Luca Iaccarino – V A

Activity 1

The quotation that I have to analyze is taken from a teacher’s discourse to his students entitled: To My Students Reading Tennyson’s Ulysses. So the writer is a teacher, who invites his students to reflect on the values of literature, in particular of poetry and to understand the main features of textual analysis through the reading of Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The quotation starts asserting that people would greatly benefit by approaching poetry with open and inquisitive minds; indeed the reader does not have to be slave to poetry but he has to put himself to test: he has to open his mind, to overstep the surface meaning in order to understand the real meaning of the text, expressed by the use of particular rhetorical devices and of specific language. However the reader does not quit reading or listening, although he arrives at something he does not know or find enjoyment in it; indeed there is no definitive answer because the language is ambiguous and characterized by lots of shades due to the position of words or due to the sound of words. It goes without saying that it is not simple to create a relationship with poetry because, as the teacher states, it requires an inquisitive mind but, at the same time, it allows us to improve ourselves:

…Great works of art and literature require much of us: active reading and participation…  

Therefore the reader has to participate emotively to the reading, expressing his own feelings and using clear eyes, open minds, sensitive hearts and thinking: the last one is the most important action because it allows to get next to truth, knowledge and wisdom.

In short the reader wants to convey the idea of the importance of reading; reading allows to get knowledge and to realize what Dante Alighieri states within Divina Commedia, Inferno, Canto XXVI that is to say:

…Fatti non foste a viver come bruti ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza…

The last image allows us connect what I stated before with Tennyson’s Ulysses that is also quoted by the teacher at the end of his discourse. The function of his quotation is to give his students a paradigm of what he stated before: indeed the mythological figure of Ulysses may be compared to the figure of the ideal reader because both seek knowledge, try to experience realms of possibility beyond the sunset and so beyond the limits. Moreover, on one hand Ulysses is brave and wants always to get a better knowledge on the other hand the ideal reader has always to continue his research and he does not have to give up although he is in front of a difficult and senseless text.

The quotation ends stating that if students follow teacher’s teaching and their imagination, they will discover new ways of expression, new ways of being, forms of life and unmapped geography.