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Pontignano, 1-8 settembre 2002 Seminars
Language: Italian Throughout the history of literature, encounters have always been catalysts for narratives: not only because they introduce lateral episodes and digressions (according to Bakhtin’s treatment of the encounter as chronotope), but also because they permit the introduction of subordinate narratives, thereby following the ancient technique of metadiegesis. In this seminar, we will discuss several key texts, in which the narrative function of encounters is crucial to the creation of exceptionally free and multi-centred narrative structures. These texts follow a single model which reaches from antiquity to the 20th century (where it frequently appears interiorised and otherwise transformed) and which is commonly referred to, by use of a convenient metaphor, as the picaresque model. Reading: Petronio, Satyricon John Neubauer Imagined and Imaginary Encounters Language: German Readers of fiction are always engaged in imaginary encounters. But what does it mean if fictional characters are liberated from their spatio-temporal confinement so that they can encounter characters from another spatio-temporal order? In most cases, such encounters involve at least one, possibly two historical figures, but this is not always the case. We shall explore in the seminar a number of such paradigmatic cases of fiction. We shall discuss their function and purpose, attempt to establish the major categories, and relate the (sub)genre to other genres, including fantastic literature. Reading: Byatt, A.S. Possession. Romano Luperini From the experience of encounter to the encounter as the end of experience (1880 - 1925) Language: Italian Reading: Maupassant, Una scampagnata Gillian Beer What the Other One Said: the child, the savage, the patient, the tick Language: english The theme will be the voice of the other in the encounter and what remains unsaid. Reading: Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, chapter 10, 'Tierra del Fuego' Helena Buescu Books, Stories and Reports as Meeting Places Language: English This seminar will focus on various forms of “words” and “wordering”
as ways of encounter between persons. Discourse, as a form of mediation,
is to be seen also as transit - a kind of voyage between people, a form
of enabling (but also sometimes making impossible) interpersonal encounters. Reading: Dostoievsky, White Nights Secondary bibliography: BIARD, J. D., “Chance encounters as a novelistic device”,
The Journal of European Studies, XVIII, 1988 (1), 21-35. Patrizia Lombardo The Encounter Language: France In this seminar, we shall consider the internal and external conditions of encounter by examining the process by which two people fall in love. This will allow us to examine a variety of different modes of contact of a person with an other, ranging from attitudes of hostility to the fugitive glimpse of a passer-by, immortalized in Baudelaire's famous poem “A une passante”. Love encounters imply an exchange of glances but also involve a range of other sentiments. Through reading Le Rouge et le Noir and some selected passages from Lucien Leuwen, we will study the very model of this type of encounter, which, although manifesting itself as an original and unique event, determines the plot itself and the duration of the story. We shall then analyse Melville's Billy Budd, a text which, despite describing a display of hostility, is nevertheless strikingly similar to the encounters on which we will have focused in our reading of Stendhal. Breton's novel, Nadja, which may be considered as a prelude to L'Amour fou, illustrates the surrealist notion of hasard objectif (“objective coincidence”), an exemplary way of describing the interpersonal contact, which unites two fundamental aspects: the psychological urge for the encounter and the real, objective conditions which bring it about. Because of its prominent visual component, the objective coincidence requires the freedom and the openness of a big city. We shall therefore proceed with our investigation by considering that most visual of media, namely cinema, specifically through Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1975). This film, constructed around two amorous encounters, portrays New York as an infinite space in which all kinds of encounters are possible. Among the range of possibilities available, it will be necessary to include those forms of encounter which are surrounded by uncertainty and doubt: did the meeting described in L'année dernière à Marienbad really take place or was it merely imagined? Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel and Alain Resnais' homonymous will allow us to consider a series of events that interrupt the flow of the narrative without resolving its mystery. Romans et films: Parmi les lectures critiques: extraits de:
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