LITERATURE THEORY
cod. 1005995

Academic year 2017/18
3° year of course - Second semester
Professor
Academic discipline
Critica letteraria e letterature comparate (L-FIL-LET/14)
Field
Attività formative affini o integrative
Type of training activity
Related/supplementary
30 hours
of face-to-face activities
6 credits
hub:
course unit
in

Integrated course unit module: LITERARY THEORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES

Learning objectives

Knowledge and understanding.
The course will provide the students with a basic understanding of the rhetorical, thematic and ideological structures of fictional texts.
Applying knowledge and understanding.
By providing a constant guide to the activity of reading, and showing a specific interest in the single points of view, as expressed by the rewritings, the course aims at generating a peculiar consciousness of the way both characters and narrators voice one’s own vision of literature and of the world. Students should be able to apply their knowledge and interpretive skills to a wider set of texts and artistic genres, developing a learned and critical readership, or spectatorship.
Making judgements.
By the end of the course, students should be able to apply their judgements to a theoretically grounded level of textual reading. They should also be able to show the capacity to correctly situating the texts in the epoch and cultural atmosphere which gave them life. Students will interpret them in a critically founded way, paying attention to narrative devices, themes, genres, poetics, as consistently employed by their authors.
Communication skills.
By the end of the course, students ought to show the capacity to master the expression of textual contents, knowing how to point out and communicate the identifying and connecting elements which run across a defined series of literary texts.
Learning skills.
Trained to read texts which belong to a cultural tradition, students should develop critical skills, in order to successfully study the contemporary literary panorama. They should also improve their judgement abilities about what they have learnt (literary-historical knowledge) in order to structure their final dissertation, as well as to prepare themselves to the reading abilities required by the second cycle of studies.

Prerequisites

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Course unit content

Title of the course: Region and Narration. The Aemilia Case

The geographical critical mode of literary analysis, focusing on textual representations of places and landscapes, proves among the most fortunate critical trends of the last decades. We will read a distinct regional literature as case study, the one of Aemilia, surrounded by the iconic fow of the Po river. Aemilian landscape will be put under scrutiny, from a still, however partially, rural setting for the stories of the mid-XXth Century, to the modernization of the region, and its aftermath. We will pay a special attention to the figure of Silvio D’Arzo – born Ezio Comparoni, 1920-1952 –whom many authors have recently paid homage to. His Casa d’altri, defined as a «perfect tale» by Eugenio Montale, stands as a masterpiece of the Italian modern short fiction.

Full programme

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Bibliography

Bibliography

Critical texts
1. Iacoli, Luci sulla Contea. D'Arzo alla prova della critica tematica, Mucchi
1. Iacoli, Luci sulla Contea. D’Arzo alla prova della critica tematica, Mucchi, 2017.
Narrative Texts
2. D’Arzo, Essi pensano ad altro, Bompiani
3. D’Arzo, Casa d’altri, Einaudi
4. Malerba, La scoperta dell’alfabeto, Oscar Mondadori
5. Celati, Verso la foce, Feltrinelli
6. Benati, Silenzio in Emilia, Quodlibet

Teaching methods

Frontal lessons; DVD screenings (cinematic works). The course is also offered in a blended way on the distance learning platform called Elly.

Assessment methods and criteria

Oral. Students ought to show a basic interpretive capacity. While discerning rhetorical-stylistic, thematic and ideological components of the texts, they should be able to reconstruct wider historical and theoretical contexts.

Other information

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