Pragmatico- linguistic analysis of Italian literary texts

Teacher(s)

Maeder Costantino;

Language

Italian

Prerequisites

- to be familiar with the main event in the history of Italian literature.
- to be able to express oneself orally in Italian.
- to be able to write a text in Italian.
- to be familiar with the main ideas of narratology and of textual analysis.

Main themes

The pragmatic approaches of language, as put forward by Austin, Searle or Grice, offer strategies of interpretation of texts and complex works (mixed media like the opera or the theatre), which are both fundamental and revealing.
The course will present the most important notions, as well as some more recent research (Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Lo Cascio, Cosenza), and will apply them in a critical fashion to different literary and dramatic texts.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	Be able to recognize the phenomena presented in class within texts; Be able to formulate textual interpretations that take into account the analysed elements; To have read a series of literary and dramatic texts; To be able to analyse critically a text as seen in class; To be able to give a critical analysis of a text using the means detailed in the lectures.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Content

When we read libretti, plays, and novels, we are confronted with very complex linguistic problems. The writers, through a literary artifact, reflect on how language works. Sometimes, they analyze communication and its failures (in a certain way, they do metalinguistic research). In other cases, a close linguistic reading reveals new textual and interpretative implications, often overlooked when a reader concentrates on content or the narrative dimension. The pragmatic and linguistic analysis of texts by Pirandello and Metastasio will help us to understand a series of problems, related to communication and to its representation in literature, understood as a form of investigation of human cognition.

Teaching methods

/

Evaluation methods

Students will prepare a presentation and write an academic paper.

Students will be asked to present an academic paper on a text of their choice. They will have to

-  choose a certain number of concepts from those studied in the course or mentioned in the bibliography;

-   to apply them to the chosen work;

-   to assess their relevance and their effectiveness in the analysis;

to present this piece of work during a work session (if the number of students so allows).

Other information

/

Bibliography

Lectures théoriques:

Stephen C. Levinson, La pragmatica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993.

Claudia Bianchi, Pragmatica del linguaggio, Bari, Laterza, 2003.

H. Paul Grice, 'Logic and Conversation', in: Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3. Speech Acts', édité par P. Cole e J. Morgan, New York, Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41-58.

Idem, 'Further Notes on Logic and Conversation, in: 'Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 9.

Giovanna Cosenza, La pragmatica di Paul Grice.

Intenzioni, significato, comunicazione, Milano, Bompiani, 2002

Carla Bazzanella, Linguistica e pragmatica del linguaggio. Un'introduzione, Roma-Bari, 2005.

Dan Sperber et Deirdre Wilson, La pertinence. Communication et cognition, Paris, Minuit, 1989.

Oeuvres:

Luigi Pirandello: Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, Il fu Mattia Pascal

Pietro Metastasio: L'Olimpiade

Faculty or entity

ROM