Biography

Raphaëlle Burns is Assistant Professor of French and Italian in the Department of European Language and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the narrative form of the “case” and on cross-disciplinary cultures of “case-thinking” in early modern literature, with a particular emphasis on the genre of the novella. She holds a PhD in French and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She has essays published and forthcoming on topics including early modern theories of scandal, Renaissance prognostications, casuistry, and the ethics of storytelling in Renaissance novella collections.

Project Summary

This project will investigate how the literary genre of the novella became a prime arena for debates on the nature of the new and the ethics of news reporting in the early modern period. It will also evaluate the extent to which novella writers sought to train their audiences to handle news and grapple with novelty in their daily lives. In particular, it will examine how Italian, French, and Spanish novella writers attempted to reframe the language and stakes of news reporting in their day using techniques drawn from professional practices of case thinking in law, medicine, and theology. The formal affinity between case and novella is well documented. This project will unveil how this affinity conceals, in fact, two others: the affinity between novella and news report and, by extension, between case and news report as well. It aims to propose a new genealogy of modern journalism in which early modern casuistry and the Renaissance novella tradition take pride of place. In doing so, it will bridge for the first time two distinct fields of Renaissance intellectual history—the study of news and the study of casuistry—by way of literary, philological, and rhetorical analysis.