LETTERATURA ANGLOAMERICANA (L-LIN/11) Anno accademico: 2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale (30 ore, 6 CFU) Dott. Fiorenzo Iuliano Queer Modernisms Il corso, che sarà tenuto in lingua inglese, intende analizzare una serie di testi prodotti negli Stati Uniti nei primi decenni del Novecento che problematizzano e mettono in discussione le categorie tradizionali di genere e di identità sessuale. In particolare, le lezioni si soffermeranno sui seguenti temi, esaminati in relazione ai testi letterari analizzati: (auto)rappresentazione delle donne e dell’identità femminile e crisi del ruolo maschile tradizionale nella società e nella cultura degli Stati Uniti agli inizi del Novecento; l’omosessualità come nuovo paradigma di identificazione o come stru- mento di radicale decostruzione delle categorie di gender e sessualità; rapporto tra identità sessuale e identità etnica. Bibliografia Testi primari 1. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) 2. Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D. (1903) 3. Claude McKay, “The Clinic” (1923) 4. Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises (1926) 5. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) Bibliografia teorico-critica 1. Rita Barnard, “Modern American Fiction”, in Walter B. Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Com- panion to American Modernism, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 39-67. 2. Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, “Gay, lesbian and queer theory”, in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (5th edition), Harlow, Longman, 2005, pp. 243-266. 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from “Introduction: Axtiomatic”, in Epistemology of the Closet, Uni- versity of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 1-22. 4. Eric Haralson, “‘The Other Half Is the Man’: the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Er- nest Hemingway, and Henry James”, in Henry James and Modernity, Cambridge UP, Cam- bridge, 2003, pp. 173-204. 5. Marshall Boswell, Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American Literature. 1607 to the Pre- sent, Facts on File, New York, 2008 (le voci su H. James, G. Stein, C. McKay, E. Heming- way, N. Larsen). Avvertenze per il corso e per l’esame a. Dato il carattere monografico del corso, la frequenza è assolutamente consigliata. Il corso si svol- gerà in maniera seminariale: per questo motivo, la partecipazione attiva di studenti e studentesse al- le lezioni sarà valutata ai fini dell’esame finale. b. I romanzi e racconti devono essere letti nell'originale. All’esame si dovrà essere in grado di legge- re e tradurre qualunque parte del testo inglese. Di tutti i testi si richiede comunque una conoscenza diretta, critica e dettagliata: vale a dire, non una generica cognizione della trama, o l’apprendimento di un commento generale. Studenti/esse dovranno mostrare di orientarsi nei singoli testi ed essere in grado di analizzarne e commentarne criticamente le specifiche articolazioni, con riferimento sia ad altre parti del testo che alia bibliografia critica prescritta. c. I testi di McKay e Stein e tutti i testi critici saranno forniti dal docente in fotocopia. d. I testi di James, Hemingway e Larsen sono facilmente reperibili in biblioteca e nelle librerie. Que- ste sono le collocazioni nelle biblioteche di ateneo: - Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”. Il testo è incluso nelle seguenti raccolte: Fifteen Short Sto- ries (Biblioteca di Scienze del Linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR JAMEH 004 I); Selec- ted Short Stories, a cura di Quentin Anderson (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2473); The Portable Henry James, a cura di Morton Dauwen Zabel (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2410) - Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR HEMIE 007 X - Nella Larsen, Passing: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio, collocazione: AMERICANO NARR LARSN 001 2 RITA BARNARD Modern American fiction Introduction There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction is “at bottom only the expression” of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality of life was in our modern era.”1 The social transformation in question has been characterized in many dif- ferent ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture (with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance (with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a verita- ble archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism.2 But it is an older writer, Sherwood Anderson, who gives us the most vivid thumbnail sketch of the changes from which modern American fic- tion emerged. In Winesburg, Ohio (1922), Anderson observes that the read- ers of his day may already find it difficult to understand the sensibilities of people whose lives were shaped by an earlier world of harsh agricultural labor: 39 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 rita barnard The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses and . the coming of the automobile has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men...[He] is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all.3 The “revolution” of modernity, as Anderson calls it, was not the exclusive experience of urban sophisticates: it extended unevenly but inexorably across the nation – even into the country store and into the minds of the folks who still gathered around the woodstove to chat. Now, it is easy to come up with a long line-up of writers – from Upton Sinclair to John Dos Passos, from Theodore Dreiser to Nathanael West, and from Abraham Cahan to Henry Roth – who have tackled such issues as urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the rise of the mass media in their work. But to say that modern fiction takes these topics as its sub- ject matter does not fully address the way in which it might “express” its historical moment, especially given the fact that this “moment” may not be experienced everywhere in the same way, nor at the same pace. How exactly did the transformation of modern life change narrative form? And does mod- ern fiction in fact provide that special knowledge about modern “reality” of which Kazin speaks? Or is there something about modernity that disables cognition, if not narrative itself? In his “Literary Prophecy” of 1894, the novelist Hamlin Garland, tak- ing courage from what he saw as the positive evolution of society, pre- dicted the shape that the fiction of “modern man” was to take. He got several things right, even though his belief in progress now makes his essay seem like the product of a bygone age. Garland believed that the emergent literature would react against the traditions of the past and attend fear- lessly to the uglier contemporary aspects of reality. Narrative techniques, he predicted, would be streamlined: “Because the novels of the past were long, involved, and given to discussion and comment upon the action,” he observes, “so the novel of the future will be shorter” and less obvious in its method. Its “lessons” will be brought out, not by explanation, but “by placing before the reader the facts of life as they stand related to the artist.”4 40 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Modern American fiction Though few modern writers, living in the wake of World War I and the stock market crash of 1929, would have endorsed Garland’s optimistic beliefs, there were certainly some who found in the speed, scale, and techno- logical inventiveness of the age a stimulus for new forms. Nathanael West, for one, also imagined that the short novel would become the quintessential American form, since it is more suited to a “hasty” people than the long “Scandinavian” tomes of yesteryear. Modern works of fiction only had time to “explode” like “cannon balls.” In a culture where “violence is idiomatic,” where a brutal crime may not even make it to the front page of a newspaper, there is no need to follow a Dostoyevsky in spending whole chapters pro- viding the psychological motivation “for one little murder.” A new kind of fiction, adapted to an environment of screaming headlines, would have to be devised, even if the writer had to turn to commercial forms like the comics for inspiration.