Refashioning the Novel in the Age of Image Media

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the contemporary French novel is responding to television. While much has been written regarding the threat that television poses to books, narrative, and language, the survival strategies of writers have been largely overlooked. Rather than lamenting the novel's decline, this study asks how writers are rethinking the purpose and form of the novel to better represent televisual subjectivity and to adapt the genre to a new cultural paradigm. Contemporary novelists must negotiate a tension between distinguishing the novel from the medium of television while also integrating their work into mainstream culture in order to remain relevant. How can the novel both rival television and borrow from it?