Emotional analysis: a didactic proposal to transform literary text into a lived experience
Daniela Falzone
In high school literature teaching, there is often a critical issue due to the cultural distance between the literary text and the horizon of meaning of a hyper-connected generation. Traditional text analysis, which is mainly focused on technical aspects, proves to be an indispensable but incomplete didactic tool, because it rarely succeeds in captivating the youngest. To meet this educational need, an innovative didactic proposal inspired by Embodied Education has been designed and put into practice: emotional text analysis, which starts from the centrality of the body and its sensations, perceptions and emotions. The unconscious meanings of the literary text, the symbolisation of the body in space and the collusive dynamics of neo-emotions are illuminated. The pupil is called upon in the first person to feel the text with his or her own body, to interpret it with the uniqueness of his or her person, to return its emotional resonance through creative writing activities. The didactic experience, conducted in a first and a fifth high school class, proved to be fully positive in terms of involvement, motivation, perception of literature as a lived experience and a stimulus to creativity, as emerged from a self-assessment questionnaire submitted to the pupils involved.
Keywords
Literary text, Embodied Education, body, emotion.
