Adria

Didactical path - first year

English - Literature

 

 

 

 

ITALIAN INFLUENCES ON THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

Leonardo da Vinci Baldassarre Castiglione Niccolò Machiavelli Copernicus Kepler Galileo

 

 

 

 

THOMAS MORE

Life and works

Focus on the text:”Utopia” Extract: “Thou shalt not kill”   In the  passage. More imagines a utopia, in a way a dream-world, a place where private property is abolished and society is not ruled by the dynamics of money and power but is based on principles of equality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOSEPH RUDYARD KIPLING

Life and works

Focus on the text: Extract from “Thrown away”: The Matter of India   In the passage the narrator describes the situation of the British expatriate community in colonial India, whose power has become meaningless. Although he is supposedly describing India as a place, in actual fact the things he mentions represent only the extremely narrow and contemptuous perspective of the British governors.

 

 

DORIS LESSING

Life and works

Focus on the text Extract from “The good Terrorist”: Food for thought   In the passage middle-class Marxist-feminist activist Alice is breakfasting in a working man’s cafe where she notices the mood is not exactly that of a prelude to the revolution. Alice’s obvious contempt for the ordinary lives of the people in the cafe reflects her own class position of power and privilege in a way which puts her revolutionary identity in serious question.

 

 

 

 

 

MARTIN LUTHER KING

Life and speeches

Extract from Speech at Lincoln Memorial In his famous speech pronounced in Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King illustrates his American dream for a just place where people of all races and religions live peacefully together, an oasis of love, freedom and justice.

 

 

 

GEORGE ORWELL

Life and works

Focus on the text Extract from “Politics and the English Language”   In the  passage, which describes a real situation frighteningly similar to that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell reflects on the empty and mechanical rhetoric that informs much of political discourse. Orwell reflects on the fact that the language of politics often implies the creation of a fictitious world devoid of substance, a galaxy of empty, meaningless words and phrases which through repetition acquire autonomous value. This leads to a virtualisation of reality which makes the interests of those in power legitimate and empties events of their real substance.

 

 

 

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Life and works

Focus on text Extract from “Civil Disobedience”   According to Thoreau, all governments are inevitably unjust. Indeed, he says, the reason why a majority have the power to rule over a country is not because they are in the right but simply because they are physically the strongest party. Every individual should develop a fair conscience that will direct them towards what is right, without need of being guided or controlled by a government that, by its very nature, represents only the interests of a particular section of the population. The radicalism of this lies in the way the individual’s identity is no longer simply a question of identifying his interests with an abstract political body of opinion. Rather, this identity must be constructed through the politics of his own actions.

 

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