Corso di laurea in Lettere

The purpose of this subject is to  introduce students to key aspects of the literary and cultural traditions of Germany and the German-speaking countries and to acquaint students with a selection of works by representative authors from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

This course is an introduction to modern poetry written in German, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Lectures are used to give students background information to the set texts and to present critical and interpretative approaches. We will study poems by Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Rilke, Trakl, Brecht, Celan, Bachmann, and others.

In this module we will study the crucial role played by notions of music and musicality in the development of German  poetry during an intense period of innovation. Focusing primarily on important poetic texts by major authors, we will also consider the parallels between formal and theoretical developments in both poetry and music, and the ways in which both arts evolve through comparison with each other.