Learning objectives
Knowledge and understanding
The course will allow students to acquire knowledge on Renaissance literature, with particular attention to the history of culture and the interdisciplinary approach to the interpretation of literary texts.
Ability to apply knowledge and understanding
At the end of the course, students will be able to comment on the works presented in class in a timely and reasoned manner as well as to set up the analysis of literary texts starting from some key questions, both historical and theoretical, related to the Italian Renaissance.
Making judgments
At the end of the course, students will learn to discuss and evaluate adequately, with attention to the specific vocabulary and with independent judgment, the contents of the teaching and the works considered in class as well as to refine theoretical tools useful for the interpretation of literary texts. .
Communication skills
At the end of the course, students will achieve the ability to communicate in a clear and articulated way, correctly using the specific vocabulary of Renaissance poetics and textual analysis.
Learning skills
The theoretical commitment will give students a certain methodological mastery, an expansion of the repertoire of knowledge and a learning ability useful for acquiring the necessary tools for a professional career in teaching or for further specialized study of literature.
Prerequisites
Basic knowledge of general literature and Italian literature.
Course unit content
The rebirth of tragedy. A literary genre in theory and practice
Being the literary form that Aristotle in the Poetics had placed at the top of the hierarchy of literary genres, tragedy offers itself as a privileged observation point to look at what is usually referred to as Renaissance. Once the Poetics was rediscovered in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the rebirth of the noblest of genres according to Aristotle was an unavoidable goal for scholars and poets, a goal that however had to confront the different needs of a changed cultural horizon. Through an analysis of some theoretical issues (first of all the reinterpretation of the Aristotelian paradigm of the unity of action) and of some texts of the sixteenth-century tragic canon, the course intends to explore the modalities of what has been called "discursivisation of the new" with particular attention to the relationships between different disciplines – but all involved in the rebirth of tragedy - such as poetics, stage design, and architecture.
Full programme
The detailed program in preparation of the exam will be posted by the end of classes on Elly 2022/2023 portal.
Bibliography
Both the syllabus and the bibliography will be presented during the first class and from that moment on made available in the Elly 2022/2023 portal, where students will also have access to further readings (both mandatory and optional) in PDF format.
Teaching methods
The course consists of lectures. Students are strongly encouraged to participate with questions and comments related to the topics covered in class.
Assessment methods and criteria
At the end of classes there will be an oral exam on all the contents of the program. The exam will start from a review of 6,000 characters (including spaces) which will make up 25% of the final evaluation and which must be delivered one week before the oral exam. The subject of the review will be one of the optional essays among those made available in PDF or indicated on Elly. It will be up to each student to choose the essay to review.
The exam is considered insufficient in the event that the minimum knowledge of the teaching contents, the ability to autonomously re-elaborate, the ability to understand and analyze the literary texts and essays proposed as well as an adequate expressive and argumentative capacity are lacking. A sufficient evaluation (18-23/30) is determined by the acquisition of the minimum contents of the lessons and by a basic level of autonomous re-elaboration (including the ability to establish simple links between the works analyzed in class), by the acquisition of a minimum ability of textual analysis and a not solid command of the Italian language. Similarly, the intermediate scores (24-27/30) are assigned to those who demonstrate a more than sufficient (24-25 / 30) or good (26-27/30) level of the evaluation indicators listed above, while the Higher scores (from 28/30 to 30/30 with honors) are assigned based on the demonstration of an excellent level. In particular, honors are assigned to students that reach the maximum score in the parameters indicated and that allow to detect, together with a solid autonomy of judgment, an excellent expressive and argumentative ability.
Other information
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