“The pain of women”, the new book by Stefano Motta from Desia

The real influencers are called Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Manzoni, Morante, Merini, Maraini, Woolf. Great authors of literature, who have a lot to say to young people. Even on delicate and current issues such as violence against women and the fight against gender stereotypes. From this observation, “Women’s paingender violence in literature, affective education in schools”, the new book by the Desian writer, teacher and literary critic Stefano Motta.

The purpose of school: to teach how to live

“The idea – explains the author – And born from annoyance towards those who propose pedagogists and influencers in schools”. The essay, just published by Ancora publishing house, it is full of quotes, available to teachers and students. “It collects the reflections of many years of teaching and dare uncomfortable pagesto give literature back its true, disturbing and salvific role” explains Motta. The school can have the courage to read the most uncomfortable pages, not to dull the senses of literature, not to smooth out its most annoying edges, to teach it and use it to the main purpose for which literature exists: That it is not teaching how to write well, but how to live well. This is the meaning of the book.

Female figures, pulsating bodies

Motta tackles the stories of the female protagonists, analyzing them with realism. The protagonists are different female figures of literature, united by the pain and violence suffered. Stories that could be current. “Every day in school classrooms our students encounter abused women – we read on the back cover – Francesca, Petra, Griselda, Caterina, Lucia, Gertrude, Emma, ​​Sybil, Nora, Judith, Kora: their stories of pain and blood scream from the pages of literary masterpieces, if possible even more ferocious than crime news. These ‘paper’ women are pulsating bodies, other than ‘angelic creatures’watched and narrated mostly by males, with all that this entails.”

The most disturbing pages of literature

Motta, author of numerous novels and essays, thus intends to remind the reader and society of the immense cultural heritage he has at his disposal to analyze today’s world and draw lessons from it. Not only. The author invites us to go further, to also know the “disturbing pages”: “In uncomfortable times, where the educational need is more urgent than the merely informative one, we must find the courage to abandon the comfortable terrain of literature known and re-proposed year after year. We need to have the courage to dare the most uncomfortable and hardest pages, who question us and our students not on rhetorical devices but on cultural paradigms. We will find that the woman is not alone blonde head and clear face. Women in literature are pulsating bodiesother than angelic creatures.”

We don’t need hours of emotional education, but a new type of teachers

The ones who bring about this change, writes Motta, must be women, who are the most numerous in schools. “They are the ones who read and explain the authors of the canon of our literature.” “There is no need – Motta insists – for any additional hours of emotional education. We need a new type of teacherscapable of hurting and being hurt by uncomfortable pages.”

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