81582 - History of Serialisation (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

Students will acquire knowledge about seriality and its central role as a mode of cultural production in modernity. The course addresses the main phases in the history of serial narratives produced by the cultural industries, offering an in-depth discussion of a phenomenon that is too often considered exclusively in relation to the contemporary period. Students will be confronted with a broader perspective looking at the development of serial strategies from the 19th to the 21st century, enabling them to evaluate more carefully how "novel" and "innovative" the contemporary works really are.

Course contents

The 2018/2019 course explores the history of seriality in relation to the history of "crime fiction" - understood as a transmedia genre - in popular literature, film and television. The course will highlight the strong connections linking the various serial forms, generic narratives and the modes of production adopted by the cultural industries from the 1800s and the present day. Particular attention will be paid to European crime fiction, especially as concerns the contemporary period.

The ten lectures will address:

1. Crime fiction as a serial genre: the (para)literary origins of modern crime narratives

2. From Poe to Agatha Christie: classic detective fiction

3. From Fantômas to Mabuse: serial anti-heroes in early 20th-century fiction and film

4. Hardboiled stories, gangster movies and film noir: pulp fiction and classical cinema

5. From Melville to Tarantino: neo-noir and (post-)modern cinema

6. After The Sopranos: the crime genre and contemporary American TV seriality

7. The crime genre and contemporary audio-visual seriality in Europe

8. Nordic Noir in fiction, film and television

9. Camilleri, Montalbano and Mediterrenean Noir

10. The return of the anti-hero in contemporary seriality - Conclusion

Readings/Bibliography

Students are required to be already familiar with the following text:

• Walter BENJAMIN, L'opera d'arte nell'epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica(1936), Einaudi, Torino 1966.

Readings

Students are required to learn and use the terminology adopted for the study of TV seriality, using the glossary provided by the Osservatorio sulla fiction italiana.

Studenti attending classes are required to study the following texts:

Students will have to study the following readings, but it is possible to replace three articles from these lists with three articles of books chapters selected from the Recommended readings (see below).

1. Stefano Calabrese, Roberto Rossi, La crime fiction, Carocci, Roma 2018.
2. Andrea Bernardelli, “Eco e le forme di narrazione seriale”, in Between, vol. 6, no. 11, 2016, pp. 1-10.
3. Tzvetan Todorov, “Typology of Detective Fiction”, in Id., Poetics of Prose, Blackwell, Oxford 1977, pp. 42-52 (traduzione italiana in Id. Poetica della prosa. Le leggi del racconto, Bompiani, Milano 1995).
4. Carlo Ginzburg, "Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario", in Id., Miti, emblemi, spie. Morfologia e storia, Einaudi, Torino 1986, pp. 2-30.
5. Franco Moretti, “Clues”, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, Verso, London 1983, pp. 130-156 (versione italiana in Id. Stili e segni del moderno, Torino, Einaudi, 1987).
6. Monica Dall’Asta, “La fine di Fantômas”, in Id., Trame spezzate. Archeologia del film seriale, Le Mani, Genova 2009, pp. 33-72.
7. Fran Mason, Hollywood’s Detectives: Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011, pp. 1-28 e 131-170.
8. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television”, The Velvet Light Trap, vol.58, no. 1, 2006, pp. 29-40,
9. Annette Hill, Susan Turnbull, “Nordic Noir”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology, http://criminology.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-294, April 2017.
10. Glen Creeber, “Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television”, in Journal of Popular Television, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp.
11. Monica Dall’Asta, Federico Pagello, "The Puzzling Subject: Detective Series, Crime Serials and Trans-subjectivity as a Narrative Device", in Anne Besson (a cura di), Fictions médiatiques et récits de genre. Pour en finir avec le populaire?, Lucie Editions, Niîmes 2016, pp. 159 – 171.
12. Jason Mittell, “Lengthy Interactions with Hideous Men: The Serial Poetics of Television Antiheroes”, in Id. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York University Press, New York 2015 (traduzione italiana in Complex TV: teorie e tecnica dello storytelling delle serie TV, Minimum Fax, Carrocci 2017.

Except for the book by Calabrese and Rossi, the readings can be downloaded from the course webpage. During the duration of classes, additional resources will be posted at the same address.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

Storia e teoria della serialità e della cultura di massa

• Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, Bompiani, Milano 2013 (1964).

• Umberto Eco, Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2016 (1978).

• Alberto Abruzzese, La grande scimmia: mostri vampiri automi mutanti. L’immaginario collettivo dalla letteratura al cinema e all’informazione, Sossella, Roma 2007 (1979).

• Veronica Innocenti, Guglielmo Pescatore (a cura di), Le nuove forme della serialità televisiva, Archetipo, Bologna 2008 (contiene breve storia della serialià e antologia di testi critici).

• Monica Dall’Asta, Trame spezzate. Archeologia del film seriale, Le Mani, Genova 2009, pp. 33-72.

• Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickents to Soap Opera, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2010.

• Marie-Eve Thérenty, “Pour une poétique historique du support”, in Romantisme, no.2, 2010, https://www.cairn.info/revue-communication-et-langages1-2010-4-page-3.htm .

• Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2012.

• Claudio Bisoni, Veronica Innocenti (a cura di), Media mutations: gli ecosistemi narrativi nello scenario mediale contemporaneo. Spazi, modelli, usi sociali, Parma : Mucchi, 2013.

• Frank Kelleter (a cura di), Media of serial narrative, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio 2017.

• Matthieu Letourneux, Fictions à la chaine. Littératures sérielles et culture médiatique, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2017.

• AAVV. Special issue on “Series, Seriality, Serialiation”, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 79, Spring 2017.

Storia e teoria della serialità e della cultura di massa – studi monografici (include studi sulla serialità nella crime fiction)

• Marie-Eve Thérenty, Alain Vaillant, 1836: l’an 1 de l’ère médiatique: étude littéraire du journal La Presse, d'Émile de Girardin, Nouveau Monde, Paris 2001.

• Monica Dall’Asta, “Italian Serial Films and International Popular Culture”, in Film History, vol. 12, no. 3 , pp. 300-307.

• Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts, Columbia University Press, New York 2001.

• Valentino Cecchetti, Generi della letteratura popolare: feuilleton, fascicoli, fotoromanzi in Italia dal 1870 ad oggi, Tunué, Latina 2011.

• Matthieu Letourneux, “Des feuilletons aux collections populaires: Fantômas, entre modernité et héritages sériels”, in Belphégor, vol. 11, no. 1, 2013, https://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/286 .

• Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu the Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2014.

• Veronica Innocenti, Guglielmo Pescatore, “Changing Series: Narrative Models and the Role of the Viewer in Contemporary Television Seriality”, in Between, vol. 4, no. 8, 2014.

• Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti (a cura di), Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2015.

• Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York University Press, New York 2015.

• Matthieu Letourneux, “The Magician’s Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature, and the Spectacular Imagination”, in Alberto Gabriele (a cura di), Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2017.

• Federico Di Chio, American Storytelling. Le forme del racconto nel cinema e nelle serie TV, Carocci, Roma 2016.

• Guglielmo Pescatore, Ecosistemi narrativi: dal fumetto alle serie tv, Carocci editore, Roma 2018.

• Paola Brembilla, Ilaria A De Pascalis (a cura di), Reading Contemporary Serial Television Universes: A Narrative Ecosystem Framework, Routledge, New York 2018.

• Paola Brembilla, It’s all connected. L’evoluzione delle serie TV statunitensi, Franco Angeli, Milano 2018.

Storia e teoria della crime fiction (letteratura, cinema e televisione)

• Peppino Ortoleva, “Romanzo poliziesco”, in Enciclopedia delle scienze sociali, Roma: Treccaci 1997: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/romanzo-poliziesco_%28Enciclopedia-delle-scienze-sociali%29/ .

• Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800-2000, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2004.

• Martin Priestman (a cura di), The Cambridge companion to crime fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003.

• Charles J. Rzepka, Lee Horsley, A Companion to Crime Fiction, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ 2010.

• Jon Thompson, Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana1993.

• Andrew Spicer, European Film Noir, Manchester University Press, Manchester 2007.

• Umberto Eco, Thomas A. Sebeock (eds.), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bompiani, Milano

• Renato Giovannoli, Elementare, Wittgenstein! Filosofia del racconto poliziesco, Medusa, Milano 2007.

• Jean Tortel, “Fantômas et le phenomène de la destruction”, Critique, no. 197, 1963.

• Monica Dall’Asta, Fantômas, la vita plurale di un antieroe, Principe Costante, Pozzuolo del Friuli 2004.

• Ruth Mayer, Never Twice the Same: Fantômas's Early Seriality, “Modernism/Modernity”, vol. 1, no. 2, 2016

• Joan Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir”, in Shades of Noir: A Reader, Verso, London e New York 1993, pp. 167-198

• Robert Rushing, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture, Other Press, New York 2007.

• John G Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformations”, in Barry K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader, University of Texas Press, Austin 1986, pp. 189-201.

• Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, Verso, London e New York, 2016.

• Fabio Vighi, Critical Theory and Cinema: Rethinking Ideology through Film Noir, Bloomsbury, London 2014.

• Sue Turnbull, The TV Crime Drama, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2014.

• Mareike Jenner, American TV Detective Dramas: Serial Investigations, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2016.

• Anne Mullen, Emer O'Beirne (a cura di), Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture Since 1945, Rodopi, Amsterdam 2000.

• Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic” in Lance Parkin, Paul Cornell, Jr., and Walter Jon Williams (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2009, pp. 429-438.

• Frank Kelleter, Serial Agencies: The Wire and its Readers, Zero Books, Winchester, UK e Washington, USA 2014.

• Christine Matzke, Susanne Muehleisen (a cura di), Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, Rodopi, Amsterdam e New York 2006.

• Marieke Krajenbrink, Kate M Quinn (a cura di), Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction, Rodopi, Amsterdam e New York 2009.

• Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti (a cura di), The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations, Bloomsbury, London 2014.

• Nilsson, David Damrosch, Theo d’Haen (a cura di), Crime fiction as World Literature,

Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2017.

• Andrew Nestingen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2011.

• Giuliana Pieri, Italian Crime Fiction, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2011.

• Claire Gorrara, French Crime Fiction, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2011.

• Katharina Hall, Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2016.

• AAVV, Special Issue “The Transnational Remakes”, in Continuum, vol .29. no. 5, 2015 https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfts20/14/3.

• AAVV, Special Issue “The Crime Drama in Transnational”, in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 2016.

• Kim Toft Hansen, Anne Marit Waade, Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2017.

• Kim Toft Hansen, “Nordic Noir and Lifted Localities”, Aalborg University, preprint, 2015.

• Anne Marit Waade, “Nordic Noir Tourism and Television Landscapes: In the Footsteps of Kurt Wallander and Saga Norén”, in Scandinavica, vol. 55, no. 1, 2016.

• Lindsay Steenberg, “The Fall and Television Noir”, in Television and New Media, vol. 18, no. 1, 2017.

• Deborah Jermyn, “Silk Blouses and Fedoras: The Female Detective, Contemporary TV Crime Drama and the Predicaments of Post-Feminism”, in Crime, Media, Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2017, pp. 259-276.

• Faye Stewart, German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire, McFarland & Company, Jefferson 2014.

• Gianfranco Marrone, La guerra dei mondi (ancora sul caso Montalbano), preprint, 2006.

• Srecko Jurisic, “Montalbano come Maigret riscritto. Osservazioni sulle fonti di Camilleri”, in Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes, no. 25, 2012.

• Marta Boni, Romanzo criminale: Transmedia and Beyond, Edizioni Ca' Foscari Digital Publishing, Venezia 2013.

• Margrethe Brunn Vaage, The Antihero in American Television, Routledge, Abingdon 2016.

• Giovanna Benvenuti, Il brand Gomorra: dal romanzo alla serie TV, Il mulino, Bologna 2018.

• Michele Guerra, Sara Martin, Stefania Rimini (a cura di), Universo Gomorra, Mimesis, Milano 2018.

• Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, Zero, Winchester 2012.

• Fiona Peters, Rebecca Stewart (a cura di), Antihero, Intellect, Bristol 2016.

• Andrea Bernarndelli, Cattivi seriali. Personaggi atipici nelle produzioni televisive contemporanee, Roma, Carocci, 2016.

• Andrea Bernardelli, “Etica criminale. Le trasformazioni della figura dell’antieroe nella serialità televisiva”, in Between, vol. 6, no. 11, 2016.

• Andrea Barnardelli, “Realismo e melodramma in Gomorra”, in Ocula, vol. 18, 2017.

• AAVV, Numero speciale dedicato al Nordic Noir, Link – Idee per la TV, no. 21, Giugno 2017, https://www.linkideeperlatv.it/rivista/distretti-produttivi-emergenti/

• Brett Martin, Difficult Men. Dai Sopranos a Breaking Bad, gli antieroi delle serie TV, Minimum Fax, Roma 2018.

Teaching methods

Lectures, including excerpts from film and television works. Additional readings and audio-visual material are available through the e-learning platform.

Assessment methods

Students will take an oral examination, which will assess whether they have acquired the following skills:

- Ability to describe analytically the different serial and generic forms outlined in the course

- Knowledge of the main phases of the history of seriality

- Understanding of the key theoretical and historical analyses of the crime genre discussed in the course

- Ability to engage critically with the debates about the role of seriality in the context the modern cultural industries.

Student showing their ability to develop a clear argument emphasising both solid factual knowledge and lucid critical awareness will receive the highest mark. Students showing only superficial factual knowledge will receive an average mark. Students that will offer incomplete answers, using imprecise or inappropriate language, won't pass the exam. Particular emphasis will be given to the students' understanding of the theoretical and historiographic framework developed in the course: a lack of familiarity with the contents of the course in this respect will seriously affect your final mark.

NOTA BENE: students are encouraged to produce a written or audiovisual (video-essay) work, which should be submitted one week before the exam. In these cases, the exam will focus particularly (but not exclusively) on the discussion of the student's work. Papers should be less than 3000 words; video-essay should be less than 10 minutes long. Students must contact the teacher in order to discuss the topic and the approach of papers/video-essays, if possibile by meeting the teacher during his office hours.

Teaching tools

Projector, Internet connection. Students will also be able to access additional readings and audiovisual material through the UNIBO e-learning platform.

Office hours

See the website of Federico Pagello