Università Roma Tre

One of the most solid achievements of literary theory during the last century concerned the identification of the nuclear structures of the narrative text. The 20th century, the century of theory, in fact inaugurated a branch of study exclusively dedicated to enucleating the essential elements of narrative: narratology. The discipline, which had its beginnings in ethnographic studies on folk tales, in Russia and Italy, and was then launched by Vladimir Propp, author of a study dedicated to the historical roots of fairy tales, underwent its greatest development during the 1960s, thanks above all to the contribution of French scholars such as Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Algirdas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov and Gerard Genette.
The 20th century was also the century that saw the birth of creative writing schools, first in US universities - a degree in ‘creative writing’ was already active in the University of Iowa in the 1930s - and only later, also in Europe and Italy.
What is the relationship between narratological studies and the courses given by creative writing schools, assuming that their objective is to make the aspiring writer aware of the fundamental mechanisms for constructing a narrative text?
The course intends to tackle this issue by proposing readings from some authors of narrative ‘manuals’ - from E. M. Forster to Giuseppe Pontiggia - not without identifying the prodromes of the ‘genre’ in some early 20th-century writings not yet linked to ‘creative writing’ courses, such as Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Writer or the ‘Prefaces’ fired by Henry James to introduce the public to the reading of his novels. Particular attention will be paid to the reading of The Writer's Craft and His Technique, a handbook licensed in the 1920s by a writer-theorist, one of the founders of Russian formalism and author of a fundamental Theory of Prose.