Telling Stories in Contemporary English

Area 10 – Scienze dell'antichità, filologico-letterarie e storico-artistiche

This workbook has been conceived while I was teaching a course on “English Language” for the 2nd year students of a degree course called “Lingue, culture e istituzioni del Mediterraneo”. Its purpose is to offer students the critical instruments to accept the challenge that learning English entails today — not ‘just’ learning a language, but dealing with the whole, multifaceted heap of phenomena that go under the name of English today, including those aspects informed by colonial and postcolonial dynamics. This work includes a number of texts from different media — writing, but also music and film, in an attempt to create a common space of thinking in a language that constantly challenges our attempts at grasping and framing it into either linguistic, literary or cultural syllabuses. This language, as a house that we inhabit (whether as ‘foreign’ or ‘native’ speakers) is haunted by the spectres of all the stories that are told in this language, and that shape its present form in the very moment when we are trying to teach it. To invite students into this haunted house also means to give them the keys to its closed rooms and dark alleys, to the shantytowns and skyscrapers where English is spoken today.Serena Guarracino teaches English at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, where she holds her PhD in “Literatures, Cultures, and Histories of Anglophone Countries”. Her research interests span from gender, postcolonial, and cultural studies to classical music and new musicology. She has published on Edward Said and Gramsci, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, and the relationship between music and postcolonial theory. Her translation of “Sycorax”, by Indo–English writer Suniti Namjoshi, is forthcoming.

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