Archetipi della serialità nella letteratura

Abstract

“Genres” are originated from the long-term persistence of semiotic systems (“format”), based on continual reiteration of a narrative structure in compliance with stable and shared rules of intratextual, trans-textual and trans-media order: this definition applies to literature as well as to media. Genres allow the representation and control of social and intra-psychic conflicts by training and retaining audiences, and by focusing and re-mediating mythologies and imaginaries. Serial technology archetypes have emerged over many centuries; long before the metropolitan "feuilleton” novel, they had come to permeate all cultural processes, from the Hellenistic era to the romance of chivalry, until the early narrative entertainment genres in XVII and XVIII century. A complex archeological investigation of serial technologies reveals the long life of some "inventions" even coming up today in the television factory, for example the return of the saga and of the political Tacitus-Baroque intrigue, now within an increasingly global and timeless dimension of collective imagination.