The course aims to provide a first introduction to the main comparative methodologies, in relation to a specific theme, leading students to experience significant forms of comparing texts from different languages and cultures. A particular attention will be devoted to the morphological dialectic between constants and variations in large/little scales of temporal and cultural relations.
The course consists in a) lectures on historical and critical presentation of some comparative methods and their analytical, historiographical, formalist, stylistic and cultural-oriented categories; b) close-reading of texts belonging to different European literatures and related to the course-theme, in order to apply the comparative methodologies.
The Fictional Problem of Reality. Theories, paradigms and narrative model to represent Reality in Literature.
Theoretical and Critical Texts
Aristotele, Poetica; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, 1946; Dolezel, Heterocosmica, John Hopkins UP, 2000; Friedrich Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, Verso 2013
Fictional Texts:
Lazarillo de Tormes; Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart; Pérez Galdós, Las novelas de Torquemada; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
NICOLA FERRARI (President)
MARCO SUCCIO
II semester
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Oral test, consisting in a critic dialogue with the teacher (length: about three quarters of an hour) to verify the acquisition of methodological skills, by the analysis of texts presented by the candidates.
The evaluation of the test will depend on the mastery of analytical and historiographical methods and on the personal capacity for their application.
