ABSTRACT

Anotacoes

ABSTRACT Why still read the classics of Italian literature? Why persist in a difficult exercise in style and language? Why impose a forced experience on students? Why is the culture of the present not enough? This essay offers a reflection on the current crisis of reading the classics of Italian lit- erature in two ways: it introduces the methods by which contemporary audiences approach heritage literature (structuralism and cognitive narratology above all), and it proposes a series of reflections on the scheme of communication proposed in the 1960s by the structuralist Roman Jakobson (context, addresser/sender, addressee/receiver, contact, common code and message) in the belief that every classic (in this case of criticism and not of literature) can be updated, even when it has profoundly renewed literary studies. The aim of these notes is to leave behind complaints about the isolation of humanistic culture from an increasingly scientific and technological world, and to engage in time to embrace inevitable changes in global communities, including the dissemination of culture and the public literature. Otherwise, there are two risks for literature: settling for a criticism without ...