Media and Cultural Studies

"Avec l’avènement des médias numériques et d’Internet, une nouvelle pratique éditoriale voit le jour : la publication de blogues (parfois appelé blook ou blouquin). Au début des années 2000, le blogue publié ne concernait presque que l’autoédition. Ceci n’est plus le cas aujourd’hui puisque les maisons d’édition traditionnelles ont su s’emparer du phénomène . Les blogues proposent un vivier de nouveaux écrivains dont le succès sur le Web peut être garant de leur réussite éditoriale. Pour les auteurs quidam, la publication est une consécration littéraire. Nous nous intéresserons à ce pouvoir légitimant du livre face aux nouveaux médias. Le cas des blogues édités permet de soulever l’aspect problématique de la persistance du livre, en tant que média littéraire modèle, à l’heure des écritures numériques.
Nous prendrons dans un premier temps l’exemple du blogue édité de Caroline Allard : Les chroniques d’une mère indigne (2007). En étudiant la remédiatisation du blogue vers le livre, nous verrons comment le passage au livre impose de modifier le texte du blogue. Celui-ci subit un lissage sémantique, orthographique et syntaxique qui le rend « digne » d’être publié, mais distord (sinon trahit) l’expérience médiatique dont il est issu. Le blogue édité semble être l’objet d’un complexe d’infériorité qui le fait se comporter de manière paradoxale. Ainsi, l’esthétique du blogue est assumée par une mise en page du livre qui produit ce que l’on appellera « un effet- blogue » (découpage en courts textes, menus dans les marges). Mais, en même temps, le statut « d’ex-blogue » est renié dans le paratexte, puisqu’il apparait comme un handicap à la reconnaissance littéraire du texte. Pourtant, c’est ce statut même de blogue, dans son aspect populaire, voire populiste, qui a attiré les éditeurs,
Une même relation paradoxale se retrouve dans les blogues d’écrivains édités . Nous verrons avec Tumulte de François Bon et L’autofictif d’Éric Chevillard que le projet d’écriture, pour lequel la présence sur le Web était pourtant centrale, s’efface au profit du livre. Ces deux auteurs, originellement à la recherche d’un nouveau champ d’expérimentation littéraire à travers le blogue (contrainte de l’écriture quotidienne, fragmentation, rapidité de publication, aspects communautaires, etc.) vont en venir, comme naturellement, et parfois presque « malgré eux », à l’édition d’un livre. Une évidence, un aboutissement logique, qui fait l’objet d’une rhétorique fascinante et qui en dit long sur la place réservée au blogue dans l’écologie littéraire, ainsi que sur la valeur obligatoire de la remédiatisation en livre pour l’écrivain blogueur. "

""‘I’ve never been into soap operas and The Bold and the Beautiful least of all (all those swimming pools and open fires!) - but I’m a real fan of Vivere…. It has to mean something, doesn’t it?!’.
The aim of this article is to try to give an answer to this question and reveal the reasons for the success of Vivere (Living), one of the first soap operas to be set and produced entirely in Italy over the last few years. Both text analysis and audience reception analysis are used to prove a specific hypothesis: that the popularity of Vivere – which is comparable to no other Italian soap – comes from its ability to allow viewers to identify with its characters without, however, giving up the typical ingredients of a Hollywood series, central to the TV habits of the Italian audience.
Here, soap operas - the ultimate popular narrative - are considered in their twin roles of ‘anthropological repertory’ and breeding ground for an active production of cultural meanings. The article tries to relate the success of Vivere to the social assets of the country which produces and consumes it, while discussing the social uses of a home-grown soap opera through which the community portrays itself.
""

This chapter analyzes the TV series La Piovra, allowing for the exploration of the ways in which Italian crime drama on television has changed as a result of the influence of US programs. The original concept of the program is illustrated, showing how social realism and the aesthetic values of Neotelevisione coexisted in it.  It is then argued that, as the series progressed, it increasingly departed from ‘social melodrama’  - as it was labeled – and drew closer to the U.S. serials. At first sight, the main outcomes were the portray of Italian society becoming more superficial and apolitical; storylines being stuffed with spectacular actions and a great component of romance; civic values being replaced by private concerns as the ultimate reasons for the protagonist's heroism and involvement in the struggle against Mafia. The main element of originality of this work consists in the attempt to analyze the transformation process of La Piovra using the analytical categories provided by studies on globalization and cultural adaptations of media contents. In particularly, I used the notion of ‘transculturalization’ Chan and Ma, 2002) to claim that La Piovra’s borrowings from US police series, far from being simply transplanted, were actively recontextualized in a way that they could appeal to the national audience. Recontextualizing meant turning the tough and unscrupulous ‘lonely avenger’ found in US action and police series in a tragic hero, like Cattani, conscious of being a looser but still determined.  The reason for such an adaptation was to provide a portray of the struggle between the forces of the law and Mafia likely to exorcise the audience’s fears without giving up the program’s claim for social realism.

Il contributo analizza la produzione di fiction domestica contemporanea, a dieci anni dal suo rilancio, adottando una prospettiva di tipo sincronico, orientata cioè al rapporto tra la fiction e il suo tempo. L’analisi viene condotta lungo due direzioni, una interna al medium, l’altra esterna. Nel primo caso si valuta il ruolo della fiction rispetto alla forma estetica e culturale della televisione di oggi, sostenendo che la fiction mantenga un ruolo di assoluta centralità nel contesto delle forme espressive e della produzione di senso della tv. Essa si carica anzi di un particolare valore “metalinguistico”, ponendosi come vero e proprio paradigma del funzionamento comunicativo del medium anche - e soprattutto - nell’epoca definita della reality television. La seconda parte del lavoro analizza in dettaglio il senso delle rappresentazioni offerte dalle storie del piccolo schermo ed il loro rapporto con la società e la cultura italiana contemporanea. Adottando le tesi di Horace Newcomb e Paul Hirsch, si guarda alla televisione come a un grande «forum culturale», individuando nella fiction il genere potenzialmente più in grado di esprimere questo valore e mantenere un profondo collegamento con la formazione del “pensiero pubblico” nonostante i conflitti che essa mette in scena siano radicati nella cornice non minacciosa e familiare del privato. Si analizzano le realtà umane, le tipologie sociali, le categorie professionali, i contesti istituzionali che ispirano le storie della fiction italiana, postulando che tanto più essi saranno vari, tanto più efficace la capacità della fiction di porsi come grande repertorio narrativo del nostro tempo. Si mira, per questa via, a valutare la “politica della rappresentazione” utilizzata dalla fiction domestica e a emettere un giudizio sulla qualità del prodotto, imprescindibilmente legata alla nozione di pluralismo

This article offers a new approach to power relations in the sphere of mass media production in Russia. The analysis focuses on television news - an object of the fiercest struggle among various agents of power (including news producers themselves). Unlike previous works, mostly done as institutional analysis, the proposed approach emphasizes the informal and dynamic character of these power relations, and describes the practices through which they shape the news. This approach avoids the normative categories widely used in previous studies. The empirical research based on this approach reveals a certain set of practices of influence on news production; their most striking difference from those in the `West' is in their explicitness. This suggests, however, not only that Russian journalists are more controlled than their western colleagues, but also that they seem less dominated.

'A white woman for marriage; a mulatta woman for fucking; a black woman for work'. So goes the 'ditado' noted by Freyre (1933) and Handelmann (1860). I argue that this proverb—though rarely, if ever, uttered in contemporary Brazilian society—gives verbal expression to a non-verbal semiotic code, which—because it has mainstream currency in contemporary Brazilian society—yields successful communication within it. I demonstrate the communicative capacity of this code through a semiotic analysis of two televised discourses. 'If your son fell in love with a black woman,' the artist Preta Gil asked the politician Jair Bolsonaro, on 'O Povo Quer Saber' (28/03/11), 'what would you do?'. 'O Preta,' Bolsonaro replied, 'I'm not going to talk about promiscuity with anyone'. For Bolsonaro, the word 'negra' functions as a 'sound-image' (Saussure 1916) that associates the sound [‘negra] not only with phenotypic traits thought to be paradigmatic of 'the black woman', but also with moral character traits like 'promiscuity'. Drawing upon my research in the Centro de Estudos de Telenovela, at the Universidade de São Paulo, and in the Implicit Bias and Philosophy International Research Project, I show that Bolsonaro's apparently idiosyncratic association is, in fact, the mainstream Brazilian association. Focussing on the first 'novela das oito' to feature a 'negra' as protagonist, I argue that the mainstream currency of this code explains why Maneco's first black 'Helena' lasted only two months on Rede Globo. In particular, it explains why the vast majority of the unprecedentedly large audience 'Viver a Vida' enjoyed saw nothing stigmatising in the notorious 'cena da tapa'. Importantly, my semiotic analysis of this scene not only enables Brazilians to crack the code of this gendered and racialised injustice, it also shows them how to break and remake their implicit associations about the 'negra'.