For a university with 200,000 students, teaching a class with less than ten students was a great luxury,
especially within the faculty of humanities. Prof. Gianmartino D’Auria looked over the class
and asked each of the students to introduce themselves
and describe why they had enrolled in a postgraduate level course named, “The Writer and the Other.”
Four of the students were aspiring writers of literature; three planned to become journalists
and one saw himself as a budding scholar of European aesthetic history. D’Auria followed this first query
with his first of multiple substantive questions. “What motivates creative people to become writers of literature.
You may include writers of literary criticism in the group.”