Università Roma Tre

Poetry and Education

The title of the course, Poetry and Education , concerns two aspects of the knowledge that will be explored from the readings of the poet and essayist Franco Fortini (1917-1994).
The text on which the course is based is The Twentieth Century Poets by Franco Fortini, an author-anthology story in which Fortini's critical method is always aimed at triggering short circuits between poetry, history and language and which allows us to read and comment on some emblematic texts of our 20th century poetic. The major scholars of education - Dewey, Bruner, Gardner - have repeatedly advocated the centrality of artistic education in learning processes. It should therefore be stressed the importance of reading poetry for the enhancement of those qualities that underlie every authentic educational relationship: listening, depth, attention, critical capacity, creativity. Furthermore, poetry makes use of a deliberately ambiguous language, based on a multiplicity of meanings, on a semantic richness capable of undermining the flat conformism of so much communication present in everyday speech, in books, in the media, in the web.

Exam texts:

Franco Fortini, The poets of the twentieth century, edited by Donatello Santarone, with an introductory essay by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Donzelli, Rome 2017.