594 / 658
592
Friday, November 11
1 6 : 0 0 – 1 7 : 3 0
our understanding of the nation and its position in the world, the way we organize our daily life, the festive occasions we look forward to, or the historical
events we remember and celebrate. In line with this, television is conceived as a mediumwith distinct spatial and temporal dimensions, which shape social
relationships across private, public, national and transnational spaces, as well as structure attitudes to the passage of time. Using this framework, the proj‑
ect investigated communist television cultures both cross-nationally and longitudinally, and used both axes of comparison to offer not only an original
descriptive account of communist television trajectories, but also an explanation of why these trajectories developed in the way they did, and how they
differed from developments elsewhere in the world.
PN 203
FromWorld Literature to World Television? Cultural Diffusion Between the French and the Romanian Television in the 1960s
S. Mihelj
1
, A. Matei
2
1
Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom
2
Lumina-The University of South-East Europe, Bucharest, Romania
Global television studies developed relatively late compared to global approaches in other branches of the humanities. World Literature, for instance, could
offer several sources of inspiration to television historians. Franco Moretti (2000, 2005), notably, puts to the test two effective concepts: interference (by
direct and indirect loans) and diffusion (of models from the core to the periphery). Broadly speaking, the same cultural dynamics can be documented in liter‑
ature and television as global phenomena: in both cases, there are centres that influence the periphery. In both cases, we witness interference and diffusion
in the same way: a format is borrowed by a periphery (it “diffuses”) and impregnated with a local “style”. While I remain indebted to the conceptual frame
sketched by Moretti, my paper will focus nevertheless more on differences permitting to render it effective in the field of television history. Unlike World
Literature, television does not originate from the era of the Enlightenment.The diffusion of television has been much more rapid than literary diffusion, and
it also became involved with the ColdWar. Obviously, television history is also much shorter and economic and political agencies weighed on it much more.
Much of the recent research conducted on European television history has tried to convey national television histories in the context of two broader regional
histories. On the one hand, West European television history has been investigated, separately from socialist television (Bourdon, 2011). On the other hand,
historians of socialist television have been striving to mobilise evidence of a European transnational television web active across the Iron Curtain (Bignell
and Fickers, 2008, Chalaby, 2009, Imre, Havens and Lustyik, 2012, Mihelj, 2014). While being aware of the political role of television during the Cold War
(Badenoch, Fickers and Henrich-Franke, 2013), I would like to emphasise the role played by longer-running and deeper cultural and historical transnational
links in Cold War Europe. Diffusion and interference, in television history, inherits from a deeper cultural configuration than that of the Cold War, the era
when national European televisions were born and were growing. Our aim is to apply those two concepts for two cases in point: the French (as the repre‑
sentative of the core) and the Romanian (as the representative of the periphery) State Televisions during their key stage of development, during the 1960s
and the 1970s. On the one hand, we shall assess the importance of historical convergence between French and Romanian political models at the beginning
of the 60s, trying to show that in both cases television was assigned a similar place within the national project (see Bourdon, 1990 and passim, and Mustata
2013, 2014; Matei, 2012, 2015). On the other hand, we shall consider how formats of French television“diffused”in Romanian Television’s programmes and
“interfered”with local cultural and political grids.