Corso di laurea magistrale in
Culture moderne comparate

Good knowledge of the English language (both written and oral). The course will be fully taught in English.

The course aims to:

- deepen the knowledge of the genre/literary form of the modern epic novel or world-system novel by placing it within the socio-cultural and literary context of 1930’s modernism and 1990s late-modernism

- provide students with tools and methodologies useful for the analysis of literary works.

- develop an understanding of how DeLillo’s Underworld works fit together into a broader literary history and how that literary history relates to concurrent historical and socio-cultural events

Expected learning outcomes

In compliance with the general aims stated in the SUA-CdS, upon completion of this course students should be able to

• Situate DeLillo’s work within American literature;
• Know the historical and cultural context in which the above mentioned work was written, read, and circulated;
• Know the narrative techniques and structural patterns used by DeLillo in his rewriting of the formal conventions of the world-system novel or modern epic

Lectures (for a total of 36 hours, i.e. 6 CFU) totally held in English, using texts, PowerPoint presentations, projection of visual material and films. Please, keep in mind that this is a literature class, which means that we will look closely at language, text form, and structure. Therefore, students will need to bring their individual books and the assigned readings to class every day. This course will run as a seminar, i.e. the emphasis will be placed on collegial discussion, enthusiasm, engagement, and ideas. Class participation and attendance are therefore encouraged.

Final oral exam (in English). Students will be asked questions on the reading list (primary required texts and secondary critical material) in order for the instructor to assess the students’ ability to

• critically articulate their response using a specific terminology
• show awareness of the major works and literary contexts examined
• recognize their existence in a mutually related frame of reference
• situate the primary texts within their cultural and literary contexts
• read and articulate comments on primary texts

Inserire testo qua

American Modern Epics and the Collective Novel. "Longing on a large scale is what makes history": From John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy to Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

If the quest for an American epic has been one of the recurring features of (Anglo) American national automythology or national autobiography (as well as literature) since its beginning, the epic novel – or modern epic – deconstructing the myths of American identity rhetoric and exposing the failure of its historical experience - has been one of the defining literary forms since Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Vast and large-scaled in both aesthetic and socio-ethical intent, presenting multilayered plotlines, decentered narratives, a collage of styles and a complex account of the social experience, the American modern epic or “world-system novel” – with its quest for denseness of theme and purpose, found a modernist variation in the so called collective novels of the 1930’s, that explored a wide social, historical and geographical context through a “loose” structure, proliferating character-systems, shifts in point of view, and interpolation of non-novelistic texts. John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36) - the benchmark for the sub-genre of the modernist collective novel – can be read as a likely antecedent for many post- or late-modernist novels such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). A monumental novel that looks at fifty years of American history (from the Cold War to the collapse of the Soviet Union) through a wide-lens of inexhaustibly interconnected plotlines and motifs held together by the material and metaphorical presence of "waste", Underworld presents the reader with a complex weave of fictional and historical characters, conjuring up historiographic metafiction, postmodern media mimicry and autobiographical record.The course focuses on the reading of DeLillo’s Underworld. Films will be presented during class.

Required texts

Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997, Underworld)

Suggested texts

John Dos Passos, The Big Money (1936), selected chapters

Short Cuts, Robert Altman (1993), film 

Babel, A. G. Inárritu (2006), film

The course is fully taught in English. Any (English) full edition of the required primary texts will do. Available Italian translations can be used by students during their preparation but  cannot substitute the original edition of the three works. Students must own the three texts and bring the relevant books to class at each session. Kindle and other e-book versions are not suitable for academic studies. Students are advised to buy these books before the start of classes.   

Non-attending students

The bibliography for non-attending students – that is students who will not, or cannot at least 70 percent of the time – is exactly the same as the bibliography for the other students. In addition to that they will be asked to read the complete text of The Big Money by John Dos Passos.

 

Required Bibliography

Peter Knight, Everything Is Connected: “Underworld”’s Secret History of Paranoia, 1999, Project Muse, pp. 1-20, PDF

Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: the World-System from Goethe to García Marquez, Verso, 1996, “Polyphony in America I, II” (Opere Mondo. Saggio sulla forma epica dal Faust a Cent’anni di solitudine, “La polifonia in America I, II”, Einaudi 1994, Biblioteche UNITO)

Timothy Parrish, From Hoover’s FBI to Eisenstein’s “Unterwelt”: DeLillo Directs the Postmodern Novel, 1999, Project Muse, pp. 1-22, PDF

Donald Pizer, The Only Words against Power Superpower. Passage in John Dos Passos’ “The Big Money”, 1985, Project Muse, pp. 427-434, PDF

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