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Dealing with the history of literary forms in European literature, the paper investigates the way cultural traditions forged them (by discussing what forms are interpreted as "poems", starting with a peculiar testimony from the Enneide) and how misreadings often perpetuated them; the paper focuses on the case of visual poetry, which is traditionally established in Horatio's poetics, and aims at proving that there is no objective way of establishing literary species, that they are the result of historically limited cultural conventions and interpretations. Furthermore, written forms of poetry are to be understood as imagining, in a visual system, the sonority of spoken language - again, with no objective guide for a so called transcription of voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the less debatable and almost universally accepted narrative distinctions is that between story (diegesis, histoire, fabula, das Erzahlte) and discourse (mythos, discours, and sujet, das Erzahlen). In one manner or another, literary genres had to pay a tribute of attention to the semiotic functioning of the narratives, in terms of the particular strategies of the endless clash between the two narrative poles. Along the path of literary history every novelistic recipe has assigned a particular dynamics, specific motivations and distinct functions to the balance between story and discourse. My paper maps out the outcomes of these processes pointing to a series of foremost European novels of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper intends to look for the origins and define the development of the apprenticeship novel, considered as a sort of European "metagenre" from the Bildungsromane told in the chivalry romances of the Middle Ages to those in the novels of the Picaresque tradition. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the turning point in this story, and it is by no means accidental that in Hegel's Aesthetics Goethe's Lehrjahre is considered as the exemplum of the new bourgeois epos towards the accomplishment of philosophical individualism as the ideal of the new class in power. The itinerarium vitae shaped in the apprenticeship novel can of course lead the protagonists to a kind of dead end and a sense of loss. The life-apprentice, that is, can lose his/ her lifepath, and what the itinerarium should lead to: identity. This is what often happens in the nineteenth century and increasingly in contemporary developments of the apprenticeship novel as the novel of desengano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]