Università Roma Tre

INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION
9 Credits 54 hours
Prof. Donatello Santarone

Title and Course Content

An intercultural teaching of poetry.
Vittorio Sereni: Lombard of Europe, Africa, and America;
Franco Fortini: Florentine-Milanese and citizen of the world.


The course aims to read and analyze poems by one of the greatest Italian and European poets after World War II, Vittorio Sereni (1913-1983), trying to bring out the intercultural intertwining of places, themes, figures, and languages coming from different historical, cultural, and poetic experiences of the poet: the civil dimension of the "Lombard" literary tradition, the second world war and imprisonment in Africa, the post-war publishing industry, opening the world up to Italian culture, travel, and the experience of translation.
The course also aims to read and analyze poems by Franco Fortini (1917-1994), who was a poetic and intellectual friend and interlocutor of Sereni. For this part, we will also trace the intercultural dimension of Fortini's work, which is characterized by cosmopolitanism and internationalism of his poems and prose and for his activity as a "cultural mediator" through translation (Milton, Goethe, Kafka, Proust, Brecht, Eluard), aware that the history and culture of the world are the cognitive background for understanding individual existences.
Reading these texts and interpreting them as a critical exercise of the imagination, with the consequent historical-critical commentary, will consolidate three capacities of which the critic Romano Luperini speaks: “the cognitive capacity, widening and deepening specific knowledge of the discipline and of the linguistic and cultural knowledge that is obtained from the dense network of interferences that presides over reading and interpretation; the imaginative capacity, as an existential, emotional and cultural enrichment produced by the contact with the great reservoir of imagination that is literature; the critical capacity, from education to the complexity and the problematic nature of the hermeneutical moment to the partiality and interdialogical character of every truth and to the democratic dialectic of the conflict of interpretations. These three capacities outline the many educational objectives.”
Part of the program is dedicated to practical applications in a learning environment for early childhood.



Objectives
• Know how to read and comment critically on a poetic text, a narrative text and an argumentative text.
• Experience the "alienating" character of the language of poetry.
• Acquire a method of reading the texts that is impressionistic but based, as much as possible, on what the text actually says.
• Know how to connect knowledge in the different analysis of texts.
• Know some key moments in the history and culture of the world over the last three centuries and connect these moments to the literary and educational dimensions.
• Acquire cognitive, imaginative and critical skills.

Exam Texts:
1. Vittorio Sereni, Diario d’Algeria, prefazione di Giovanni Raboni, Einaudi, Torino 1998.
2. Vittorio Sereni, Gli strumenti umani, introduzione di Chiara Fenoglio, il Saggiatore, Milano 2018.
3. Vittorio Sereni, Stella variabile, prefazione di Franco Fortini, il Saggiatore, Milano 2017.
4. Franco Fortini, Tutte le poesie, a cura di Luca Lenzini, Mondadori, Milano 2014.
5. Donatello Santarone, Letteratura e intercultura, dispensa scaricabile dal sito del docente.