The second session began by going back to the question of narrative and different arts to prepare the first discussion of a number of texts reaching from the Bible, Thucydides’ Peloponesian War, Boccaccio’s Deccamerone, and Montaigne’s Essay On practice. We asked ourselves what an event is, a questions that poses itself in a paradigmatic way in narrations about accidents and catastrophes. characteristics such as excess and irreversibility were analyzed. Through a large number of texts, we tried to understand how accidents and catastrophes are interpreted and represented by different canonic literary traditions as part of the divine order. Through the construction of an intention as framework, traditional accounts make the scandal of a damaging, vehement event less virulent. They absorb the shocking consequences and therefore act against contingency. At the same time, the course traced how in modern experience in Montaigne problematizes this construction and formulates an experience that remains a problem by first representing it as unavailable to the subject. Detailed historic context was necessary for each of these authors in order to understand how they relate to the events represented, ranging from the religious wars in Montaigne|s time to the Bible as a text. We also tried to understand the interacts aspects of these texts bz considering institutions, rites, and visual representations referenced in them more closely.

The first class meeting was divided into two parts: the first one introduced the students to the history of the terms as well as to the historic phenomena related to accident, catastrophe, and trauma in detail. Accident comes from accident, what is not essential, and through a long history it has come to be defined as a significant and central event for Modernity. Catastrophe is a term that first designates a turning point. Toda, it is also part of political and geological language. And trauma comes from the Greek word for wound, it becomes a psychological term in the context of railway accidents. We then discussed in detail Aristotle’s Poetics  to understand how narratives represent events. The second part of the class was entirely devoted to a discussion of Lessing’s Laokoon, one of the foundational texte for inter-arts and inter-media studies. We reconstructed the debates around the expression of pain in visual and linguistic arts and how Lessing changes the debate of ut pictura poisis that had dominated the understanding of the relationship between painting and literature until 1766. We looked in detail at the way in which Lessing allows us to understand narrative in different media, in particular what the problems around the representation of time an affect are. In concluding, we brought the two parts of the first session together and we investigated the difference between inter-media and inter-arts.