Contamina(c)tions: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Teaching American Literature in an Italian University. The case of ‘Dickinsong’.

Given the enormous unpredictable changes that our world is undergoing, it is irrefutable that one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is the building of a sustainable and durable future. The transforming dynamics investing our time are making our lives increasingly uncertain, thus encouraging reflection on the complex nature of human inquiry and on the role of education as one of the most powerful instruments of change. However, the more complex our knowledge seems to become, the more fragmented our approaches toward its understanding and interpretations are. We tend to believe that intricate issues may better be tackled by reducing their complexity through methods and techniques of simplification. The academic world is no exception to this tendency, since disciplines provide the rationale for both university departmental organization and their pedagogical agendas. In this essay, I provide the case study of a course in American literature, where Emily Dickinson’s poetry is taught through music and sculpture. The purpose is to demonstrate how transdisciplinarity, transformative education, and contamina(c)tion offer a method to develop a new way of thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries and engages students in an active participative learning process based on the respect of their individual vocations and creativity, on the integration of their multifaceted acquired knowledge, and on its application in the larger context of life.