I came into contact with literary texts for the first time when I was very young. In fact, when I attended the nursery school, my teachers taught me simple poems and songs and I sang them with enthusiasm. At that time, I didn't understand what those songs and nursery rhymes meant, what they were about, I just learnt them rote and sang them together with my friends in order to have fun.
I remember that I was fascinated by rhyme and when I managed to recite the whole poem without interruptions I was really happy and proud.
Poetry was a sort of game at that time. Reciting a poem was something like passing a spell. It made you feel powerful!
When I attended the elementary school, I learnt other poems. They were more difficult and generally they were about themes like Christmas, Easter, Love, Friendship and Peace and I recited them with my schoolmates during plays organised by school. In this period I thought that poetry was a synthetic and unusual way to speak about various problems and themes or to describe reality.
My idea about poetry and literature changed when I attended the junior high school. Indeed, during the Italian- lessons, I started studying what literature is and analysing different literary genres, drawing my attention on their structure, their aim and their addressee. After these theoretical lessons, I started studying Italian Literature from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The teacher gave me information about the historical, economical and social context in which a literary trend was born; subsequently she provided me information about the most famous poets and writers of that period (their biography, their ideas, their greatest works) and after that I had to read and make a short analysis of some of their poems. Analysing a poem meant to pick out: its topic, its speaking-voice, its possible addressee, the sequences it was organised into and the possible message provided by the poet. What's more, you had to recognize the figures of speech (for example metaphor, assonance, consonance, similitude and rhyme) used in the text. It was quite a surface and banal analysis but it helped me understand that literature was more than a stanza of strange words put together in order to amaze the reader.
I came closer to literary texts this year, studying Italian and English literature at the senior high school. The teachers provided me a useful method of textual analysis that considers both denotative and connotative aspects of the text. Following this analysis-scheme, I have made more interesting and complete textual analysis of medieval English poems and Italian sonnets. The most important thing I learnt is that you cannot know what the poet wanted to say trough the text, you cannot be sure about the exact meaning of the words he used: you can just make some hypothesis and try to go deep into the text, because even banal words may hide interesting points of view about various aspects of life. In a certain sense, literature is a chance to put yourself at stake, compare different opinions and become open-minded and more tolerant and to know something more about the world we live in. What's more, from a didactical point of view, you understand how a language works and how many shades of meaning hide behind the same word.
I also learnt that a textual-analysis will never be finished: you will always find new messages and stimulus to reflection in the same work; that is why this activity, even if hard, fascinates me. Analysing texts, you will better analyze the world all around you.