A01=Morgane Cadieu
Author_Morgane Cadieu
autobiography
Category=DSBJ
class
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forms
interdisciplinarity
nonfiction
novel
poetics
precarity
social mobility
sociology
Product details
- ISBN 9780226827124
- Weight: 513g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jan 2024
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes.
Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu’s study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.
Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.
Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu’s study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.
Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.
Morgane Cadieu is associate professor of French at Yale University. She is the author of one book in French, Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle, and her articles and essays have appeared in publications such as Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, The Balzac Review, Fabula, and French Forum, among others.
