Learning objectives

Objectives: The Winter School offers 8 credits (CFU) and aims to reflect on the connections, integrations, and hybridizations between different literatures, taking a broad view of entire currents and vast epochs, including contemporary issues such as translation practice and relationships with the publishing market. It also aims to explore current critical approaches that can equip young scholars with the investigative tools needed to undertake literary research. Upon completion, doctoral students will demonstrate: the ability to independently navigate the historical-cultural relationships relevant to their field of study; an awareness of the need for diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives and critical approaches appropriate to the subject of study; an awareness of the transcontextual and transcultural importance of the classics; and an awareness of the historical-cultural complexity of translations and transcodings across different eras and media (e.g., literature/film), even in today's world.

Prerequisites and basic notions

The seminar proposes a discussion of the concepts of truth and fiction in medieval literature and the applicability of these categories in the analysis of Germanic heroic epics.

Program

According to Vladimir Nabokov's famous opinion, literature "was born the day a boy came crying wolf, and there were no wolves behind him" (1982: 35). Literature has, in fact, always questioned (and founded) the relationship between truth and fiction; it has acted and played on the blurring of these two dimensions through strategies, sometimes culturally given, of authentication, that is, of vindication of the truth or, conversely, of its falsification to the point of producing authentic literary forgeries. Narration and representation are inherent to lying and are articulated in honest deceptions or, conversely, in deliberate falsehoods, between facets of meaning and formal complexities that become the very nourishment of literature (and literariness). These are issues inscribed in creative practice itself; they open with fruitful, we would say inevitable, results to the exegesis and theoretical debate that has variously developed around the relationship, among others, between history and narration, and again within the field of narratology, but also with regard to philological, cultural and broadly epistemological questions.

Didactic methods

Classes will be held in person, but a Zoom link can be requested from individual instructors and provided at their discretion.
Attendance is mandatory according to the training program guidelines.

Learning assessment procedures

PhD students will select an aspect of the seminar as the topic for their annual term paper, which they will prepare under the guidance of one of the supervising professors.

Assessment

Evaluation of the term paper (positive or negative).

Scheduled Lessons