Università Roma Tre

The course analises the relationship between didactics, education, interculturalism and literature through the work of Franco Fortini.
Poet, writer, essayist, translator, literary critic, journalist, copywriter, editor, school teacher and university professor, political activist of the Marxist left, Franco Fortini (1917-1994) embodies the ideal of the “multidimensional man” able to connect different fields of human knowledge.
Didactics, for the continuous attention to the popularization of the ideas (from Politecnico of Elio Vittorini to the entries, from the educational antologie to the radio broadcasts on Italian classics of literature); education, for the rooted opinion of a horizontal knowledge for all, a democratic knowledge in which we discover “the beauty to be an intellectual-friar not a priest: friar Cristoforo not cardinal Borromeo”; interculturalism, for the cosmopolitism and the internationalism of his works and for the activity of “cultural mediator” through the translation (Milton, Goethe, Kafka, Proust, Brecht, Eluard), aware of the history and the culture of the world are the cognitive background to understand the individual lives; literature, and poetry in particular, as an aesthetic form able to reveal the evil and the nobility of the world in a contradictory way through a language which is able to destroy the dull conformism of a lot of communication in the every day speech, in books, in the media, in the social network.
The course analises such connections through the reading, analysis, commentary and discussion of the last collection of Franco Fortini’s poems, Composita solvantur (1994).

1. Franco Fortini, Composita solvantur, il Saggiatore, Milano 2015.

2. Donatello Santarone, Le catene che danno le ali. Percorsi educativi tra didattica intercultura letteratura, Le Lettere, Firenze 2013.