Recenti sviluppi nell'educazione letteraria

The first Minister of Education of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 was Francesco De Santís, the author of the first «History of Italian Literature»: he shaped the notion of literary education for the Italian school - a notion still in use after 140 years. According to his vision, teaching literature meant teaching the history of literature. This vision has been upset in the late 1980s in the teaching of foreign literatures (compulsory in the final three years of «Licei»): teaching literature means teaching how to read literary texts, how to detect and criticize their «literaryness», how to connect them to the production of the author and to the social and cultural setting of the times. This approach to the text, rather that to the author, is spreading slowly in the teaching to Italian Literature in schools