September 2015 / Panel on Italian Experimental Narrative, SIS Conference, Oxford

SIS Biennial Conference
Oxford, September 28-30 2015

Panel

Italian Experimental Narratives: From the Novel to Digital Storytelling

This panel examined the culture of narrative experimentation from early critical definitions of experimental literature in the Sixties and Seventies to more recent developments in digital storytelling. Shifting the focus from transhistorical critical taxonomy to cultural history, transmedia studies, and close textual analysis, our contributions embrace the conceptual openness of experimental literature itself. We assess how the notion of experimentalism (and concepts such as “opera aperta” and “iper-romanzo”) have developed within the different socio-technological contexts of the last fifty years, and explore ideas of non-referential language, transformative social action, inductive creativity, metafiction. We also consider how “experimentalism”, as a disctinctive mode and editorial genre, relates to the wider literary canon and to other artistic media.

Speakers:

Florian Mussgnug (UCL), Transnational Experimental Literature
Raffaele Donnarumma (Pisa), Contro il romanzo. Calvino fra gli anni ’60 e ’70
Emanuela Patti (University of Birmingham) Literary Experimentalism? From the literary heritage to digital storytelling