Learning objectives
Knowledge and understanding.
The course aims at strengthening the basic knowledge of literary study, opening the way for a specialized field, and promoting the development of original statements about the thematic net described throughout the course itself.
Applying knowledge and understanding.
The study of literary methods, the learning of the genre theories, and finally the comparative approach elicit the development of the capacity to understand and connect literary facts, in a profoundly interdisciplinary perspective.
Making judgements.
By the end of the course students ought to have acquired the capacity to carefully value the complexity of literary text, critically interpreting their structural elements, the morphological similarities and differences between them. They should also have acquired particular intepretive and comparative abilities about the historical and socio-cultural contexts to which those artistic documents belong.
Communication skills.
By the end of the course students should have conceived the capacity to describe literary texts on the basis of the genre theories and supranational literary study, developing a personal, reliable and consistent way of reading.
Learning skills.
The commitment shown in acquiring competences and learning should provide the students with a definite methodological competence as well as with skills aimed at consolidating their set of readings, their capacity to understand and schematize the dynamics of literary facts – all necessary skills in order to organize contents into the written form.
Prerequisites
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Course unit content
A literary theory? Susan Sontag as literary (and art) critic
Twenty years have passed since her death. And yet, Susan Sontag exerts a vivid fascination still nowadays, with her books, her reflections, her painstaking analysis of social, cultural, artistic facts. Far from amounting to a fragmentary set of works, her oeuvre, also read in the wake of cultural studies, testifies to an exemplary hermeneutic consistency. Moreover, the recent reprint of her books in translation, along with the appearance of biographies, diaries, interviews, allows us to detect an interpretive pattern: an idea of literature, that we will try to define, following Sontag’s essays on her favorite authors.
Full programme
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Bibliography
Bibliography
1. Carrara, Neri (eds.), Teoria della letteratura. Campi, metodi, strumenti, Carocci.
2. Sontag, Contro l’interpretazione e altri saggi, Nottetempo
3. Sontag, Malattia come metafora e L’Aids e le sue metafore, Nottetempo
4. Sontag, Sotto il segno di Saturno, Nottetempo
All books can be read in original version.
Further critical materials will be provided on platform Elly.
Teaching methods
Privileged methods will be the following: frontal lessons, film screening,guided readings of selected narrative passages.
Assessment methods and criteria
Oral exams, held in presence and/or, if necessary, via Teams. Questions will firstly regard the handbook, in order to subsequently involve themes, plot turns, the development of characters, as inferable from the reading of literary texts.Evaluation: A fail is determined by the lack of an understanding of the minimum content of the course, the inability to express oneself adequately, by a lack of autonomous preparation, the inability to solve problems related to information retrieval and the decoding of complex texts, as well as an inability to make independent judgments. A pass (18-23/30) is determined by the student’s possession of the minimum, fundamental contents of the course, an adequate level of autonomous preparation and ability to solve problems related to information retrieval and the decoding of complex texts, as well as an acceptable level of ability in making independent judgments. Middle-range scores (24-27/30) are assigned to the student who produces evidence of a more than sufficient level (24-25/30) or good level (26-27/30) in the evaluation indicators listed above. Higher scores (from 28/30 to 30/30 cum laude) are awarded on the basis of the student’s demonstration of a very good or excellent level in the evaluation indicators listed above.
Other information
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