20710480 - American Fictions: Plots and Counterplots

Graduates in Languages and Literatures for Teaching and Translation obtain advanced knowledge and understanding in all the subject areas of their training in order to
1) consolidate and develop their competence in European and American Studies, with particular attention to their literature of specialisation;
2) deepen their knowledge of the two foreign languages chosen, achieving a heightened competence in the language of specialization and an advancement in the second language;
3) reach enhanced awareness of the linguistic features of their language of specialisation, both from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective;
4) reach an adequate knowledge of the most advanced methodologies for the analysis of literary texts;
5) handle confidently the theoretical-practical tools for teaching and for translation.

American fictions: plots and counterplots is one of the characterising modules of the programme. It allows students to consolidate their language skills as well as their knowledge of North American literary phenomena from a global and transcultural perspective. Classes focus on the analysis of plots, themes, and characters across narrative genres – such as the short story, the novel, the romance, the serial – conducive to an understanding of the Anglo-American literary imagination.
At the end of the module students will be able to: apply their methodological and educational competence to the analysis of literary phenomena from a transcultural perspective; communicate at an advanced level the disciplinary content; express an autonomous and accurate critical assessment.

Requirements: Students must have already taken North American literatures and visual cultures.

teacher profile | teaching materials

Programme

The course is focused on the Hollywood Novel, a subgenre of twentieth century American novel, including writers, such as Fitzgerald and West, who worked for cinema as screenplayers and later reworked their experience in works that are not biographical but metaphorically represent American life through Hollywood lenses. Themes will be discussed related to alienation and mass-production. Texts will allow a different discussion about literature and cinema shifting from adaptation to reshaping literary language in cinematic terms. A recent TV series and an older movie about the end of classical Hollywood will be shown and discussed during the extra academic classes.



20710480 - American Fictions: Plots and Counterplots

2nd year MA Languages and Literatures for Teaching and Translation

(36 hours – 6 CFU; meeting twice a week – each class is 2 hours)


Core Documentation

Programma 20710480 American Fictions: Plots and Counterplots


Novels

H. McCOY, I Should Have Stayed Home (1938)
New Publisher, 2021 ISBN-13 ‏ ‎ 978-1618952967

N. WEST, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Penguin, 2018 ISBN: 9780241341674

F. Scott FITZGERALD, The Last Tycoon (1941)
Penguin, 2002 ISBN: 9780141185637

Short Stories

F. Scott FITZGERALD, The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), selection of six stories (the whole collection must be read, though)
https://archive.org/details/pathobbystories0000fitz/page/n5/mode/2up

Film:
Sunset Boulevard (US, Paramount, 1950) regia di Billy Wilder







Reference Bibliography

Criticism (Prof. Maggitti) - Rhodes, Chip, Theorizing the Hollywood Novel: Aesthetics, Psychoanalytic Desire, and History in Id., Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel, University of Iowa Press, 2008, pp. 1-48 (introduction, chapter on West's novel, (online text in SBA link: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uniroma3-ebooks/reader.action?docID=843265 - Fleeting Fictions:Film Technology, Adaptation, and a History of the Hollywood Novel, 1920-1950 (online text in SBA link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1dh5x6jkCriticism

Type of delivery of the course

The course will be given in English. Students will be given assignments via Teams, on specific issues concerning each of the texts in the syllabus

Type of evaluation

Students will need to bring with them the literary texts, either paper or e-texts. The exam will be mostly in English. Students could also be asked to translate or comment a passage from a literary text. In the oral evaluation assignments given on Teams during the course will be relevant, as much as to allow students who attended and did the assignments to discuss only a section of the programme, not covered by the assignments.

teacher profile | teaching materials

Programme

The course proposes an overview on the literature written in the 20th Century by immigrants or immigrants’ descendants in the U.S.A. The texts tackle the literary representation of the migration from the country of origin and the adjustment in the host country, dealing especially with controversial and multifaceted phenomena such as assimilation (or “melting-pot”) vs cultural pluralism, national identity, ethnic identity, and racial and ethnic discrimination. Moreover, the texts display a variety of perspectives on the migratory dynamics depending on the country of origin and on the perception of their community in the host country. The choice of these texts allows to compare different critical approaches due to their different literary techniques and different genres: autobiography, semi-autobiography, the Modernist novel, the realist novel, and the collective novel in first person plural. Thus, the course analyzes both the linguistic and structural differences and the recurring literary topoi. Some classes may include cinematic representations of migratory phenomena in the U.S.A.

Core Documentation

 Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912)

 Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle (1932)

(any edition and format, digital or on paper)