Since the turn of the 21st century, the literary and cultural history of the press has been examining the newspaper through the lens of its connections and interactions with literature. Studies focusing on men and women of the press and letters, media genres, supports, or a potential imagination of the press have demonstrated the existence of a culture in the West that combines the grand narrative of information with a diverse and fragmented set of writing strategies, forms, sensibilities, and discourses inscribed around, within, and through print media.

This seminar encourages students to familiarize themselves with this vibrant research context and to test their methods of literary analysis using the press as object, large-scale media corpora, and the poetics specific to them. What relationships of subordination, complementarity, and circulation does literature maintain with the press? How do literary studies provide a toolkit to help read and understand the history and challenges of 'media communication' (Vaillant)? To attempt to answer these questions, we will focus our thoughts and discussions on three concepts: event, celebrity, and community. We will endeavor to articulate these notions based on important periodicals (daily newspaper, magazine, review, almanac) and discursive practices (column, report, interview, essay, women's page) that have thus favored the emergence of modern media culture in Quebec. We will also pay particular attention to fiction in which the 'media imaginary' (Pinson) seeps in and to the romanesque, poetic, or dramatic staging of the figure of the journalist.

Students from other graduate programs may submit assignments in English with approval of the instructor.