PARITARY PRIVATE HIGH SCHOOL
DECREE N.338 MITF005006
DECREE N.1139 MITNUQ500H
DECREE N.2684 MIPMRI500E
IT

ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE - GENERAL OUTLINES AND SKILLS

ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE - GENERAL OUTLINES AND SKILLS

The Italian language represents a national cultural asset, an essential element of every student's identity and the preliminary means of access to knowledge: in fact, the linguistic dimension lies at the crossroads between the communicative, logical argumentative and cultural competencies declined by the Educational, Cultural and Professional Profile common to all high school paths.

At the end of the high school course, the student masters the Italian language: he/she is able to express him/herself, in written and oral form, with clarity and propriety, varying - according to the different contexts and purposes - the personal use of the language; to perform fundamental operations, such as summarizing and paraphrasing a given text, organizing and motivating an argument; to illustrate and interpret in essential terms a historical, cultural, scientific phenomenon.
Systematic observation of linguistic structures enables the student to deal with even complex texts found in study or work situations. For this purpose he also uses tools provided by metalinguistic reflection based on reasoning about the functions of different levels (orthographic, interpunctive, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, textual) in the orderly construction of discourse.
He or she also has an overall awareness of the historicity of the Italian language, matured through the reading since the two-year period of some literary texts distant in time, and then deepened by elements of the history of the language, its sociolinguistic characteristics and the presence of dialects, in the overall picture of Italy today, characterized by the varieties of use of Italian itself.

Literature at the Scientific High School Freud

A taste for reading remains a primary objective of the entire course of instruction, not to be compromised through an undue and abstract insistence on interpretative grids and methodological aspects, the acquisition of which will take place progressively throughout the entire five-year period, always in contact with texts and the problems concretely raised by their exegesis. Describing the literary landscape will be other authors and texts, in addition to those explicitly mentioned, chosen autonomously by the teacher, because of the paths he or she will deem most fruitful to emphasize in particular and the specificity of the individual high school addresses.
At the end of the course the student has understood the intrinsic value of reading, as a response to an autonomous interest and as a source of comparison with other than oneself and of broadening one's experience of the world; he or she has also acquired stable familiarity with literature, with its expressive tools and with the method it requires. He or she is able to recognize the interdependence between the experiences that are represented (the themes, explicit and implicit senses, archetypes and symbolic forms) in texts and the modes of representation (the aesthetic and rhetorical use of literary forms and their ability to contribute meaning).
The student acquires a specific method of work, gradually mastering the indispensable tools for the interpretation of texts: linguistic, stylistic, rhetorical analysis; intertextuality and the relationship between themes and literary genres; the incidence of the layering of different readings over time. He was able to observe the creative process of the literary work, which often takes place through different stages of elaboration. Over the course of the five-year period, he or she matures an independent ability to interpret and comment on texts in prose and verse, to ask personal questions of them, and to compare distant experiences with experiences present in the present day.
The student also has a clear grasp of the historical course of Italian literature from the Origins to the present day: he grasps the historical dimension understood as reference to a given context; the impact of authors on language and literary codification (in the sense of both continuity and rupture); the connection with historically present questions in different eras. He has then deepened the relationship between literature and other cultural expressions, also thanks to the systematic contribution of the other disciplines that occur on the axis of time (history, history of art, history of philosophy). Has an adequate idea of the relationships with the literatures of other countries, placing side by side readings of Italian authors with readings of foreign authors, to be arranged possibly with foreign language and culture teachers, and of the mutual exchanges between literature and other arts.
Has done direct readings of texts (whole works or significant portions of them, in philologically correct editions), has become familiar with the characteristics of our literary language, formed in ancient times with the appearance of the works of primary authors, especially Dante. He has a consistent knowledge of Dante's Commedia, whose artistic value and significance for the 

of which he grasped the artistic value and significance for the constitution of Italian culture as a whole. In the span of Italian literary history, he has identified cultural movements, authors of major importance and works whose recurring presence has been felt over time, and has also grasped the coexistence, alongside production in Italian, of production in dialect.
The reading of texts of literary value has also enabled the student to enrich his linguistic skills, in particular the broadening of lexical and semantic heritage, the ability to adapt syntax to the construction of meaning and to adapt register and tone to different themes, and attention to stylistic effectiveness, which are prerequisites of writing competence.

SPECIFIC LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Language

FIRST TWO YEARS at the Scientific High School Freud

In the first two years, the student fills in any gaps and consolidates and deepens oral and written language skills, through activities that promote effective and correct language use, flanked by a reflection on language oriented to the dynamics of morphosyntactic cohesion and logical-argumentative coherence of discourse, without indulging in meticulous taxonomies and reducing nomenclatorial aspects. General differences in the use of oral, written and broadcast language will be the subject of special observation, just as attention will be paid to the different forms of word processing and multimedia communication. In the area of oral production, the student will be accustomed to respect for verbal turns, theme order and expressive effectiveness. In the area of written production, he/she will know how to control the construction of the text according to coherent thematic progressions, logical organization within and beyond the sentence, the use of connectives (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs and text structuring signals), punctuation, and will know how to make appropriate lexical choices.

These activities will develop textual competence in both comprehension (identifying data and information, making inferences, understanding internal logical relationships) and production (attending to textual, ideational and linguistic dimensions). In addition to the traditional practice of extended writing, in its various types, the student will be able to compose short writings on constrained assignments, paragraphing, summarizing by grasping the salient informational features of a text, titling, paraphrasing, relating, composing texts by varying registers and points of view.
This course will use the opportunities offered by all disciplines with their specific languages to facilitate vocabulary enrichment and develop the ability to interact with different types of text, including scientific text: the transversality of the teaching of Italian Language requires that collaboration with the other disciplines be effective and planned.
At the end of the first two years he will address, in historical perspective, the theme of the birth, from the Latin matrix, of Italian vernaculars and the spread of literary Florentine until its substantial establishment as an Italian language.

SECOND TWO-YEAR PERIOD AND FIFTH YEAR at the Scientific High School Freud

In the second two years and the final year, the student consolidates and develops his or her language knowledge and skills on all suitable occasions to reflect further on the richness and flexibility of language, considered in a wide variety of texts offered for study.
The refinement of comprehension and production skills will be pursued systematically, in collaboration with the other disciplines that use texts, both for study and comprehension and for production (reports, written tests, etc.). With this in mind, special attention will be given to the possession of disciplinary vocabularies, with emphasis on terms that move from special languages to the common language or that are endowed with different meanings in different areas of use.
The student will also analyze literary texts linguistically, practicing literal explanation to detect the peculiarities of lexicon, semantics and syntax and, in poetic texts, the incidence of figurative language and metrics. They, while remaining the focus of attention, will have to be placed side by side with texts of other types, highlighting their distinctive features from time to time; in non-fiction prose, for example, the techniques of argumentation will be highlighted.
In the historical perspective of language, the decisive 16th-century codification, the fortunes of Italian in Europe especially in the Renaissance period, the importance of linguistic consciousness in the generations of the Risorgimento, and the gradual spread of spoken Italian in the national community from Unification to the present will be highlighted. More recent evolutionary trends in the simplification of syntactic structures, the coinage of compounds and derivatives, and the reception and cast of dialectalisms and forestierisms will be pointed out.

Literature

FIRST TWO YEARS at Scientific High School Freud

In the course of the first two years, the student encounters significant works and authors of classicism, to be read in translation, in order to identify the main features of the literary and cultural tradition, with particular attention to works that are foundational for Western civilization and have become rooted-perhaps unconsciously-in the collective imagination, as it has settled down over the centuries (the Homeric poems, 5th-century Attic tragedy, the Aeneid, a few other texts by primary Greek and Latin authors, especially in high schools lacking classical subjects, the Bible); alongside other readings from authors of modern times, including foreign ones, he will read Manzoni's Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), as a work that sums up the artistic quality, the decisive contribution to the formation of modern Italian, the exemplary realization of the novel-form, the breadth and variety of themes and perspectives on the world.
At the end of the first two years he will approach, through some readings of texts, the earliest expressions of Italian literature: religious poetry, the Sicilians, pre-Sylnovistic Tuscan poetry. Through exercise on the texts he begins to acquire the main techniques of analysis (literary genres, metrics, rhetoric, etc.).

SECOND TWO-YEAR PERIOD at the Scientific High School Freud

The historical outline of Italian literature will extend from the Stilnovo to Romanticism. The diachronic outline, essential to the understanding of the historicity of every literary phenomenon, requires selecting, along the axis of time, the most relevant moments of literary civilization, the writers and works that have contributed most both to defining the culture of the period to which they belong and to enriching, in a significant and lasting way, the Italian and European literary system, both in the merit of the symbolic representation of reality and through the codification and innovation of the forms and institutions of the various genres. On these it will be necessary, therefore, to focus, eschewing the temptation of a generic encyclopedism.
The sense and breadth of the cultural context, within which literature is situated with its own means of expression, cannot be reduced to a mere narrative background on which authors and texts are printed. A composite panorama, able to account for social structures and their relationship with intellectual groups (the communal bourgeoisie, the clergy, the courts, the city, forms of patronage), the emergence of worldviews (humanism, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment) and new ethical and cognitive paradigms (the new science, secularization), cannot fail to benefit from the contribution of different disciplinary domains.
It is within this framework, of description and analysis of cultural processes - to which the study of history, philosophy, art history, scientific disciplines will contribute - that will find a necessary place, in addition to Dante (whose Commedia will be read during the last three years, to the extent of at least 25 cantos in total), the centuries-long vicissitude of lyric poetry (from Petrarch to Foscolo), the great season of chivalric narrative poetry (Ariosto, Tasso), the various manifestations of prose, from novella to novel (from Boccaccio to Manzoni), from political to scientific treatise (Machiavelli, Galileo), the rise of the theatrical tradition (Goldoni, Alfieri).

FIFTH YEAR at the Scientific High School Freud

Because of the twentieth-century resonances of his work and, at the same time, the complexity of his position in nineteenth-century European literature, Leopardi will be studied at the beginning of the senior year. Again resorting to a real multidisciplinary programming, the historical design, which will go from the Unification of Italy to the present day, requires the student to be able to understand the relationship of the literary system (genres, themes, styles, relationship with the public, new means of expression) on the one hand with the course of events that have gradually modified the Italian social and political order and on the other hand with the phenomena that mark more generally modernity and postmodernity, observed in a sufficiently broad European and non-European panorama.
At the center of the path will be the authors and texts that most marked the profound innovation of forms and genres, produced in the crucial transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
marking the paths along which poetry and prose will redefine their statutes during the 20th century. From this profile, the vicissitudes of lyric poetry, less than ever reducible to national boundaries, can only move from Baudelaire and the Italian reception of the European Symbolist season that was inaugurated by him. The incidence throughout the twentieth century of the voices of Pascoli and d'Annunzio makes their study inescapable; just as, on the side of fiction, the representation of the "true" in Verga and the breakdown of the forms of the novel in Pirandello and Svevo constitute as many non-avoidable moments in the constitution of the "twentieth-century tradition."
Inside the 20th century and up to the threshold of the present, the path of poetry, which will begin with the decisive experiences of Ungaretti, Saba and Montale, will contemplate an adequate knowledge of texts selected from those of authors of the coeval and later lyric poetry (e.g. Rebora, Campana, Luzi, Sereni, Caproni, Zanzotto, ...). The path of fiction, from the neorealist season to the present, will include readings from significant authors such as Gadda, Fenoglio, Calvino, P. Levi and may be supplemented by other authors (e.g. Pavese, Pasolini, Morante, Meneghello...). Finally, the reading of pages from the best non-fiction, journalistic and memoiristic prose is recommended.

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