Docente

Daniela Daniele daniela.daniele@uniud.it

Crediti

6 CFU

Obiettivi formativi specifici

Affine ai corsi di letteratura e civiltà inglese, l’insegnamento si propone di affrontare e approfondire l’analisi specifica di temi, generi, tendenze di area anglo-americana e di presentare autori e opere di particolare rilievo.

Programma

"The Innocents Abroad": 19th-c. American travel narratives

This class will discuss the wide number of fictional and semi-autobiographical literary genres which reported the experience of travel and expatriation of 19th-century Americans.
Ranging from Washington Irving's _Sketch Book_ to Mark Twain's 1869 satire of American tourism in _The Innocents Abroad_, we will study Margaret Fuller's Romantic journeys to the Western frontier, Herman Melville's exotic dislocation of the domestic racial fights which led to Civil War and the problematic reaction of Henry James's heroines to European artifacts and artificial manners.
Excerpts from the travel notebooks composed by the established literary figures above listed will be discussed in relation to relevant travel books of coeval women writers such as Sophia Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott.

Bibliography

Washington Irving, _The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent._ (1819-20), in _History, Tales and Sketches, The Library of America, 1983.
Margaret Fuller, _Summer on the Lakes in 1843_ (1844), Ward and Lock, 1861.
Herman Melville, _Benito Cereno_ (1856), ed. Luigi Ballerini, Venezia, Marsilio, 2012.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Marble Faun. A Romance of Monte Beni_, Sears, 1860.
Mark Twain, _The Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrims's Progress_, American Publishing, 1869.
Henry James, _Il carteggio Aspern_ (1888), ed. Sergio Perosa, Venezia, Marsilio, 1991.
----, _Amato ragazzo. Lettere a Hendrik C. Andersen. 1899-1915_, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Venezia, Marsilio, 2000.
Mark Twain, _The Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrims' Progress_, American publishing, 1869.
Susan Howe, _The Birth-mark unsettling the wilderness in American Literary History_, Wesleyan U. P.1993.

Suggested reading

Dion Boucicault, "The Octoroon" (1859) in _Early American Drama_, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards, Penguin 1997, pp. 444-494.
Renée Bergland and Gary Williams, _Philosophies of Sex. Critical Essays on _The Hermaphrodite_, Ohio State Univ., 2012.
Mary Suzanne Schriber, _Writing Home. American Women Abroad 1830-1920_, Virginia U. P., 1997.

Requirements

A final paper written in the MLA or Chicago style on a topic related to our classwork and officially approved by the instructor. Translation students might replace their final research paper with a translation from texts related to the subject, and not yet available in Italian. Even this assignment should be negotiated in advance with the instructor.