AMERICAN LITERATURE

The course aims at providing students with a good knowledge of Twentieth and Twenty-first American literary culture, through the analysis of the most important historical and cultural phases of the United States.
Ability to apply Knowledge and understanding: Stimulated mainly through the close reading of literary and non-literary texts, it will be supported by the historical and theoretical contextualization of the selected texts and literary voices.
Making judgments: Judgment skills will be encouraged through seminars, active reading sessions (aloud reading & discussions) followed by critical debates in the classroom and writing practice.
Communication skills: They will be encouraged through interactive readings and critical debates. The texts will be read and analyzed in their original language, so as to enrich the linguistic and lexical abilities of the students.
Learning skills: the work will be carried out both in the classroom and in the laboratory, where writing and listening practice, critical reading activities will aim to stimulate the students' cognitive and linguistic skills.

The course is structured in 27 lessons, of 2 hours each.

Practical activities will regard essay writing/autobiographical writing and small research work that may also partly be carried out as a home assignment.

American literature and culture, XX and XXi centuries.

Discoursive relevance will be given to issues of multiculturalism, gender, race and ethnicity.

• "American Studies": from nationalist to planetary perspectives; contemporary literary debates from the fifties to present day.
• "The tranquillized fifties"; the consensus culture; the historical and literary landscape of post-World War II America.
• "The African American experience": texts, movements, problems, historical and cultural overviews. Richard Wright: "Black Boy" (1946).
• "The problem that has no name". Sylvia Plath, Poetry & Fiction. Selections from "Lady Lazarus & other poems (1965)", The Bell Jar (1963).
• Adolescence, travel and personal dislocations in conteporary American literature: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) e Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957).
• The Beat Generation: myths, aspirations, interventions: Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1956).
• The sixties counterculture: movements, cultural and literary forms: Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)+ film (1975).
• Narrating the postmodern: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965).
• Multiculturalism in the US. Debates, interventions, literary, cultural, ethnic and gender identities. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1975).

1.Fink, Guido. Storia Della Letteratura Americana. Firenze: Sansoni, 1991.

2. Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

3. Palumbo-Liu, David. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997.

4.Nelson, Emmanuel S. Ethnic American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students. , 2017.

5. Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Vols. D, E. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.

Fiction & Poetry

1. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and other poems. Hong Kong: Naxos Music Library, 2008. © 1956

2. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. , 2019 © 1957

3.Kesey, K. One flew over the cuckoo's nest. Viking:New York, 1971 ©1971.

4. Kingston, M. H. The woman warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. London: Picador, 2015 ©1975

5. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 2019 ©1963.; Poems. New York: Knopf, 1998. ©

6. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. , 2014 © 1965

7. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. S.l.: Vintage Classics, 2020 © 1946