AIMS AND CONTENT

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students who attend this course regularly and study the assigned texts

• know some aspects of the late 19th-early 20th century reflection on the experience of the modern metropolis;
• know significant historical-critical studies on the representation of London;
• know analytically a small corpus of literary texts of the period, can describe their main themes and formal features, and relate them to specific historical and cultural contexts;
• are able to make use of insights and ideas offered by critical studies.

TEACHING METHODS

Lectures in English interspersed with activities aimed at encouraging active participation in class. Attendance is highly recommended. Students who are unable to attend will have to refer to an ad-hoc reading list. 

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

This course aims to introduce students to the study of the literature about London from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, focusing on the late-Victorian short story (Prof. Villa), impressionist and modernist non-fiction writing (Prof. Colombino) and, finally, the poetic experimentation of the avant-gardes (Prof. Michelucci). Strolling without aim or destination, losing oneself in the city streets and immersing oneself in the crowd, while maintaining a detached posture: this is the experience of the flâneur described by Baudelaire, which inspired the urban journeys of much of the London literature of the period. The physical space and places of the modern city become the landscape of modernity par excellence — sensationally recounted by tabloids, traversed by new means of transport, captured in fragments by photography and in motion by early cinema. Their significance is both ideological and aesthetic: they materialise specific political conditions and social relations, and at the same time solicit perceptions that redefine the subject, fracturing and multiplying its identity.The course focuses on a selection of texts by authors who have represented this experience in their writings.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

All students will have to study a selection of critical articles, contextual materials, and the following literary texts, which will be made available on aulaweb:

• E.A. Poe, The Man of the Crowd (1840)
• George Egerton/Mary Chavelita Dunne, “The Lost Masterpiece” (1894)
• Charlotte Mew, “Passed” (1894)
• Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London (1905). Excerpts.
• Virginia Woolf, ’Street Haunting. A London Adventure’(1927)
• Virginia Woolf, "Flying Over London" (1950; posthumous)
• T. S. Eliot et al., A selection of poems

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

LESSONS

LESSONS START

February 2025.

Class schedule

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE MOD.2

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

This course is assessed by a 3-hour written examination in English. The exam paper covers all parts of the syllabus (literary history, poems and other texts commented in class; and the assigned critical material). The final mark will result from the average of the marks related to the three parts of the syllabus.

Students who attend regularly and actively will be able to opt for alternative forms of assessment on selected parts of the syllabus.

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The exam paper involves open-ended questions (on the historical period, the cultural contexts, the main authors) and guided commentaries of literary texts. Open-ended questions test knowledge and comprehension; guided commentaries test the students’ ability to recognise and describe the main formal and thematic features of specific  texts, and connect them to contextual historical and cultural information; it also tests the students’ comprehension of, and ability to respond to, the critical essays included in the reading list. 

FURTHER INFORMATION

• Attendance is strongly recommended. At the beginning of the course students will have to enroll in AulaWeb. Enrollment for exams is online (www.unige.it).
• This syllabus is valid till July 2026.
• Students who have valid certification of physical or learning disabilities on file with the University and who wish to discuss possible accommodations or other circumstances regarding lectures, coursework and exams, should speak both with the instructors and with Prof. Sara Dickinson (sara.dickinson@unige.it), the Department’s disability liaison.