The “queer design” of Modernist Fiction: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Primary texts:

- V. Woolf, La signora Dalloway. Testo inglese a fronte. A cura di M. Sestito, Venezia, Marsilio 2012

- “Modern Fiction” in Selected Essays, Oxford UP, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009, pp. 6-12 [trad. it. “La narrativa moderna”, in Il lettore comune, Genova, Il Melangolo, 1995, pp. 166-175]
- “Professions for Women”, in Women and Writing, London, The Women’s Press 1979, pp. 57-63 [trad. it. Le donne e la scrittura, Milano, La Tartaruga 1981, available from the library]
- [Optional]: V. Woolf, “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”, in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, London, The Hogarth Press, 1953, pp. 102-109 (available from the library)

Criticism:
- V. Amoruso, “La signora Dalloway”, in id. Virginia Woolf, Bari, Adriatica 1968, pp. 111-148 [available from the library]
- E. Barrett, “Unmasking Lesbian Passion: The Inverted World of Mrs. Dalloway”, in E. Barrett, P. Cramer eds., Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, N.Y. & London, New York University Press, 1997, pp. 146-164

- [Optional]: E. Douglas, “Queering Flowers, Queering Pleasures in ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’”, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 82, Fall 2012, pp. 13-15.
- J. Goldman, “Contexts” e “Mrs. Dalloway”, in The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge UP 2006, pp. 33-36 e pp. 53-58 [available from the library]
- J. Goldman, “From Mrs. Dalloway to The Waves”, in S. Sellers ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 49-59
- L. Marcus, “Virginia Woolf and The Cinema: Modernity and Montage”, in id. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period, Oxford UP 2007, pp. 139-143

- S. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: the Sexual Politics of the City, University of North Carolina Press, 1985, pp. 91-121
- S. Sellers, “Chronology”, in id., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. xii-xvii
Methodology:
- F. Marenco, “Il romanzo, quel cannibale”, in F. Marenco, a cura di, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, Torino UTET, 1996, vol. 3, pp. 42-48 e pp. 66-73 [available from the library]
- M. Pagnini, “Difficoltà e oscurità: il linguaggio del Modernismo”, in F. Marenco, a cura di, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, Torino UTET, 1996, vol. 3, pp. 24-40 [available from the library]
Web resources:
- Cenni biografici su V. Woolf (Yale University)
http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf#cite_note-15
- E. Showalter, “Exploring Consciousness” (video, British Library) (https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/exploring-consciousness-and-the-modern-an-introduction-to-mrs-dalloway
- D. Bradshaw, “Mrs Dalloway and the First World War” (article, British Library)
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/mrs-dalloway-and-the-first-world-war

- M. Taunton, “Modernism, Time and Consciousness: the Influence of Bergson and Proust” (article, British Library)
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/modernism-time-and-consciousness-the-influence-of-henri-bergson-and-marcel-proust
- P. Cohen, “The Virginia Woolf of ‘The Hours’ Angers the Real One’s Fans”, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2003 (article)
http://donswaim.com/nytimes.hours.html

Module B (3 ECTS)

Stories in the Margins: Postcolonial Palimpsests of the Imperial Archive

Primary texts:

- D. Dabydeen, “Turner”, in Turner; New and Selected Poems [1994], Leeds: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2003, pp. 1-40 (available from the library).

- D. Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress [1999], London: Vintage, 2000 (available from the library).

Criticism:

• About the author:

1. D. Dabydeen: “Coolie Odyssey,” in F. Birbalsingh (ed.), Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, Warwick University Caribbean Studies, Macmillan, 1996, pp. 167-82.
2. L. Eckstein, “Getting Back to the Idea of Art as Art: An Interview with David Dabydeen,” World Literature Written in English 39.1 (2001), pp. 27-36.
3. M. Stein, “David Dabydeen Talks to Mark Stein,” Wasafiri 29 (Spring 1999), pp. 27-29.

• About “Turner”:

1. T. Döring, “Turning the colonial gaze,” Third Text, 11:38, (1997), pp. 3-14.
2. M. Frost, “The guilty ship’: Ruskin, Turner and Dabydeen”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45: 3 (2010), pp. 371-88.
3. A. L. Ward, “‘Words are all I have left of my eyes’: blinded by the past in J. M. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead and Dying and David Dabydeen’s Turner”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42. 1 (2007), pp. 47-58.

• About A Harlot’s Progress:

1. C. Molineaux, “Hogarth’s Fashionable Slaves: Moral Corruption in Eighteenth-Century London,” ELH, 72 (2005), pp. 495-520.
2. S. Muñoz-Valdivieso, “Africa in Europe: Narrating Black British History in Contemporary Fiction”, Journal of European Studies, 40. 2 (Jun 2010), pp. 159-74.
3. A. L. Ward, “David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress: re-presenting the slave narrative genre,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43: 1 (2007), pp. 32-44.

Methodology:

1. W. W. Walters, At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing, Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2005 (“Introduction: Diaspora Consciousness and Literary Expression,” pp. vii-xxv).
2. Ania Loomba et al. (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham, MD: Duke UP, 2005 (“Introduction,” pp. 1-38).

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All the books listed in the programs can be consulted in the Library.