Birth of the Popular Narrative: Sensational Narrative, Yesterday & Today and Considering Dorian Gray

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Narratives often represent the poor relations of narrative arts, whether it be the novel, the theater, and more recently the cinema and the television series. "Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story," concedes novelist and critic E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, making this narrative component the shameful but secretly loved face of the novelistic form. Stereotyped, formulated, with its characters clichés and pre-formatted intrigues, the popular narrative makes history and its actors the bottom of commerce, aiming to reach a vast market of readers and spectators. It is among other things that the hierarchies which categorize our evaluation of cultural objects are forged on this division between the arts of narrative and the arts of style, the arts of wide circulation and niche arts. Precisely, it is these instances and the relevance of these cultural hierarchies that this course intends to examine. In an approach at the crossroads of the sociology of culture and the analysis of literary or visual objects, we will reflect on the artistic and theoretical foundations of cultural hierarchization, question the link between cultural recognition and economics of culture, and consider more broadly the questions of opacity or, on the contrary, the porosity of the boundaries between popular culture and learned culture. The course will also give an overview of the evolution of the great forms of the popular narrative, and of the great forms of folk art, in its relations with institutionalized art, which it never ceases to call into question, agitate, but also integrate. The lecture will offer a series of questions and an introduction to the theoretical works of cultural thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Edgar Morin, Lawrence Levine, Marshall McLuhan, Umberto Eco, etc. Since his first appearance, under the pen of Oscar Wilde, in the 1890s, the character of Dorian Gray has continually been reinvented; the dozens of films, plays, operas, rewrites, comic strips and other video games dedicated to him confirm a power of fascination and cement the construction of a powerful archetype in the collective imagination. A figure in whom the quest for the beautiful becomes monstrous, he crystallizes, in Wilde and later works, a question of problematic aestheticism that evolves over the centuries. This course will focus on studying the construction and evolution of this archetype by studying the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his posterity.