Agenda

The Italian-French conference aims to investigate, through case studies drawn from the cultural areas in question, the position of the medium in the composite scenario of narrative languages. Among all of them, comics still seem to be the most ‘elusive’ today. Codified at the beginning of the 20th century as a syncretic verbal-visual discourse, a direct descendant of caricature and illustrated stories, it occupies a much-debated place between ‘static’ image languages, such as painting, graphics, and photography, and narrative languages—including literature, theater, and cinema—from which it borrows and adapts forms and techniques of expression. While it seems illusory to define comics unambiguously, both as a serial product and in the form of graphic novels, the medium – also due to its amphibious nature – has catalyzed various methodological approaches, which have accompanied the historiographical, sometimes compilative, needs of early criticism: from semiotics to narratology, from sociology to philosophy, to neuroscience. In the continuous redefinition of a field of study that has as its object a constantly changing language, tracing its ontology is a complex and prismatic operation, which continues to be attempted by a plurality of sciences, even in evident disagreement. Space will be given to the application of theoretical tools that investigate new creative trends, supported also by the spread of the graphic novel format and the advent of digital technology.