An in-depth treatment of a current area of special concern within the field of English Literature. Courses offered previously include: Dickens and Englishness; Race, Class, Gender, Culture: The American Dream in Literature; The Innocents Abroad: Perceptions of Italy in American, European and British Writing; Topics in World Literature: Masterpieces in Western Fiction. May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

Beginning with Petronius's novel of ancient Rome, the Satyricon, and ending with a novella set in contemporary Rome, this course explores a wide range of novels, novellas and films dealing with the entanglements with grifters, criminals, outsiders and rakes that are characteristic of city life.
We will explore in particular how against the backdrop of the metropolis crime and detection become ways of figuring identity and human connections.  We will look at the big questions thrown up by city life: how individual identity is formed, challenged, or changed; how the past interacts with or disrupts the present; how we are connected to, repulsed by, or drawn towards strangers.  We will read a set of novels, short stories, and novellas from ancient Rome through to the present, though most of them will be drawn from the twentieth century.  We will also watch and study a set of films.  There is a particular emphasis on novels and films set in Rome, both by Italians and foreigners. 

The course is particularly designed with a view to enriching the experience of students living in Rome by giving them a heightened awareness to the cultural, psychological, and imaginative aspects of city life in general and of Rome in particular.

By the end of the course, students will have read/watched and studied a number of classic and less well known literary and cinematic texts from Europe and the US.  They will understand the basic concepts of narrative theory and be able to read films and novels for structure as well as content.  They will be familiar with the idea of genre in literature and film, and how it affects meaning.  They will recognize recurring character archetypes in fiction and be able to understand their structural, symbolic, and psychological functions.  The course is particularly designed with a view to enriching the experience of students living in Rome by giving them a heightened awareness to the cultural, psychological, and imaginative aspects of city life in general and of Rome in particular.

Texts available at The Almost Corner Bookshop, via del Moro, 45, tel. 06 583 6942.  YOU MUST GET YOUR TEXTS FROM HERE AS DIFFERENT EDITIONS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE.