Teaching

Secret Agency: The British Cold-War Novel

Semester: 
1st semester
Offered: 
2023

The course reads key texts in the British Cold-War novel, and traces the defining themes, formal characteristics and historical contexts that contributed to the emergence of this narrative tradition from a popular entertainment genre to a literary form that engages with the preoccupations and the moral quandaries of an empire grown painfully aware of its dissolution.

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Syllabus

  • Len Deighton, Berlin Game
  • John le Carrē, The Spy who Came in from the Cold
  • John le Carrē, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  • Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Recommended extra reading

  • Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
  • Graham Greene, The Third Man
  • Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
  • John le Carrē, Smiley’s People
  • John le Carrē, The Russia House

 

Spy vs Spy

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Paranoid Hermeneutics I & II: The American Novel after the Death of the Novel

Semester: 
1st semester
Offered: 
2021
The course looks at a number of texts that explore paranoia, not as a medical condition but as a hermeneutic approach coinciding with a modernist and postmodernist fascination with all-encompassing sign systems. The discussion will focus on the following themes: the nature of subjective experience; the power of media; the relation between fiction and reality; entropy and semiotics; hyper-reality; the ontological status of hallucinations; artificial intelligence; the viability of the novel as a contemporary narrative genre. 

Spotlight Theory: Posthumanism

Semester: 
1st semester
Offered: 
2021
This seminar explores salient themes and tropes in posthuman critical theory, reading important texts in the field in light of contemporary cultural concerns such as the impact of media on consciousness, the mechanisation of everyday life, the interpenetration of virtual and material realities, and the transformation of models of subjectivity after the digital revolution.

Narcissus on the Liffey: Image and Identity in the Modern Irish Novel

Semester: 

This course explores the theme of Narcissism in the work of six Irish novelists of the late 19th and 20th Century. The story of Echo and Narcissus provides the coordinates for a reflection on the nature of images, on the triad of death, desire and unrequited love, and on the role of repetition in producing and maintaining identity. We will consider the implications of pitting a Modernist (i.e. cosmopolitan and international) notion of Self against a specifically Irish treatment of the Narcissus myth. The authors included in the syllabus are Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien and John Banville.

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Primary Sources

  • John Banville, Mefisto
  • Samuel Beckett, “Film”
  • Samuel Beckett, “First Love”
  • Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction
  • James Joyce, Dubliners
  • James Joyce, Ulysses I-III
  • James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (excerpts)
  • Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
  • Flann O’Brien, “John Duffy’s Brother”
  • Flann O’Brien, “Two-in-One”
  • Ovid, “The Story of Echo and Narcissus” from The Metamorphoses
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Recommended Reading Schedule

  • 1st Week: Ovid, "The Story of Echo and Narcissus"
  • 2nd Week: Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism--An Introduction"
  • 3rd Week: Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism--An Introduction"
  • 4th Week: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; "The Disciple"; "The Artist"
  • 5th Week: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; "The Disciple"; "The Artist"
  • 6th Week: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; "The Disciple"; "The Artist"
  • 7th Week: Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • 8th Week: Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • 9th Week: Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • 10th Week: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinematic Image
  • 11th Week: James Joyce, Ulysses (Chapters 1-3)
  • 12th Week: James Joyce, Ulysses (Chapters 1-3)
  • 13th Week: Julia Kristeva, "Approaching Abjection"
  • 14th Week: James Joyce, "The Sisters"; "The Dead"; Finnegans Wake (excerpts)
  • 15th Week: James Joyce, "The Sisters"; "The Dead"; Finnegans Wake (excerpts)
  • 16th Week: James Joyce, "The Sisters"; "The Dead"; Finnegans Wake (excerpts)
  • 17th Week: Samuel Beckett, First Love
  • 18th Week: Samuel Beckett, First Love
  • 19th Week: Samuel Beckett, First Love
  • 20th Week: Samuel Beckett, Film
  • 21st Week: Flann O’Brien, “John Duffy’s Brother”
  • 22nd Week: Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
  • 23rd Week: Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
  • 24th Week: Presentation or roundtable discussion (theme to be announced)
  • 25th Week: John Banville, Mefisto
  • 26th Week: John Banville, Mefisto
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European Modernism

Semester: 

This course explores major themes in European modernism. Class discussions focus on the following themes: the preoccupation with historicity; the mobilization of anachronistic structures and ghostly temporalities by the avant-garde; the ethics of forgetting and encyclopaedic form. Authors included in the syllabus are T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Pirandello. (Offered at the University of Perugia)

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  1. Introduction: Overview and aims of the Course
  2. Modernism: Tradition and Historicity 
    1. Reading:
      • T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”;
      • Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity”
  3. T.S. Eliot: the demands of tradition
  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  • The Waste Land
  • Little Gidding
    1. Supplementary materials:
      • T.S. Eliot, Dante (the essay)
  1. Haunted Historicity: Ghostly Modernisms
  • The Spiritualist Temptations of Modernism (Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal)
  • Joseph Conrad and the madness of the time: The Secret Agent
  • Joyce’s ghostly temporalities (Ulysses IX; Finnegans Wake I.7 [excerpt from the Haunted Inkbottle])
    1. Supplementary materials:
      • Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism
  1. Revisions of courtly love, or the love song of J. Augusta Joyce
  • Giacomo Joyce
  • Finnegans Wake II.4
    1. Supplementary materials:
      • Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist

Course site at UniPg

 

 

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Dante and Modernism

Semester: 

Dante’s presence in the work of various twentieth-century writers is widely acknowledged. Yet the extent to which his poetry can help us theorise a poetics of modernism remains to be explored. In this course we will try to understand why numerous modernist writers were fascinated with Dante’s Commedia. We will touch on modernist uses of Dante as a mythic model or as an intertextual source; modernist representations of the descent into the underworld; modernist revaluations of Dante’s moral universe; changing interpretations of the ethical value of emotions (Love, Joy, Pity, Terror); phantasmagoria and the image in modernism; ineffability and immemoriality.

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Primary Sources:

  • Samuel Beckett, “Dante and the Lobster.”
  • Dante, The Divine Comedy (trans. Hollander or Durling & Martinez)
  • T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and “Little Gidding.”
  • T.S. Eliot, Dante (the 1929 essay)
  • James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, Giacomo Joyce and Finnegans Wake II.4
  • Primo Levi, Se questo e` un uomo.
  • Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

Course outline:

  1. Aims and Expectations; defining the project of modernism.
  2. Eliot’s 1929 Essay
  3. The Double Allegory of Dante’s Journey (Cantos I, II)
  4. Allegory as a Hermeneutic Principle
  5. Topography and moral interpretation of Dante’s Hell (Canto III, IV, XI)
  6. Dante and Joyce: Love as a philosophical apprenticeship.
  7. Dante in A Portrait: the difficulties of bookish love
  8. Giacomo Joyce: Adultery and courtly love
  9. Giacomo Joyce: phantasmagoria and the theme of love-sickness.
  10. Dante’s poetry in Mrs Dalloway: the ethics of suicide and the rhetoric of despair
  11. Pier delle Vigne: Canto XIII
  12. Primo Levi: the uses of Dante in If this is a Man (resistance and problems of translation)
  13. Primo Levi: "Il Canto d'Ulisse"
  14. Dante in Prufrock: Eliot’s Hell as an Abyss of Irony
  15. Dante in The Waste Land: Hell and the Modern Urban Landscape
  16. Eliot’s Purgatorial Poetry: from the Waste Land to ‘Little Gidding’ (Purg. XXVI)
  17. “Dante and the Lobster”: Using Dante as an intertextual source.
  18. Pity and Beckettian Pathos
  19. Beckett and Dante: the Remains of the Human in Beckett’s “Purgatory” (Belacqua)
  20. Beatrice Dominatrix: (Purg. XXIX-XXXI)
  21. Medieval Love in Finnegans Wake (Focus on chapter II.4)
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Literature and Film: Ghostly Temporalities

Semester: 

 

 

The course examines the relation between concepts of modernity and figurations of ghostly time in film, philosophy and literature. We begin with a reading of Hamlet, laying the groundwork for a study of the influence of the play on 20th Century thought. The second part focuses on works by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce; on philosophical texts by Nietzsche, Derrida and Deleuze (especially their readings of Hamlet), and on films by Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam. Special attention will be paid to the relation between time and technology, the figure of the ghost, the theme of falsehood (the role of the simulacrum in the twentieth century representations of time), and the conventions of genre (tragic time vs comic time). 

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Course Outline

Part I: Hamlet: tragic time vs tragic action

  • Hamlet and tragic action
  • Hamlet: the figure of the ghost
  • Hamlet: the bait of falsehood
  • Hamlet and modernity

Part II: Modern tragic thought

  • Nietzsche reads Hamlet
  • Nihilism and disgust
  • Deleuze on Nietzsche and the tragic (from Nietzsche and Philosophy)
  • Deleuze on Hamlet

Part III: Modernism and historical responsibility

  • Time, money and modernity (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
  • The madding of time (Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent)
  • Modern historicity: Nietzsche (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”)
  • Modern historicity: De Man (“Literary History and Literary Modernity”)
  • Modern historicity: Derrida (Excerpt from Specters of Marx)
  • History or life (Virginia Woolf, Orlando)

Part IV: Ghosts and the moving image

  • Hitchcock and the bait of falsehood (Vertigo; North by Northwest)
  • Chris Marker and Terry Gilliam: Hitchcockian simulacra (Vertigo, La Jetée, Twelve Monkeys)
  • Chris Marker and the apocalyptic imaginary (La Jetée)
  • 80's neo-noir and the time out of joint (Joel and Ethan Cohen, Blood Simple)

 

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