French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Wrona, Face au portrait - De Sainte-Beuve à Facebook
History, Politics and Society
Adeline Wrona, Face au portrait - De Sainte-Beuve à Facebook
Paris: Hermann, "Cultures numériques" coll., 2012.
408 p.
EAN 9782705684143
34,00 EUR
Publisher's Description:
From Sainte-Beuve's portraits to the photographs of a young Iranian woman circulating on Facebook, this book examines the link between media platforms and the forms of the portrait. It offers both an aesthetic and historical reflection on the role played by the media in shaping the visual representation of individuals.
Why does the portrait become a journalistic genre?
How does the newspaper, acting as a museum of contemporaries, appropriate the techniques of portraitists, writers, painters, or photographers? What is the role of the portrait in society? When Nadar, initially a journalist, moved from drawing to photography to carry out his satirical "Pantheon" project; when Zola offered Le Petit Journal five portraits of contemporaries looking grim; when Libération placed the image of a personality of the day on the back page of every daily issue—the same gesture is repeated: it is as much about giving substance to a singular figure as it is about embodying the norms that underpin a society in its self-representation.
At the end of this journey, the case of digital portraits raises new questions: because the text and its medium now lead autonomous lives, the ways in which portraits are archived and collected seem to change in nature. Individual faces continue to occupy media representation, as evidenced by the "book of faces" promised by the Facebook network, but the modes of dissemination are very different.
Adeline Wrona is a professor at Paris Sorbonne University (Celsa, Paris 4), where she heads the journalism program. A former student of the ENS and holder of the agrégation in Modern Literature, she specializes in the relationship between literature and journalism from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Author of Zola journaliste (Flammarion, 2011) and numerous articles on writer-journalists, press portraits, and digital media, her research focuses in particular on the metamorphoses of journalistic genres, analyzed from both a poetic and communicational perspective.
The study explores the intersection of journalism, literature, and visual culture across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. By examining figures such as Nadar and Émile Zola alongside modern digital formats, the volume traces how newspapers and online platforms appropriate techniques from painting and photography to construct public figures. Readers interested in the history of journalism, media studies, and the evolution of cultural representation may find this work relevant to their inquiries.