From Appendicism to Post-Modernism, from Post-Modernism to New Appendicism. Literature and TV Narration

Abstract

The success currently enjoyed by season upon season of TV dramas must not make us forget the “season” which originated them all: that is the heyday of the 19th century feuilleton, the seven decades of the popular serial novels one would find in the last pages of newspapers. It was a key moment in the bourgeois literary system, which paved the way for the audio-visual, theatrical and TV transformations of the written narrative. International hits like Lost, Game of Thrones or True Detective display a new level of authorship, complementing the makeshiftdevices of the original feuilleton writers with a much more aggressive host of multimedia skills and writing finesse. The traditional literary scene seems empoverished of real talents as the new wizards of storytelling move to the screen. The literary perimeter shrinks progressively as it loses aesthetic-functional layers and sub-layers, just as the galaxy of TV series grows larger and ever more layered. The regrets of the literary scholar are of little use: what we need is a new critique of the Post-Gutenberg Narrative.