Letteratura e matematica. Potenzialità didattiche nell’insegnamento della letteratura tedesca

In the German literary production of the xix and xx century, ideas, metaphors and concepts drawn from algebra, analysis, geometry and physics played a starring role. From a didactic viewpoint, these literary texts neatly fit in a competences-based syllabus, in which the integration of interdisciplinary knowledges, abilities and fields is expected. The teaching of these texts is certainly the hardest part: how these different forms of knowledge can be taken out of a literary text and efficiently taught? How to teach this complex subject in an interdisciplinary perspective? How to spark a mathematical interpretation of these literary texts? Moving from several studies on the subject undertaken in Germany, this paper aims at providing interdisciplinary didactic units which allow students to analyze how mathematical language is present in the German literature between the xix and xx centuries.