The course aims
to:
- discuss the principal evolutionary trajectories
of late modern and contemporary English literature, thus presenting
significant authors and texts from an ecocritical perspective;
- strengthen and refine the tools of textual and
critical analysis already acquired during the initial three years of
study, with the objective of enhancing students’ critical and
methodological skills.
Although attendance is not mandatory, it is strongly
recommended, as it represents a valuable opportunity for a direct and
structured engagement with the themes explored.
Module A – From
Pastoral to Apocalypse: Nature in Late Modern and Contemporary English
Literature (6 CFU)
The course will be held and discussed in English. It will begin with a
reconstruction of the historical and cultural background of late modern and
contemporary English literature from an ecocritical perspective. This will be
followed by direct engagement with the texts in the classroom. These texts,
which are grouped into four thematic macro-areas, will be discussed and analysed
also at the stylistic and rhetorical level.
The study materials will include the PowerPoint presentation that will
be used in class, selected excerpts from the literary works under discussion, as
well as the texts and critical/methodological essays listed below.
Students will also read one of the novels which are included in the list below.
1. Ecological Romanticism
- Charlotte Smith, Rural Walks (1795)
- Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal (1800-1803)
- Jane Austen, Emma (1815)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
(1818)
2. Nature and Industrialisation in
Victorian Times
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
- William Morris, The Hollow Land (1856)
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
3. Modernism and the Crisis of Nature
- D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)
- Charlotte Mew, The Trees Are Down (1920)
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
4. Environmental Issues in
Contemporary Literature
- Ted Hughes, The Iron Woman (1993)
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
- Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009)
- Ian McEwan, Solar (2010)
Module B – T. S. Eliot and the Wasteland of Modernity: An Ecocritical Perspective
(3 CFU)
This module – which will be held and discussed in Italian – aims to
foster an in-depth critical reflection on The
Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot through an ecocritical
approach, examining the tensions between modernity, environmental crisis, and
cultural decay. The analysis will focus on the relationship between landscape
and symbolic disintegration, exploring how the text reflects the ecological and
social anxieties of its time.
In
addition to selected excerpts and critical-methodological readings, students
will read Eliot’s poem considering Carmen Gallo’s Italian version T. S. Eliot: La terra devastata, Milano,
Il Saggiatore, 2021.Module A – From Pastoral to Apocalypse: Nature in Late Modern and Contemporary English
Literature (6 CFU)
The lines of English literature from the 19th-20th
centuries are considered acquired. Those who come from the study of other
literatures should refer to the professors for the necessary bibliographic
recommendations.
The above-mentioned texts/extracts will be studied
from critical and methodological perspectives:
2. Literary Criticism
- Feder, Helena, “Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, and
the Biological Idea of Culture”, in Greg Garrard (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp.
225-240.
- Serenella
Iovino, Ecologia letteraria. Una
strategia di sopravvivenza, Milano, Edizioni Ambiente, 2014,
pp. 9-74.
- Raine, Anne “Ecocriticism and Modernism”, in Greg
Garrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2014, pp. 98-117.
- Rigby, Kate, “Romanticism and Ecocriticism”, in
Greg Garrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2014, pp. 60-79.
- Rubinstein, Michael and Justin Neuman, Modernisms
and Its Environments, London, Bloomsbury, pp. 57-87.
3. Metodology
·
Iovino, Serenella, Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza, Milano,
Edizioni Ambiente, 2014, pp. 9-74.
Module B – T. S. Eliot and the Wasteland of Modernity: An Ecocritical Perspective (3
CFU)
1. Primary Texts
- T. S. Eliot, The
Waste Land (1922)
- Carmen Gallo,
T.S. Eliot: La terra devastata,
Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2021.
2. Critical Readings
- Elizabeth Black, The
Nature of Modernism: Ecocritical Approaches to the Poetry of Edward
Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew, New York,
Routledge, 2018, pp. 87-111.
- Gabrielle McIntire, “The Waste Land as
Ecocritique,” in Gabrielle McIntire (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to “The Waste Land”, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 178-193.
- Alessandro
Serpieri, T. S. Eliot: La terra desolata,
Milano, BUR Rizzoli, 1985, pp. 5-47.
Please remember that in compliance with art 171
L22.04.1941, n. 633 and its amendments, it is illegal to copy entire books or
journals, only 15% of their content can be copied.
For further information on sanctions and regulations
concerning photocopying please refer to the regulations on copyright (Linee
Guida sulla Gestione dei Diritti d’Autore) provided by AIDRO - Associazione
Italiana per i Diritti di Riproduzione delle opere dell’ingegno (the Italian
Association on Copyright).
All
the books listed in the programs can be consulted in the Library.