Una germanista alla prova dell'umorismo e dell'utopia : per una prassi e una poetica del discorso universitario

The present essay considers the risks caused by the myth of an all-encompassing translatability which affects Western inclusive societies, where scholars of Literature and Human Sciences are requested to develop Global Competence and to face neurocomputational models of task-oriented behaviour and working memory. Researches upon innovative Didactics in German Literature give students the opportunity of exploring literaricity and of experiencing aesthetic education by throwing a look from across the disciplines to generate new multi-disciplinary insights. Reconsidering utopian fiction and thought in the digital era is one of these opportunities. The present investigation is intended to show that humour, if examined with psychoanalytic criteria and with Cristopher Bollas’ “Cracking up”, greatly contributes to develop new strategies in order to study utopianism and literay utopias not being overshadowed by dystopian projective identification. Humourous strategies and utopian instances are also at stake so as to balance the “Discourse of The University” (Lacan). The present essay analyses Kafka’s and Benjamin’s Fragments, apologues and aphorisms along with Leopardi’s reflections with the purpose of structuring an alternative “academic discourse”. Get acquainted with genres, define functions and roles of foreign literatures implies alternative forms of aesthetic education as well as an enhancement of creativity. Pursuing linguistic and cultural aims by considering the dynamics of humour and utopia can foster foreign language competences and interculturality in order to develop intrapsychic, interpersonal processes and grow as individual persons who recognise Otherness and cope with intellectual emancipation in the digital era by means of literaricity and of Weltliteratur.