This is an experimental class in literature and music for first year non-native English undergraduates. The class was taught during Erasmus Staff Mobility for Teaching financed by the Erasmus + and at the University of Bari, Dipartimento Lettere Lingue Arti Italianiastica e Culture Comparate, 9-13 May 2016.

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Dr Otilia Pacea
otiliapacea@yahoo.co.uk
9 May 2016
Literature into
Music, Music
into Literature.
An Alternative
Approach to
Teaching
Literature

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Can we listen to the
music of literature?
Lend me your
writing ear
I had nothing to offer except my own confusion…

3. BOUBA KIKI

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sound, meaning, (non-)arbitrary, Plato, Cratylus, John Locke,
Ferdinand de Saussure, conventionalism, naturalism, Wolfgang Köhler
(1929), Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard (2001)
The Bouba
Effect
Minor
VS
The Kiki
Effect
Major
Sound Symbolism

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darkness
VS brightness
Music of Grammar

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Cultural Patterns
 Fire
 Rejection in itself
 Spiritual liberation
 Non-conformity
 Spontaneity
 Firework
 Rejection with a hook
 Self-expression, self-esteem
 Conformity revisited
 ‘Expected’ spontaneity

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American Decades
 Reappraisal of conventional
structures
 Postwar economic boom
 Rampant materialism
 Consumer culture
 End of innocence
 3Ds (digital, disaster, divas)
 Twin Tower fall
 Terror alerts
 Economic bubbles
Post WWII Post 9/11

8. But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I
shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest
me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything
at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the
blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call
such young people in Goethe’s Germany?
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10. By the strictest definition, the Beat Generation consists of only
William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and
Herbert Huncke, with the slightly later addition of Gregory Corso and
Peter Orlovsky. By the most sweeping usage, the term includes most
of the innovative poets associated with San Francisco, Black Mountain
College, and New York's Downtown scene. Using the broad definition,
the Beat Generation is marked by a shared interest in spiritual
liberation, manifesting itself in candid personal content and open
forms, in verse and prose, thus leading to admiration for Walt
Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and other avant-garde writers.
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11. “It's a kind of furtiveness ... Like we were a generation of
furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge that there’s no
use flaunting on that level, the level of the “public,” a kind of
beatness I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because
we all really know where we are and a weariness with all the
forms, all the conventions of the world. So I guess you might
say we’re a beat generation.”
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12. down and out
poor and exhausted
elusive, mysterious quality of the word
beat
beatific
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13. Hold your fire
_____ your tongue
____ your breath ___
What you love
Ashes to ashes
We’re ____ ____ rust
But there _____ ____ a little iron left
Left in us
I’ll _____ a candle
You _____ the flame
Kiss in the darkness
Just to ____ it all ____
I still believe in the choirs in the sky
Singing, “Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!”
We are a ______
Into the night
We’re burning
Into the night
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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results.
-- Einstein