508838 - LITERATURE AND VISUAL CULTURE

courses

ID:

508838

Duration (hours):

36

CFU:

SSD:

LETTERATURA ITALIANA CONTEMPORANEA

Year:

2025

Date/time interval

Primo Semestre (22/09/2025 - 19/12/2025)

Course Objectives

The course aims to provide moderately advanced skills on the increasingly profound intersections between the literary and the visual in the contemporary panorama, through the reading and analysis of exemplary texts.

Course Prerequisites

a good knowledge of italian

Teaching Methods

Lectures

Assessment Methods

The oral test will value the capacity of the student in organizing a speech about the the matter discussed along the lectures, and about one of the cases, in depht studied.

Texts

Just a few key titles in a very large bibliography: Edward G. Ray, Mason-Dixon – Crucible of the Nation, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2023; Linda Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction, New York-London, Routledge, 1988; Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London-New York, Routledge, 1984; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso, 1991; Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire. History and Post-1960s Fiction, Baltimore-London, Johs Hopkins University Press, 2001; Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, Edited by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2000; The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations, Edited by Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, Rochester (NY), Camden House,2005; Samuel Thomas, Retro-Vertigo: Escaping the Enlightment in Mason & Dixon; and Blank Checks: Invisibility and Economy in Mason & Dixon, in Id., Pynchon and the Political, New York-London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 19-40, 41-62; Stefan Mattesich, A Vigilant Folly: Lines of Flight in Mason & Dixon, in Id., Lines of Flight. Discursive Time and Countercultural Design in the Work of Thomas Pynchon, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 231-246; Sascha Pöhlmann, (Un)Making America: The Postnational Space of Mason & Dixon, in Id., Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination, Heidelberg, Winter Universitätsverlag, 2010, pp. 177-276; Robert R. Hill, Rationalizing Community: Victims, Institutions and Analogies for America in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon Notes, Spring-Fall 2003, pp. 124-164 Jason T. McEntee, Pynchon’s Age od eason: Mason & Dixon and America’s Rise of National Discourse, Pynchon Notes, 52-53, Spring-Fall 2003, pp. 185-207

Geographies of Separation: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon In 1763, English astronomers and surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were asked to carry out a task that would put an end to a dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland that had been going on for about a century. The two scientists were to draw a line, on the map and on the ground, establishing the border between the two states: what would go down in history as the Mason-Dixon Line, a milestone as fundamental as it was divisive for American identity. Thomas Pynchon's fifth novel, published at the end of the 20th century (1997), is named after Mason and Dixon, but according to hypothetical but probable reconstructions, the writer had been working on it since 1975, shortly after the publication of Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The course aims to provide a direct and as extensive as possible comparison with Pynchon's book, which is at once a historical novel, a masked allegory, a self-reflective metafiction, and a profoundly and ambiguously political work. The work on the text will be guided by a fundamental question: what does it mean and what are the consequences of flattening and abstracting the lived experience of space onto the flat surface of a map? Lectures will be recorded and made available via the KIRO platform (https://elearning.unipv.it/), on the course page (students are advised to register in good time). Consequently, there is no programme for non-attending students. Examination texts: Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, traduzione di Massimo Bocchiola, Torino, Einaudi, 2024 [edizione originale New York, Henry Holt, 1997]. The novel must be read and studied in itrs entirety. During the course, frequent reference will be made to the original language edition. Students must also prepare the following texts for the examination: Franco Farinelli, Geografia. Introduzione ai modelli del mondo, Torino, Einaudi, 2003; David Cowart, The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon, American Literature, 71, 2, June 1999, pp. 341- 363; Michael Wood, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, in Thomas Pynchon, Edited with an Introduction by Harold Bloom, Philadelphia, Chealsea House, 2003, pp. 251-260; Brian McHale, Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space, in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, Edited by Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2000, pp. 43-62These essays and the original language edition of the novel will be made available in digital format by the teacher on KIRO.