81792 - Didactics of Italian Literature (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course the student will be able to know and propose the didactic and academic resources of the Italian Literature, whose disciplinary contents will be valued for text analysis as well as for the literary history and the relationship between literature and society.

Course contents

The teacher remembers, but it would be unforgivable not to know how to do without it Unforgivable for the teacher. (Trappole per topoi: 41)

 

 

The lesson, frontal, segmented, dialogued, participated, is the teacher's work of art-craft, represents the measure of his craft, as well as his knowledge. The lesson benefits from the enthusiasm of those who implement it but cannot be improvised, it is not only designed for students but carried out with them. In a certain sense, the lesson begins when it ends, i.e. with the questions of the students who have attended/participated in it.

 

The lesson is an open genre because it starts again when it seems to end, i.e. from the questions of the students themselves. It is susceptible to infinite variations corresponding to the temperament and the maieutic climate in the class. The successful lesson generates more questions than answers, but it is important that the questions are not about the logical coherence of what has been said. In this most unfortunate circumstance, the students apply the cross investigation to what the teacher said and discuss his arguments of authority. At school, authority is only what manages to be authoritative in the face of facts, i.e. in the classroom. The rest is just authoritative.

 

What distinguishes the work of a teacher from that of a trainer is not only recognizable in the longer duration of his teaching time but in the way in which the training offer is combined at school. At school, one should not only learn knowledge and know-how, but one can become the protagonist of an intellectual, human and in some respects also civil experience as the knowledge brought into play and the way of teaching it form the student into the citizen.


Disciplinary teaching, to take up the thought of an affirmed Italianist such as Claudio Giunta, is didactic of what and how, not of "fuffa". The first reference is to the sedimentation of the contents of Italian literature which are not always learned in a homogeneous way during the three-year university education. The course therefore cannot fail to propose them again and deepen them, favoring the discussion of those that are often left out of the school canon, e.g. the phantom centuries, the authors always quoted and never read. The second reference refers to the teaching methods that represent the teacher's know-how.

Who teaches to teach? Is teaching a secret alchemy, a mix of knowledge and empathy, is teaching erotic, does it implement a kind of transference? The answer may not only be in the specifics of the discipline but also in what the class allows for the teacher. It may appear a paradox but whoever teaches us to teach is primarily our students who, with their attention, mark the stages of our success or failure in the classroom. Teaching cannot fail to be a form of persuasion that is not valid once and for all but is repeated over time. Teaching is the curiosity that remains.

With the collaboration of Prof. Claudia Colombo of ADI-Scuola, the Literature Didactics course aims to activate a cycle of lessons with teachers and students of the Copernicus High School. We intend to reproduce teaching situations in contact with those who do the school every day to make the teaching situations imagined during the course more realistic.

The Didactics of Italian Literature course will begin on 18 September 2023 with the lectio magistralis of prof. Luca Clerici (State University of Milan) entitled:

  Guadagnarsi il pane. Scrittori italiani e civiltà della tavola

 

 

 

 

 

 

The course is divided into the following parts:


I Text analysis:

hetorical, argumentative and stylistic strategies do not refer to the text as a closed universe but open it to the hermeneutics of real life and of our time

II

Seven lessons with professors and students of the Liceo Copernico in Bologna

1 Storytelling and autobiogrady

2 The novels with a criminal background in the Decameron

3 The new Sicilian school: The Sicilian novel from the unification of Italy to the first republic (Verga, De Roberto, Brancati, Tomasi da Lampedusa, Sciascia)

4 Country and landscape in Italian literary geography

5 The judicial novel by Alessandro Manzoni

6 The relationship between the sexes from sixteenth-century comedy to eighteenth-century autobiography and comedy

7 Rhetoric and social communication

III The writings of the ego: talking about oneself and autobiographies outside and inside literature. How and for whom he builds his own story, how to claim it, how to dialogue with himself pretending to be someone else.

IV The new Sicilian school and the Italian novel.

A historical-literary didactic journey that from De Roberto reaches Sciascia with a particular relationship to the idea of family and unitary state from the kingdom of Italy to the first republic.
 

Literature and Justice

Beccaria, Manzoni, Zola, Pascoli, Sciascia

The position taken by five Italian writers on the judicial issue

 

 

 

 

 

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Readings/Bibliography

Before entering the classroom: reading the following books:

M. Nussbaum, Non per profitto. Perché le democrazie hanno bisogno della cultura umanistica, Bologna, Il Mulino 2011

Silvia Tatti, Classico storia di una parola, Roma, Carocci, 2015

Read with the class. A text to be chosen from the following:

G.M. Anselmi, L. Chines ( a cura di), Leggere i classici italiani: un'antologia. Bologna Patron, 2019.

B. Capaci, Chiara Festa, Paola Licheri, Elvira Passaro, Trappole per Topoi. La retorica che non ti aspetti nella letteratura e nella vita, Città di Castello, 2023 (II edizione)

 

Classroom teaching. Both texts:

R. Carnero, Il bel viaggio insegnare letteratura alla generazione Z, Milano, Bompiani, 2020.

G. Ruozzi G. Tellini (a cura di), Didattica della letteratura italiana, Milano, Mondadori, 2020.

 

The writings of the self and of society.

 

A text chosen from the following:

A. Perissinotto, Raccontare. Strategie e tecniche dello storytelling, Bari-Roma, Laterza, 2022

B. Capaci, G.Simeoni, Casanova. Una autobiografia intellettuale e romanzesca, Napol, Liguori, 2009

literary geography and beyond

P. Camporesi, Le belle contrade. Nascita del paesaggio italiano, Milano il Saggiatore, 2016

 

Instructions:

non-attending students must arrange a supplementary reading with the teacher

Teaching methods

frontal lesson, online and in the presence, use of hypertexts, audiovisual material.

Seminar that involves the participation of ordinary teachers of the school and of trainee students.

Assessment methods

Verification of learning

The test will be carried out by oral question and interview, possibly supplemented by a multimedia teaching demonstration. Precisely the content of the course and the aims of the teaching make the exam the opportunity to highlight, with the skills acquired, the predisposition to the specific teaching of Italian literature.

Example of the evaluation grid:

30 and praise

in-depth knowledge of the contents of the bibliography and lessons combined with a critical language not only precise and congruous but already inclined to the best teaching effectiveness

28-30

in-depth knowledge of the bibliography and of the content of the lessons expressed through an exact and congruous critical language and of appreciable argumentative clarity.

24-27

Good knowledge of the bibliography and the content of the lessons. Critical language with some inaccuracies and not always congruous to the object, presence of excessive simplifications in the exposure.

18-23

Sometimes uncertain knowledge of the contents of the bibliography and lessons. Critical language in which generalizations and inconsistencies are present. Presence of simplifications partially inadequate to the content of the exhibition.

Invitation to repeat the test

Serious gaps in the preparation both concerning the texts in the bibliography and the subject of the lessons.

Teaching tools

Le avventure dell'autobiografia quando la vita è un romanzo

https://www.google.com/search?q=le+avventure+dell%27autobiografia.+quando+la+vita+%C3%A8+un+romanzo+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b#

Office hours

See the website of Bruno Capaci