News and novelties: the novelization of historical reality

Mobilizing the notions of "textual migrations" (Roger Chartier) and "architextuality" (Gérard Genette), borrowing from contemporary critical theory the concept of "novellisation" (Jan Baetens and Matthieu Letourneux) and from medievalists the question of the relationship between novus and brevitas (Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Nelly Labère), the lecture attempts to define the short story as a genre, in its relationship to truth, exemplarity, orality and novelty. It's this last notion that calls for historians' attention: how do we articulate novella and avvenimenti, what's new in the short story? Cutting through the depths of the past, the novella makes manifest the dream horizon of good government: this was already the case in the ^13th century with the Novellino, or Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile. With the character of Ezzelino da Romano, we rediscover the bloody and grotesque origins of tyranny.

Contents

• Fake news is fake news: a first progress report
• The circulation of transmedia fictions and novelization (Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à la chaîne. Serial literatures and media culture, 2017)
• Those who win(The West Wing), those who lose(The Wire): how is political fiction political?
• Novellisation, a "contaminated genre" (Jan Baetens, Poetics, 2004): by-products, degraded auctoriality
• Novella, young growth and avvenimenti : the event is what happens to what has happened (Pierre Laborie)
• Political fiction sheds light on actuality, i.e., on what we are becoming
• "Que porai-je de nouvel dire?" (Froissart, Le Joli Buisson de Jonece): the sadness of déjà-dit (Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La couleur de la mélancolie. La fréquentation des livres au ^XIVe siècle, 1991)
• Nouvelle, cri, rumeur et clameur : quand le jeune plant renouvelle le champ de la littérature (Nelly Labère, Défricher le jeune plant. Étude du genre de la nouvelle au Moyen Âge, 2006)
• Four imperatives for the short story: truth, exemplarity, orality, topicality
• Bringing fresh memories up to date , revealing the obscene
• From the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles bourguignonnes (1462) to Marguerite de Navarre'sHeptaméron (1545), or how to disenchant the grand narrative of the French Renaissance
• What makes the genre: textual migrations (Roger Chartier) and architextuality (Gérard Genette), the case of Urban Mysteries
• What is a punch line? The production of the novus
• Boccaccio and medieval forms of brevitas: Cento novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie che dire le vogliamo
• "(Francesco Bonciani, Lesson on the composition of short stories, 1574)
• The motto as ascending facetiousness, the beffa as condescending farce
• The furrier Ganfo in Sercambi's short story, or the ontological fragility of the weak: Va via, tu se' morto
• The survivor in power: the novelization of the dominant as an alteration that does not weaken
• A social ascent thwarted, then punished: the case of Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, novelliere novellisé
• The sedimented past of the Alberti Paradise : 1425, 1389, 1350, 1258
• "Today, these lords have become cruel tyrants"(Decameron, X, 7)
• "There is no point in recounting the venomous and pestiferous rage that set the Guelphs against the Ghibellines in times past, since even today, traces and vestiges can be seen throughout Italy..." (Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Le Paradis des Alberti)
• L'acquettino, or poetic insurrection against civic humanism (Antonio Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Quattrocento, 1971)
• "For it always begins before..." the Novellino, or Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gentile
• The depths of the past, the dream horizon of good government
• Potente imperadore Federigo: two Fredericks, one imperial spectre
• "To say how much he was feared would be a great matter: many people know it"(Novellino, 84), Ezzelino da Romano, or the bloody and grotesque origins of tyranny
• "Messire Ezzelino had at his service a storyteller to whom he made tell stories during long winter nights"(Novellino, 31)
• Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (1936), and the fall of the course of experience: every piece of information has value "only at the moment when it is new", but the same is not true of the story, "it does not deliver itself"
• A poetic and political reading of Dante, Ossip Mandelstam and Canto 33 of Inferno, "... one of those delicious horrors that one mutters to oneself with contentment..."
• Ugolin's two agonies, or the indeterminacy of politics: "in the darkness of the Tower of Hunger, Ugolin devours or does not devour all his beloved corpses, and this oscillating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. So dreamed Dante, with two possible agonies, and so will generations to come" (Borgès, Neuf essais sur Dante)
• Machiavelli, too, faced with the indeterminacy of the times: striking the spirits with a few "rare examples of himself, similar to those told about Messire Bernabò of Milan"(The Prince, 21)