Il corso è un’introduzione allo studio della letteratura Americana attraverso l’analisi di testi significativi all’interno del canone e la riflessione sul loro rapporto con la tradizione e il contesto culturale coevo.

Lezioni frontali

esame orale

una buona conoscenza della lingua inglese

Il corso segue lo sviluppo della narrativa statunitense attraverso il genere della short story, la cui evoluzione si delinea lungo un percorso diacronico.

Fonti primarie
Dispensa con antologia di short stories reperibile presso Libreria CLU

Gli studenti dovranno inoltre leggere almeno 2 romanzi a scelta fra i seguenti:
Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, A narrative of 1757, 1826
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale 1851
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876 or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

Fonti secondarie:
M.Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Introduction

Gli studenti dovranno inoltre scegliere almeno 3 saggi critici della lista seguente (tutti reperibili online)
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Ruth Perry, The Solitude of Hawthorne's Wakefield
American Literature, 1978 – JSTOR

Kate Chopin:
Information and critical analysis can be collected at :
KateChopin?.org, THE KATE CHOPIN INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY, 30–31 May 2012, http://www.katechopin.org/

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Diane Price Herndl, The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O., and Hysterical Writing. NWSA Journal Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 52-74
Or
Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Feminist's Struggle with Womanhood
The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall, 1980), pp. 503-526
Or
Jonathan Crewe, Queering The Yellow Wallpaper? Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Politics of Form, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 273-293
Or
Alys Eve Weinbaum, Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism, Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 271-302

Edith Wharton:
M.Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, Cambridge University Press, 2006
ch.10

Ernest Hemingway:
Charles J. Nolan, Jr., Hemingway's Out of Season: The Importance of Close Reading,
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature Vol. 53, No. 2 (1999), pp. 45-58 JSTOR
Or
Julian Smith, Hemingway and the Thing Left out, Journal of Modern Literature
Vol. 1, No. 2 (1970 - 1971), pp. 169-182 JSTOR

Sherwood Anderson:
Patricia Zumhagen, Using Improvisational Workshop to Explore Gender Issues in The Untold Lie, The English Journal, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Sep., 2005), pp. 82-87

Francis Scott Fitzgerald:
Tim Randell, Metafiction and the Ideology of Modernism in Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Vol. 10, (2012), pp. 108-129 JSTOR
or
Ronald Berman, American Dreams and Winter Dreams: Fitzgerald and Freudian Psychology in the 1920s The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Vol. 4, (2005), pp. 49-64 JSTOR

Joyce Carol Oates:
James Cruise, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? and Cold War Hermeneutics, South Central Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 95-109 JSTOR

Jamaica Kincaid,
Wendy Dutton Merge and Separate: Jamaica Kincaid's Fiction
World Literature Today Vol. 63, No. 3 (Summer, 1989), pp. 406-410

Toni Morrison:
Helane Adams Androne, Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison's Recitatif and Viramontes's Tears on My Pillow MELUS Vol. 32, No. 2, Thresholds, Secrets, and Knowledge (Summer, 2007), pp. 133-150

Raymond Carver,
M.Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, Cambridge University Press, 2006
ch.22

Studenti non frequentanti:
come sopra, ma 4 romanzi e 6 saggi critici.