Abstract
This article analyzes the relationship between contemporary literature and the current development of the city in the French context. It first outlines the main aspects of the crisis of the city, or “la question urbaine,” and focuses then on specific responses by four writers, François Maspéro, Jean Rolin, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, to the challenge the city poses for literary representation. Given that these responses pertain both to the techniques of literary representation and to cultural interpretations of space, the analysis is carried out at the level of both literary semiotics and cultural semiotics. In the end, the article relates the authors and texts discussed to works in other fields of arts, pointing out lines for future investigations.
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Notes
Spectacular burning of stolen cars after wild racing through suburbia. The first widely-reported rodeos took place in Lyon suburbs in the summer of 1981.
Such as leading Parisian publishing houses (like Gallimard, Seuil, or Minuit) and various state-funded grant systems and programs for national and international promotion of French literature.
“Beur” designates a young Arab born of immigrant parents in France. Here is a selection of paratexual descriptions that underline the sociologically exceptional aspects of the works instead of their literary qualities: “Here’s the pathetic odyssey of an immigrant...” (Boudjedra 1996, back-cover), “Kiffe kiffe demain is first of all voice, the voice of a child from the blocks” (Guène 2005, back-cover) and “A low rent apartment block. On the walls: graffiti, slogans, cries of despair, obscene drawings” (Charef 2002, back-cover).
An important forerunner for Maspéro is Carol Dunlop’s and Julio Cortazar’s Les Autonautes de la cosmoroute, ou un voyage intemporel Paris-Marseille (1983), where the authors travel on the highway from Paris to Marseille, move every 1day from one resting place to the following, spend the night there, and write about the journey as if they were nineteenth century explorers.
However, some oulipian texts are artistic masterworks and have also become modern classics. The most famous is, perhaps, Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (1978)
Literary examples of suburbia as a threat to the bourgeois social order and the identity of the bourgeois can be found, for instance, in Baudelaire’s short story Mademoiselle Bistouri (1869) and Céline’s novel Mort à credit (1936). Nonliterary examples include Aristide Bruant’s Chant d’apaches and the numerous articles on the apaches in newspapers like Le petit journal. For a historical account on the apaches, the frightening young robbers from the working-class suburbs, see Perrot (2001), pp. 351–364.
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Veivo, H. Authors on the Outskirts: Writing Projects and (Sub)urban Space in Contemporary French Literature. Know Techn Pol 21, 131–141 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-008-9055-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-008-9055-7