Matthieu Letourneux, lecturer in French literature at the University of Paris Nanterre, will present his book Fictions à la chaîne: littérature sérielle et fictions médiatiques (Le Seuil, 2017) at the AFICTIONADOS festival.
From Fantomas to James Bond, from detective storytelling to science fiction, from Harlequin to Série Noire, modern popular culture obeys a serial dynamic: the production and reception of the work is re-captured in a larger body of texts that determines its meaning. Deeply linked to media culture and the logics of cultural consumption, these fictional forms and practices are at the heart of our modernity, of which they are one of the main expressions.
It is this “poetics of seriality” that the author studies in this fascinating essay, following theoretical, historical, media and cultural axes. Insisting on the specificities of serial communication and their consequences in terms of literary choices, form and meaning of works, he also shows the role of editorial and media practices since the nineteenth century in mass literature and their impact on contemporary fictional imagination.
A major work, enlightened by numerous examples treated with vivacity, which opens the field of literary research to a new questioning at once sociological, historical and aesthetic.
Media:
https://www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre/fictions-a-la-chaine
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