Classes will start on Monday, February 8 (3 pm), in the Microsoft Teams “virtual classroom” of the course, and will continue according to the schedule published in the teacher’s webpage. Classes are officially three hours long, but the average duration will be about 2 hours and 15 minutes, because the so-called “academic hour” is actually made of 45 minutes, to allow teachers and students to get some pause in-between lessons. The three 15-minute pauses will be combined at the beginning or at the end of the lessons – we will decide when to start and when to finish in the first lesson, after having checked all the possible overlappings with other lessons.

Starting from the second week, all students are supposed to have already read the primary text that will be discussed in each lesson.

The first two lessons and the lesson on “How to Write a Critical Essay” will be recorded and made available to everyone. It is possible that other lessons or parts of them will be recorded, but after the first week classes will be organized in order to encourage the students’ active participation, and recording the lessons could have an inhibitory effect – so, I will record the lesson only when I will be teaching ex cathedra. A part of each lesson will be devoted to translating into Italian some crucial passage of the primary texts, in order to enhance the skills in literary translation (this is one of the main purposes of our Master of Arts in “Foreign Languages and Cultures and Literary Translation”).

At the end of the course students will have the option to present and discuss a critical essay on one or more of the primary texts of the program, and to answer to a couple of questions on the other texts – if this evaluation-in-progress proves positive, the acquisition of the knowledge and skills required to pass the exam will be considered as obtained, and students will only have to record their grade in one of the official exam sessions, without any further examination. In order to be evaluated in this way, students are required to present in one of the lessons their own reading and interpretation of one of the additional critical essays on the primary texts that will be made available at the beginning of the course (this presentation will not be evaluated). Even if the program (due to bureaucratic reasons) distinguishes between attending and non-attending students, and the presentation and discussion of a critical essay should be reserved only to attending students, this distinction is merely formal. In the Master of Arts in “Foreign Languages and Cultures and Literary Translation” class attendance is not compulsory, and can only be recommended, but cannot discriminate in any way non-attending students. NO TEACHER CAN PRESCRIBE CLASS ATTENDANCE (NEITHER CAN S/HE CHECK IT IN EVERY LESSON) AS REQUIRED FOR TAKING THE EXAM IN A CERTAIN WAY AND WITH A DIFFERENT PROGRAM. Teachers can include some supplementary texts in the program for non-attending students, but these texts can only be a substitute and integration for activities carried out in class, and cannot add further issues and topics not addressed in the program for attending students. So, in order to present and discuss their critical essay at the end of this course students are not required to attend any given percentage of lessons (even if they are recommended to attend as much as they can…) – they will only have to present their reading and interpretation of one of the additional critical essays in one of the lessons.

Notes and PowerPoint presentations of (almost…) every lesson will be made available in the course webpage and in the Microsoft Teams classroom, together with other materials. A Facebook group, Across the Ocean, will be created to allow immediate communication between the teacher and all the students, and also to provide further materials that might be used for the composition of the critical essay and more generally for the in-depth study of one or more of the primary texts (but these materials are only optional and will not be the object of any direct question in the exam). For any issue of general interest, students may publish a post on the Facebook group. For individual questions, please send an e-mail to the teacher (do not use Windows Messenger).