On Both Sides of the Tracks

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A01=Morgane Cadieu
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Author_Morgane Cadieu
autobiography
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Category1=Non-Fiction
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COP=United States
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eq_biography-true-stories
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forms
interdisciplinarity
Language_English
nonfiction
novel
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poetics
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Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
social mobility
sociology
softlaunch

Product details

  • ISBN 9780226830360
  • Weight: 399g
  • Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 09 Jan 2024
  • Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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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.
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.

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