Televising the Literary Citizen as the Future of France

• In Event: Visual Technologies as Narrativizing Making Kinds of People in Education

Proposal

Objectives
After WWII, France moved from one historical formation, epoque, to another (Sirinelli, 2023) and a new kind of literary citizen was created (Cardon‐Quint, 2010). This research examines the condition that made this citizen possible between 1945-1967 and argues that a broader historical assemblage that included new forms of visual productions like television generated this citizen and delinks the commonsense notion that the educational field solely produces kinds of students. Television merits close attention as a kind of visual technology because it was purposefully educational with the goal of acquainting France with her own literary authors. Le temps des copains, a TV show for teens, exemplifies one such attempt. The premise, going up to Paris to study, has deep literary roots and the show offers introductions to other literary themes in the plot line and character development concomitantly reinventing a new literary citizen.

Theoretical framework
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva’s works influence my research. From Foucault, I posit that history does not progress continuously and is neither teleological or causal (Foucault, 1969). I view history not from a singular narratival perspective but from conflicting polyphonic narratival perspectives (Bakhtin, 1970). I use Deleuze and Foucault to reframe the idea of ‘context’ as historical assemblage and normative ‘space-time’ as historical formations, respectively. To discuss how various discourses are interrelated, I use Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertext’ and intertextuality which posits that all texts have some kind of connection, deliberate or not, to other texts and through any medium to form an intertextual assemblage (Kristeva, 1969).

Data and Methods
My research material is a television show produced from October 1961 to June 1962 called Le temps des copains translated as both time with and the stage of life with friends and friendships.
My methodological approach as toolbox engages with the French school of textual analysis which emerged in post-war structuralist literary studies in Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette’s work, for example. This methodology decenters the author to focus on the mechanism of construction of the text and the conditions of production of enunciation of the text via linguistic markers. My theoretical approach addresses the content of the texts and is said about the ‘literary citizen’ in the tv show, my methodology addresses the form, how things visually are presented to reinforce what it said.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
By using historical formation and assemblage and intertext as a theoretical framework and a structuralist methodological framework to untangle and delink common sense ideas of how students are made, this research highlights how television as a new technology played a role in creating a new kind of literary citizen that was imagined first outside educational field and then threaded into it. This work grapples with the initial impact of visual technologies and hopes to complicate the conversation around the production of students.

Author

• Britt-Marie Zeidler, UW-Madison