Umfragen zur Lektürepraxis und zum Leseverhalten an Schulen und Universitäten im europäischen Vergleich

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Lynn Rosemary Randall
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1 1 Umfragen zur Lektürepraxis und zum Leseverhalten an Schulen und Universitäten im europäischen Vergleich GIOIA PARADISI Sapienza Università di Roma The Perception of European Literature among Italian Students This talk examines the responses of Italian high school students, with some points of reflection also in respect to other groups examined (high school teachers, students, and university teachers). In the handout, there are tables, in very simplified form, to which I will refer. The questions on the questionnaire did not ask the interviewees for information relative to their own direct knowledge of works and authors; therefore, it is obvious that the responses don t say which books they have actually read, but it offers useful indications to reconstruct the cultural function assigned by them to the literatures, and in particular, European literature. In total, the number of Italian high school students was 512 individuals, of which 35% are male and 65% female; thus, there are almost twice as many females as males. The numerical data relative to gender, for all of the groups of interviewees, merit a much deeper analysis and should be systematically organized according to content (authors and works) indicated by those who responded to the questionnaire. Only in this way can we choose the specificity of all of the options, a specificity which, as we know, we are able to circumscribe for the various epochs of the European history of literature, and that have to be evidenced also by our research. Jane Austen, the only feminine name among the top ten marked, had to have been marked by girls (among boys, on the other hand, Defoe is ranked very highly, but then, since most of the respondees are female, he goes down in the overall rankings) and, a result, that is less foreseeable, in my opinion, the positioning of Baudelaire with Les Fleurs du Mal in the top ten is also due to the girls. In looking at the percentages concerning reading, 40% said that they read from 1 to 3 books per year; 32% read between 4 and 8; and 23% read nine or more. In looking at the European correspondences, these data show that, like the Portuguese, even if in a smaller percentage, the majority of Italian students say that they read from 1 to 5 books per year; the majority of Spanish and Romanian students, meanwhile, said that they read between 4 and 8 books; and the majority of German students read nine or more. Concerning how many books the students own, the percentages show that about 67% of Italians are located in two median segments (from 51 to 100 books, and from 101 to 500, with a minority that has more than 500); the situation is largely analogous

2 2 for Spain and Romania (this situation, however, is globally better than the other two), while Germany shows a situation of another sort: almost 80% of the students are in the two higher segments, of 101 to 500 books and more than 500 books. Regarding annual attendance at theatre events, we see that 58% say that they never go to the theatre, 37% go a few times; and 4% go often; the distribution of the three options among the Italians is overall better than the Spanish, similar to the Portuguese, and worse in respect to the Germans and Romanians. The situation is different regarding cinema, in which, unlike the other results, unlike Romanians and Germans, the majority of Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish (between 70 and 80%) go to 4 to 8 films per year. Now we move on to the section of the study that concerns which authors and works of European literature are the most important, according to Italian high school students. Table 1. Questions 3 and 4, Part 2: Most important authors and works of European Literature, according to the students (excluding works in the students own language). Ranking Most important author Most important work 1 Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet 2 Oscar Wilde The Portrait of Dorian Gray 3 Dickens Hamlet 4 Homer The Odyssey 5 Goethe Pride and Prejudice 6 Dostoyevsky The Iliad 7 Jane Austen War and Peace 8 Cervantes Don Quixote 9 Baudelaire The Sorrows of Young Werther 10 Tolstoy Frankenstein

3 3 I will compare this list to the European literary canon as defined in the Anthology entitled European Literature: The Canon 1, which consists of the following works: The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Canzoniere of Petrarch, The Decameron, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust, Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, In Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, and The Trial. This canon is derived from previous research presented at a 2007 Conference on the European canon, during which students and teachers from La Sapienza University in Rome were interviewed. Now, based on the survey of high school students and teachers and Italian university teachers and students that was presented at the Conference of March, 2012, a rather more stable group of authors and works has been established rather stable but not fixed. It includes, of course, Shakespeare, but we have to keep in mind not only Hamlet (as it is in the Anthology) but also Romeo and Juliet, Cervantes and Don Quixote, and Homer and not just The Odyssey, but also The Iliad; Goethe, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. We must include Dante among these names, as I consider him implicit on this list, because the question requires that Italian students exclude Italian literature in their answers. This group of authors is consistent with the composition of the most relevant European literature as expressed by high school teachers, as can be seen in Table 2; and the same group can be found also in the list of the top ten names or works as chosen by university students (Table 3) and university professors (Table 4). On the other hand, the names of Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky are among the European authors who are generally included in school curricula and again, consistently, we at least find Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet), Baudelaire, and also Dante among the literature chosen by the students. I said that this group was stable, with a rate of internal variability: it is not fixed regarding the works; Romeo and Juliet, as we know, is read by high school students as well as university students, but not by teachers; for university teachers there is inevitably Proust, the only author excluded from the top ten of the other three groups the same university professors do not include Homer, while high school students name The Iliad and The Odyssey, and university students name only The Odyssey. Around this rather stable nucleus, there are various groups who responded to the questionnaires add other components or pieces. For students, all of them, a very 1 Edited by R. Antonelli, G. Paradisi, M.S. Sapegno, The Department of European, American, and Intercultural Studies, ed. not for sale, for the participants of the Conference on Literature and the Formation of the Europeans, Rome, March, 2012.

4 4 important work of European literature is The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Wilde. Dorian Gray is the character in European literature who has most struck the imagination of high school and university students; for the high schools students, Dorian followed by Juliet and Romeo, which is consistent with what was said previously, and then Dante, who is a stable element of the Italian cultural memory, as character and as auteur; for university students, on the other hand, Dorian Gray is followed by Othello, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Emma Bovary (tied with Juliet). Emma Bovary is the only character present in all of the lists, from students and from teachers. To return to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, this is a work that is in any case well represented also in Italian scholastic anthologies. Therefore, Wilde s presence on these lists can be considered conditioned by the power of scholastic canons. According to the high school students, the weight of the nineteenth-century novel is carried by some names that are not included in the canon of our Anthology (Dickens, Austen, Hugo). Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, authors who are solidly present in the hierarchies of value expressed by teachers, have weight in European literature among university students. Further, as a confirmation of this, In Remembrance of Things Past, The Trial, and Ulysses are, according to the professors, among the most important works of European literature of the 20 th century. Virginia Woolf replaces Jane Austen at the university level. Looking at numbers and percentages, the groups of authors and works of European literature provided by students, for rather obvious reasons, tend to break themselves down at least in rankings after the top ten, the students choose fewer different things, so that their choices are less fragmented than those of the teachers, whose choices, at times, seem to be more conditioned by fashion and generational preferences. When looking at the Italian situation with the lists of European literature furnished by high school students vis-à-vis other European partners, we see that the primacy of Shakespeare is shared by all, as is the special relevance assigned to Romeo and Juliet. It is noteworthy that the Italian students, along with Romanian students, did not include in the top ten books that have gained popularity due to movie versions, such as Harry Potter by Rawling and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown; these were, however, present in the top ten of the other groups (Spain, Portugal, Germany). In the case of Romanian students, it s truly the nineteenth-century novels, in particular French novels (Hugo, Balzac, Dumas), but also Verne and Dickens, to fill in the gaps among the super-group of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Dostoyevsky. The oldest author among the Romanian s top ten is Dante, coming in at number ten. All of the others except for Shakespeare and Goethe are clearly of the nineteenth century. In the case of the Italians, the list is less chronologically compact, containing The Iliad and The Odyssey: antiquity, the roots of literature.

5 5 Despite the impression that might be derived from a superficial reading of the data, even acknowledging the need for a deeper analysis, it seems to me that I can say, with various nuances, that based on our survey, Italy and Romania above all appear to represent cases of perception on the part of the students of European literature as a patrimony is conceived by students as completely separate from the pseudo-cultural consumerism of today, which is dominated by purely economic criteria. Multi-mediality tends to reuse every type of artistic and literary content for market purposes, and most of the time (not always) it imposes a process of degradation of high-culture material and of annihilation of its most specific and elite components (i.e., those that are not easily and quickly communicable). Think, for instance, of Dan Brown s plastic Middle Ages, or of the Dante s Inferno video game, in which Dante, dressed as a crusader with a huge scythe enters Hell as a newfangled Orpheus to free Beatrice. So, at the other end of these over-abundant consumer goods, there is the school, that is to say, the canons that the school imposes and transmits, concerning the national literature and the European literatures. These canons (luckily) still work as instruments of evaluation and of choice, as critical resource to assign to Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, a place that evidently others do not deserve in European literature, and in general among the values of humanistic culture. Table 2, Questions 3,4 Most important authors and works from other European literatures, according to teachers (Top 10) Ranking Author(s) Work(s) 1 Shakespeare Don Quixote 2 Tolstoy War and Peace, Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil 3 Dostoyevsky, Goethe Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov 4 Cervantes, Kafka, Joyce, Hamlet Baudelaire 5 Mann The Sorrows of Young Werther, Ulysses 6 Flaubert The Odyssey, The Metamorphosis, The Portrait of Dorian Gray 7 Chekov, Balzac Anna Karenina, Dubliners, Buddenbrooks, Faust 8 Woolf Siddhartha, The Miser, To the Lighthouse, The Canterbury Tales, Remembrance of Things

6 6 9 Zola, Garcia Lorca, Wilde, Homer, Stendhal 10 Proust, Molière, Saramago, Dickens, Gogol Past, The Trial, Crime and Punishment, The Cherry Orchard The Magic Mountain, King Lear, Gulliver s Travels, Waiting for Godot, Les Miserables, The Red and the Black, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Romeo and Juliet Frankenstein, The Iliad, The Man Without Qualities Table 3, Question 3,4, Most important authors of European literature according to university students (Top 10) Ranking Author(s) Work(s) 1 Shakespeare Don Quixote 2 Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil 3 Wilde The Portrait of Dorian Gray 4 Goethe Romeo and Juliet 5 Cervantes Pride and Prejudice 6 Hugo War and Peace 7 Kafka Madame Bovary 8 Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, The Odyssey Joyce 9 Woolf, Dickens, Austen, Hamlet Tolstoy 10 Homer The Sorrows of Young Werther, Ulysses, Les Miserables

7 7 Table 4: Most important authors and works of other European literature according to university teachers (Top 10) Ranking Author(s) Work(s) 1 Shakespeare Don Quixote 2 Cervantes Remembrance of Things Past 3 Proust Ulysses 4 Dostoyevsky Les Fleurs du Mal/The Flowers of Evil 5 Goethe Hamlet 6 Joyce, Kafka War and Peace, Faust, The Red and the Black 7 Tolstoy The Trial 8 Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert Crime and Punishment 9 Stendhal Madame Bovary, The Man Without Qualities 10 Woolf The Brothers Karamazov

Dear Parents, In His Service,

Dear Parents, In His Service, Dear Parents, The English teachers at Grace Christian School are committed to continuing the reading program for our students. We believe this emphasis is important in preparation for life in general and