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Howard Paul

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Professore a contratto
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E-mail:
ph465 (at) cam.ac.uk
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http://www.collegiosantacaterina.it/it/
Dipartimento:
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici - Sez. di Lingue e Letterature straniere

Info e materiale didattico

PROGRAMMA LETTERATURE COMPARATE E TRADUZIONE LETTERARIA a.a. 2015-2016 Prof. Howard

VERSIONE ITALIANA+VERSIONE INGLESE+ BIBLIOGRAFIA+ PROGRAMMA SU BASE SETTIMANALE

 

DESCRIZIONE PROGRAMMA IN ITALIANO

Il corso sarà tenuto in inglese e in italiano e l'esame sarà scritto.

Racconto di due Nazioni: La Parola ai Poveri nell'Italia e la Gran Bretagna dell'Ottocento

 Questo corso di letteratura comparata si pone come obiettivo quello di esaminare diversi tentativi letterari di ritrarre autenticamente gli strati più bassi della società, nella Gran Bretagna e nell’Italia del lungo Diciannovesimo secolo. Il corso si propone anche di valutare il ruolo della nuova lingua letteraria del popolo nella costruzione di una nuova letteratura moderna; una letteratura in grado di esaminare una realtà sociale in rapida evoluzione. Questo corso si svilupperà intorno alle opere (considerate sopprattutto in lingua originale ma anche in traduzione) di alcuni dei principali autori del periodo sotto analisi: William Wordsworth e Charles Dickens per la letteratura inglese; Carlo Porta, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli e Giovanni Verga per quella italiana e dialettale. Tutti questi autori si sono dovuti confrontare con la difficoltà di trovare una voce credibile, esplorandone i legami linguistici e formali, a loro volta strettamente connessi a problematiche identitarie sia a livello locale che nazionale. Questo corso s’interrogherà sull’identità di questi poveri, sull’importanza e il valore della loro rappresentazione e sui destinatari di tali ritratti, analizzando, allo stesso tempo, come la voce di questi poveri si sviluppi in maniera trasversale fra prosa e poesia. 

Studieremo quindi le diverse rese di questi autori e tutte le loro implicazioni e peculiarità, muovendoci nello spazio (dalla Gran Bretagna all’Italia, ma anche dal contesto urbano a quello rurale, da quello industriale a quello agrario, a quello marittimo) e nel tempo (a partire dai primi decenni del secolo, caratterizzati, in Italia, dall’occupazione straniera e da una forte frammentazione politica e in Gran Bretagna dall’industrializzazione; fino alla seconda metà del secolo, durante la quale i due Paesi iniziano realmente a preoccuparsi della situazione dei poveri, anche grazie agli sforzi letterari).

 Gli studenti saranno incoraggiati a confrontare dinamicamente queste due culture letterarie sotto diversi punti di vista (linguistico, tematico, narrativo e stilistico) e saranno inoltre invitati a partecipare attivamente, contribuendo alle discussioni con il loro punto di vista. Le lezioni cominceranno con un’introduzione generale del problema da analizzare che sarà solitamente seguita da un’analisi testuale di passaggi letterari precisi. Il lavoro sui testi sarà tuttavia accompagnato da frequenti contestualizzazioni storiche, e facilitato da un regolare ricorso alla teoria e critica letteraria.

 

 DESCRIZIONE PROGRAMMA IN INGLESE

 The course will be in English and Italian and the exam will be written.

A Tale of Two Countries: Voicing the Poor in 19th-Century Britain and Italy

 This Comparative Literature course will explore attempts to offer an authentic literary portrayal of society’s lower echelons in the literature of Britain and Italy during the long Nineteenth Century. It will assess the importance of a new literary language of the people in forging a modern literature capable of examining rapidly changing social realities. The course will focus on works by some of the main authors of the period (mainly in the original, but also in translation): William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens in English; Carlo Porta, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli and Giovanni Verga in Italian and regional varieties. These writers grapple with the problem of credible voice and how this is tied to language and form, in turn relating to local, national and wider preoccupations of identity. The course will ask who the poor were, why their depiction mattered and who it was aimed at, and how their voice is framed across the usual boundaries of poetry and prose.

 We will investigate these authors’ differing responses and their implications as we move through space (e.g. from Britain to Italy, but equally from urban to rural/industrial to agrarian/maritime contexts) and time (from the early decades of the century, dominated by foreign invasion and political fragmentation in Italy and industrialisation in Britain, to the latter half of the century when both countries begin to pay real attention to the plight of the poor, thanks in part to literary endeavours).

 Students will be encouraged to draw parallels between the two literary cultures from linguistic, thematic, narrative and stylistic points of view, and will be expected to contribute their own insights to class discussion. Classes will generally take the form of structured introductions to overarching topics, to be followed by commentary of exemplary extracts. Classes will be text-focussed throughout, but will be contextualised by frequent recourse to literary theory and secondary criticism.

 

 

                                                   

                                                                         Bibliography

Specific suggestions for  further reading  will be assigned on a weekly basis.
Photocopies of obscure or difficult-­‐to-­‐find  articles will be provided.
Below is a general reading list for the course.

                                                                       Primary Texts

The principal works of Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads), Dickens, Porta (Poesie), Belli (Sonetti), and
Verga.
See also: Orford, Pete (ed.), Dickens on Poverty (London: Hesperus Press, 2013).

                                                                      Secondary Texts


Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Giovanni Verga. Le finzioni dietro il verismo (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1982).


Chiesa, Mario and Giovanni Tesio (eds.), Il dialetto da lingua della realtà a lingua della poesia:
da Porta e Belli a Pasolini
(Turin: Paravia, 1978).


Ferguson, Susan, ‘Drawing Fictional Lines: Dialect and Narrative in the Victorian Novel’ in Style,
No. 32:1 (Spring, 1998), 1-­‐17.


Gibellini, Pietro, ‘La scrittura “orale” di G.G. Belli. Sette appunti’ in La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 15
(April, 1987),75-­‐80.


Hollington, Michael, Dickens and the Grotesque (Croom Helm, 1984).


Morris, Pam, Dickens’s Class Consciousness: A Marginal View (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1991).


Sampson, David, ‘Wordsworth and the Poor: The Poetry of Survival’ in Studies in Romanticism,
No. 23:1 (Spring, 1984), 31-­‐59.

 

                                                        Schematic Overview
Week 1

Defining the Poor. What people? What language?
• Authors’ statements on their chosen literary language.
E.g. Wordsworth’s ‘real language of men’ in the Lyrical Ballads and Belli’s introduzione to the Sonetti
romaneschi.
• Who are the poor? “Working class”? “Destitute”? E.g. Dickens (‘the lowest, cruellest and worst populace’), Belli (‘la gentaccia bassa’), Verga (“basse sfere […] delle più umili condizioni”).
• Writing for whom? Writing by whom? The Poor as socially constructed, but are the humble
of 19th-­‐century literature merely the literary construction of bourgeois writers, or something more
real? (See Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor).
• Literacy levels in Britain and Italy.
• Can the apparent contradiction between Romanticism’s great invention, that language equals
nationality, be reconciled  in the Italian case of plurilingualism and relative political instability
when compared  with Britain?
• Against an Italian background, does the speech of Dickens’s characters question the stability
 of the long-­‐since unified English language?
• The thorny issue of dialect and its legitimacy in both literatures.
 

Week 2
The rhetoric of baseness: characterisation through nonstandard language.

• The uneducated, authentic voice. Features of socio-­‐linguistic marking.
• Dickens and  so-­‐called eye dialect: commentary of Jo’s speech in Bleak House.
• Linguistic inconsistency in Dickens (Orwell, Gissing etc).
• Belli’s romanesco compared to Porta’s milanese.
• Verga’s language mixing.
• Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.
• Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘tensored language’ (i.e. demotic speech, saturated with profanity,
scurrility, malapropisms, hypercorrections, speech defects in conscious transgression). Hugo on slang as “une langue de combat”. Examples in English and Italian (e.g. Wellerisms).

Week  3
Structural concerns and questions of narrative presentation: the view from above or below?

• Omniscient narrators v poetic personae.
• Verga’s narrative inventions (free indirect discourse and authorial impersonality).
• Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory: “ingroups” and “outgroups” – notions of class division and opposition;
‘us and them’ (e.g. ‘yo’ Factory Owners and ‘us’ The Hands in Hard Times, or Belli’s ‘noantri/voiantri’).
Where does the author stand in this dichotomy?
• Lower than low: underworld types of thieves, murderers, prostitutes. E.g. Porta’s Ninetta del Verzee,
Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
• Poverty and gender. Emasculation and slavery. Master/servant dialectics. Voicing mothers and
daughters.

Week 4
Poverty and space. Geographical borders.

• ‘Shabby-­‐genteel people’ exclusive to the metropolis: Dickensian London.
• Milan in Porta and Verga’s Per le vie.
• Rome in Belli.
• Comparative imagery: the city as locus of disease (e.g. H. G. Wells on London as a ‘tumorous growth’,
Leopardi on Rome as ‘letamaio di letteratura’).
• Urban realism versus regional verismo: Verga’s Sicily.
• What happens when Dickens goes North? Coketown and the speech of Stephen Blackpool in
Hard
Times
.


Week 5
Power and possession, money and morality. Does financial security equal socio-­‐ethical progress?

• A comparison of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and Verga’s I Malavoglia.
• The ‘golden calf’ and ‘la roba’ as moral compass.
• The myth of progression: ‘this round world of many  circles within circles’ versus Verga’s cyclical
structure.


Week 6
Literature or politics? “Sullen socialism” (Macaulay)  or real progress?

• Fiction or social commentary?
• Satire of judiciary types (e.g. Manzoni’s Azzecca-­‐garbugli, Dickens’s Sampson Brass).
• Verga’s light of truth.
• The depiction of children and educational reforms (e.g. Oliver Twist and Rosso Malpelo).
• The effects of literature in social reform: Wapping Workhouse and the 1860s in Britain; the Ciclo
dei vinti and the 1880s in Italy.

 

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