In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Des personnages et des hommes dans la ville: géographies littéraires et sociales by Sylvie Freyermuth, and Jean-François P. Bonnot
  • Sarah Tribout-Joseph
Des personnages et des hommes dans la ville: géographies littéraires et sociales. Par Sylvie Freyermuth et Jean-François P. Bonnot. (Géographies littéraires et sociales.) Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. 522 pp., ill.

Sylvie Freyermuth and Jean-François Bonnot have previously co-edited Ville infectée, ville déshumanisée (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014) and Malaise dans la ville (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014). This co-authored book brings these two researchers from different backgrounds together again to further a pioneering approach to the urban world around us. Freyermuth works on the inscription of literature in sociopolitical questions. Bonnot has a background in linguistics and an interest in the interface between literature and social history. Following in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu and his defiance of theories of the ‘irréductibilité’ of art and its ‘transcendance’ (Les Règles de l’art (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 11), this study ventures further away from literature to analyse literary texts not for their literariness but rather for their documentary value. As such they are placed alongside ‘microhistoires’ of historical persons. The boundaries between fictional and real-life stories of men and women are broken down, and each reinforces the other in the choice of corpus and the confrontation of the fictional with newspaper extracts, medical accounts, and photos. In a chiasmic move, the speculative narrative that builds up real-life accounts from written or oral ephemera converges with the documentary reinsertion of the fictional into the real. Citing Christine Dupuit’s ‘Pour une sociologie de la littérature’ (Cahiers de l’Institut de recherches marxistes, 31 (1989), 48–53), the authors affirm that literature is neither a ‘monument’ nor an actual ‘document’ but rather a ‘trace […] d’un processus de signification à construire’ (p. 11). Having freed the text of its aura as a literary work, the authors’ approach is to try to develop a detailed understanding of the sociohistorical context to which it relates. An integrated approach is adopted, which neither compartmentalizes the different disciplines nor separates the contributions by author. Instead the study is organized into four parts. Part One, ‘Malaise dans la vie et dans la ville’, examines the reasons for exclusion and how it is made bearable. The overall tone of the book is pessimistic, with a sustained analysis of the ‘misère du monde’, or, as the authors term it, the ‘taedium vitae’, which they see as characteristic of the end of epochs (p. 1). Key here is the deconstruction of Marc Augé’s concept of the ‘non-lieu’, and the book is structured around the idea of ‘habiter un lieu inhabitable’, which Freyermuth and Bonnot work up from concentration camp testimonies. Parts Two and Three examine questions of urban structure, change, and individual and collective identity and [End Page 302] memory. Part Four traces the infra-historical in Montbéliard in the face of industrialization, and in the lives of itinerants. The study engages with important critical thinkers from Rousseau to Maurice Halbwachs, Bourdieu to Augé. Although it offers more of a sociological than a literary perspective, on occasion the wealth of literary texts brought together is telling, and it is the last section of the book that is the most successful in forging an interdisciplinary approach. The study includes an extensive and most helpful bibliography, arranged by discipline.

Sarah Tribout-Joseph
University of Edinburgh
...

pdf

Share