Le début de l’année a vu la parution de l’ouvrage « Her Stories. Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History » chez Duke University Press. Signé par la professeure en Media, Cinema et Digital Studies à l’Université du Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Elena Levine, le livre propose une histoire culturelle et économique des feuilletons télévisés aux États-Unis, depuis leurs débuts à la fin des années 1940 jusqu’à leur déclin au 21e siècle. L’étude approche ainsi l’histoire de la télévision en croisant des questions industrielles, de genre, de génération et de race.
La chercheuse dit au sujet du texte sur lequel elle a travaillé pendant douze ans: « I started to realize that there was a story to tell here that would arch over all of television history from the 1940’s and 50’s up to the present. One of the things that led me to the focus of my book was in the late 2000’s, a number of daytime soap operas started to get canceled and there were four shows that were on for decades that got canceled between 2009 and 2012. It made me realize that there was a kind of an end to this story. »
Présentation de l’ouvrage:
« Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen. »
Signalons par ailleurs que notre collègue de la Section d’histoire et esthétique du cinéma de l’Université de Lausanne, Delphine Chedaleux, proposait en 2019 un séminaire intitulé « Le soap opera et ses spectatrices : une approche par les cultural studies ». Elle prépare actuellement un ouvrage sur le soap opera que nous ne manquerons pas de relayer!