OVERVIEW

"UNDERSTANDING THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS: FROM THE FIRST EXPLORERS TO GLOBAL WARMING"

This course examines the role of wilderness in the literature and culture of the United States. From the colonial contacts with wilderness the course will explore several representations belonging to different cultural traditions of this space. Texts writen by native, white and African-American authors will be considered. Special attention will be given to both the female and male perspectives on wilderness.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims to familiarize students with major trends of American culture and with important works in different genres (fiction, essay, drama, poetry, film). Students will learn how to analyze such works competently from a historical and generic perspective.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the completion of the course the student

- will have become familiar with major American historical and cultural developments, and with some major American writers and texts;

- will be able to interpret these developments in English and Italian with reference to  fiction, poetry, drama and literary theory;

- will be able to contextualize and analyze texts and documents of notable complexity and historical significance and describe their cultural and linguistic peculiarities.

TEACHING METHODS

This is a lecture course. Semester II, three hours per week, 6 CFU.

Students must enroll for this course in Aulaweb where they will find weekly notes & resources.  

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

This course focuses on some of the most relevant ways in which American literature and culture has dealt with the physical environment, considering texts from both narrative and nonfictional prose, and with also some attention to poetry. Lessons will offer a close reading of the three novels in bibliography while other texts will be introduced to follow the changes the idea of wilderness has undergone from the colonial period to the XXI century.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Integral texts

Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Linda Hogan Solar Storms

Reading List (provisional & indicative)

Thoreau “Walden” (extracts)

Jackson Turner “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

Johm O’Sullivan “Manifest Destiny”

N. Scott Momaday, “A First American Views His Land”

Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass” (extracts)

Emily Dickinson Poems (extracts)

Frederick Douglass. “The Heroic Slave” (extracts)

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers (extracts)

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! (extracts)

Handsome Lake, “How America Was Discovered”

Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron”

Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”

Mark Twain “The Adventure of Huckelberry Finn” (extracts)

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

MASSIMO BACIGALUPO (President)

PAOLA ANNA NARDI

LESSONS

LESSONS START

Lessons will start on the 26th of February 2018

Class schedule

ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

EXAMINATION PROCEDURE

There will be a written exam (3 hours), which can be taken in February, June-July, September-October  2018 or February 2019.

The exam is in three parts:
Part 1 - Fill in the blank (10 questions);
Part 2 - Short Answer (5 questions);
Part 3 - Essay questions (Answer 3 questions chosen from a list). 

ASSESSMENT METHODS

See Examination Procedure. The written exams are graded by the lecturer and a colleague in the same discipline who have previously agreed on criteria of evaluation, as outlined in the course.

Exam schedule