ENGLISH LITERATURE 1 MOD. 1

The course generally aims to develop students’ proficiency in the field of the history of English literature and culture of the early modern period (16th and 17th centuries). Students will enhance their skills in textual analysis of both poetical and dramatic works, and in relating literary texts to their historical and cultural contexts, as well as to their subsequent reception (including rewriting and adaptation practices) up to the present.
This first-year course is part of the syllabus of EUROPEAN JOINT DEGREE IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES, and the competence achieved will be tested in the foreign universities where Joint Degree students spend a semester as part of the programme, in interaction with international students.

The analytic skills students have learnt to use in their BA course will be further verified and developed, to include knowledge of literary history, rhetoric, philology, critical methodology, and theory.
In addition, they will broaden their experience in autonomous work and in discussing the results of their own research.

Only postgraduate students are allowed to attend the course. Different cases will be individually examined.
Classes will be held in English. Students must therefore be able to understand and critically discuss literary and cultural topics of the English Renaissance.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

The course will focus on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a great epic poem which explores the essential questions of good and evil and of Man’s freewill.
The text will be analysed in its relations with seventeenth-century historical and cultural contexts, between the puritan Revolution and the Restoration of the monarchy. Different textual issues will be considered: sources, epic genre, biblical allusions, Renaissance cosmology, language, structure.

Primary text (suggested edition):
J. Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Gordon Teskey, Norton Critical Editions, London, W.W. Norton, 1993.

Secondary texts:
L. Hopkins and M. Steggle, Renaissance Literature and Culture, London, continuum, 2006 

2 sections (with all the relevant essays) to be chosen among those of “Modern criticism of Paradise Lost” included in the Norton edition of the poem.

Three of the following books:
C. Belsey, John Milton: language, gender, power, Oxford e New York, B. Blackwell, 1988.
D. F. Bouchard, Milton: a structural reading, London, Edward Arnold Ltd., 1974 (la parte II).
J. Broadbent, Paradise Lost: introduction, London, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
The Cambridge Companion to Milton, edited by D. Danielson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 (solo i capitoli da 5 a 9).
J. G. Demaray, Cosmos and epic representation: Dante, Spenser, Milton and the transformation of Renaissance heroic poetry, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1991
J. G. Demaray, Milton's Theatrical Epic: the Invention and Design of Paradise Lost, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1980.
A. Ferry, Milton's epic voice : the narrator in Paradise Lost: with a new preface, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1983
S. Fish, Surprised by Sin. The Reader in Paradise Lost, Macmillan, New York 1967
C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London, Faber and Faber, 1977
D. Loewenstein, Milton. Paradise Lost, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Milton: Paradise Lost, edited by A.E. Dyson and J. Lovelock, Casebook Series, London, Macmillan, 1973 (part three: Modern Criticism).

Students are expected to do individual presentations on selected topics during the course, and will eventually be evaluated in an oral examination. They will have to prove they know the primary texts and the secondary critical essays that are listed in the syllabus. The exam will be in English and the levels of linguistic knowledge and of the ability to communicate will be part of the assessment, as well as the skill to make autonomous judgments.

60 hours of seminars, with two two-hour classes per week. After some introductory lessons given by the teacher, the course will include students' discussion, presentations and independent research projects.
Students are expected to do oral presentations on relevant topics.

Students unable to attend at least 2/3 of the course, shall write a paper of 4000 words on a topic to be agreed upon with the teacher and to be submitted at least two weeks before the exam as a hard copy. They are moreover expected to study the following books:

M. Cappuzzo, Il Paradise Lost di John Milton, Bari, Adriatica Editrice, 1972.
L. Calè, Visione e cosmo: la prospettiva nel Paradise Lost, Roma, Bulzoni, 1997.

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