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.