Voices and landscapes

 

This section includes a series of texts in which different literary voices, from a variety of ages and cultural backgrounds, ‘speak’ their emotional and psychological landscapes, ranging from the melancholic to the nostalgic, the angry, the ironic. They are voices of women and men, of children and adults, of black and white people, and the texts that give verbal signification to their emotional worlds are simple poems, short stories and some extracts from a novel. The result is a symphony of emotional landscapes, which appear to evoke the idea expressed by Marshall McLuhan in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ (1951): 

‘Whereas in external landscape diverse things lie side by side, so in psychological landscape the juxtaposition of various things and experiences becomes a precise musical means of orchestrating that which could never be rendered by systematic discourse. Landscape is the means of presenting, without the copula of logical enunciation, experiences which are united in existence but not in conceptual thought. Syntax becomes music’.

The landscapes emerging from these texts are a kaleidoscope of moods and even ‘colours’, which in a way resemble the different tonalities and rhythms of a musical composition.

The texts that follow have been analysed and commented on by 4^th year-students, but they are part of a didactic project including also students from the 3^rd and 5^th year of course A of our school. For each text there is a visual analysis, sometimes in PDF format, a comment, a short biography of the author and images.

Prof.ssa Maria Antonietta Struzziero