9794272 - NEUROHRMENEUTIC OF MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE A - Z

According to the Dublin descriptors, students, at the end of the course, will demonstrate:

 

1) Knowledge and Understanding

The course aims at providing students with a brief overview of the critical and transdisciplinary approaches of literary criticism with reference to the field of German literature and culture, in order to sharpen students' analytical skills.

 

2) Ability to apply knowledge and understanding

In-depth modules on literary- transdisciplinary critical approaches such as visual culture, cognitive poetics and neuroaesthetics and neurohermeneutics will be used to examine some selected German literary texts. Group work aimed at developing independent judgement and cooperative learning will be organized.

 

2) Communication skills

The student’s group work will be presented during the course. This presentation will be considered as an in-itinere test and will be part of the final assessment. Communication skills will also be assessed during both the in-itinere test and final examination.

 

3) Learning skills

The course aims to provide the tools and illustrate the fundamental methodologies of the latest literary and transdisciplinary research, thus fostering a common reflection on learning skills and possible study and research strategies

LM37 students must have at least B2 level German competence in order to work with texts in the original language. Students of LM14 or of other CdS who wish to take the course must have a basic knowledge of the main European poetic currents and textual analysis practices. For them, the lecturer will indicate texts in Italian.
Those who would like to include this course in their syllabus even if they do not have a basic knowledge of German are welcome but are asked to contact the lecturer during the first lessons of the course in order to agree on the readings suited to their personal needs and language skills.
Those borrowing from this course with less than 9 CFUs may choose two of the three modules in the syllabus by agreeing the course with the lecturer in class, during office hours or by e-mail.

A Visual Culture (3ECTS)

This course will examine a field of academic studies that deals with the visible and the practices of the gaze in culturally organized forms by applying its critical tools to the analysis of some fundamental texts of German literature, also in comparison with further transmedia performances or from other cultural origins.

 

B Neurohermeneutis (3ECTS)

Studies in cognitive linguistics and poetics have opened up new frontiers in the interpretation of the act of reading and artistic creation. Beginning with Semir Zeki's neuroaesthetics and in conjunction with studies on embodied simulation (Vittorio Gallese), conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson), the literary text will be interpreted as a device created with the intention of stimulating certain mental and physical processes in the reader. It will be the intention of this module to explore elements of cognitive rhetoric, the concept of embodied simulation, the Schema Theory. The course will attempt to uncover such structures within selected texts and analyze the link established between the reader as a body-mind complex, the 'world of discourse' and the 'world of the text'.

 

C Animal Studies (3ECTS)

In the mid-1980s, a new critical approach took off in Europe and the United States, termed Animal Studies, which set itself the goal of researching human-animal interaction, in all its components and, in particular, in the value assumed from an anthropological perspective in literary representations. These studies deal with the definition of concepts such as animality, the human representation of the animal world, the anthropomorphisation of the animal world, the relationship between human cultures and the animal world, and cross-species communities