Contenu du sommaire : Gérard Genette, théoricien de la communication ?

From the 1920s to the late 1970s, books devoted to the presentation of territories in the form of photographic albums experienced a major growth spurt. Corollary of the expansion of tourism in industrialized countries, this editorial boom corresponds to the development of a particular genre, of which these albums bringing together writers and photographers constitute one of the avatars: the portrait of country. This name certainly does not correspond to the classical taxonomies, nor is it customary among the authors and editors of these albums. However, the country portrait appears as a genre in its own right, insofar as it corresponds to a specific reality in a generic system. Several indicators also show the designers of these books an obvious “generic consciousness”, which left within these books traces that fit them under the model of the “portrait”.

This article studies the links between territory and the film-making in a semantic and communicative perspective. Through a series of movies (made in Lorraine, 2005-2015) and interview with professionals from the film sector, the author shows how a territory can be “placed” in films and establishes an original typology of these occurrences in film images. Through a parallel dialogue with both product placement and territorial branding strategies, the analysis reveals the diegetic singularities of the territory in films.

Is Gérard Genette a “classic” for the Information and Communication sciences? This paper analyzes a corpus of articles and PhD theses in this field to describe the citations of Genette made by this scientific community between 1980 and 2018. Against his own predictions, Genette's categories have become “nomadic concepts”, particularly in the analysis of media and social discourses. The purpose of this research is to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize the uses of the reference to Genette by analysts of ordinary and media communication, when they apply his theoretical categories. The article shows that this conceptual nomadism is partly paradoxical and concerns the relations between a poetics aiming at the analysis of literariness and a use of poetics as an instrument for the analysis of social discourses.

Gérard Genette's research on the transtextual relations of the literary work invites us to think the text as woven into a network of other texts with which it builds different relationships. A media object has also links with texts that surround it and cross over it, playing a part in its apprehension and interpretation. Through the analysis of a documentary - November 13: Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, in reference to the 2015 Paris attacks – this article questions the various texts that announce and fix its content. As the documentary aims at offering a rewriting of the world, the texts that escort a film play a special role in the position of a particular story in relation to history and in the memory mark that a traumatic event leaves.

This paper shows how Genette's distinction between “peritext” and “epitext” is useful to describe the role of circulating utterances when discussing digital media. Considering the promotional discourses for such media as epitexts allows the author to assign them a guiding role in interpreting social practices, without overerestimating their impact. As paratexts, to be found in a different material framework, advertising utterances revolve around the digital media, and are connected to them through their pragmatic function in addressing audiences. This interpreting role is all the more critical to interpret the digital media that it underlies an important figuration process, constantly rekindling the memory of cultural forms.

Movie culture is based on the practice of watching movies. It also takes shape in the context of discussions that people have about cinema. It may go through words (discussions, TV shows, Youtube videos) or writing (fanzines, magazines, website). Within that field, digital technologies and the Internet may have led to the emergence of a new practice. Its principle is that of the elaboration of a discourse based on movie shots or video shots that are manipulated and diverted. This practice is called “mashup” and it accompanies the advent of an audiovisual literacy. However, there is a diversity of mashups that to the author analyzes by using Gérard Genette's categories of transtextuality (intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality, hypertextuality).

Gérard Genette has invented many notions that are almost common today in a textual analysis. But one often forgets the theoretical choices and frameworks that led to the development of these categories. To measure the importance of “opening” the black box of Genettian categories, the author takes the example of the “narrative voice” in Figures III and tries to see to what extent the notion of “homo-intradiegetic narrative” can really apply to Odysseus among the Pheacians. In the form of a counter-investigation, the analysis sheds light on the problem of the articulation between formal analysis and diachrony. Against an approach that uses Genettian textual categories by changing the context of their application, the author tends towards a more pragmatic approach to the use of forms, one that historicizes and gives meaning to the formal game, while deepening the conceptualization at stake in the works of Genette.

How can the reading of Genette's L'Œuvre de l'art helps us to understand the status of the heritage object? This article proposes a reflexive return on the borrowing of this work from the opposition between autography and allography and its fecundity for a definition of heritage. After a reminder of the proximity of certain characteristics of the allographic works with those of the intangible heritage, three questions are asked about the legitimacy of the transfer of the concepts of the approach of the work to the patrimonial object, on the relevance of the loan the ontological distinction between autography and allography and the contribution of Genette's ontological approach to the study of the patrimonial object. Similarities and differences are thus highlighted, especially between the artistic function and the heritage. The discussion shows above all how the originality of Genette's approach helps to reveal the specificity of the two types of heritage and the role of the institution in the definition of the heritage object.