Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, 2012
Geographically speaking, the French banlieues a problemes offer a prime example of the kind of em... more Geographically speaking, the French banlieues a problemes offer a prime example of the kind of emergent, interstitial spaces discussed in the introductory chapter. Despite the periodic upsurges of interest in the low-income, ethnically mixed banlieues surrounding France’s major metropolises (which tend to follow on the periodic upsurges of violence that have occurred there), they have until very recently remained, culturally speaking, largely unmapped and depicted in the mainstream media as opaque, impenetrable zones. The cultural historian Anna Louise Milne has argued for the need to overcome the reductive view promoted in the mass media of “la banlieue” (without the plural ‘s’) as a “singular” (i.e., undifferentiated) space of alterity, asking how we can “sunder the totalising opposition of centre and periphery, or France and misery”(Milne, “The Singular Banlieue” 60). For Milne, as for me, the best answers to such questions are provided by works of film and literature that eschew the existing interpretive paradigms and journalistic cliches while exploring the multiple, varied experience of the banlieues (in the plural), as seen through the eyes of those who inhabit them. Success is not guaranteed. Even those who set out expressly to come to a better understanding of the banlieues—like Jean Rolin in Zones, Francois Maspero in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, or Bertrand Tavernier in De l’autre cote du periph’—tend to leave this sense of confusion and disorientation largely intact.
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Books by Eric Prieto
“This kind of semiotic boundary crossing between music and literature is inherently metaphorical, but, as Prieto’s analyses of Beckett, Leiris, and Pinget show, these interart analogies provide valuable clues for bringing to light the unspoken assumptions, obscurely understood principles, and extra-literary aspirations that gave such urgency to the modernist quest to better represent the mind in action.”—Fabula
(Fabula )
"Carefully reasoned. . . . Difficult but rewarding. Highly recommended."—Choice
“A well-researched book likely to appeal to both scholars and students. Prieto’s style is clear and meticulous, and every key notion is explained…. [It] delivers a pertinent study of modernist literature, as well as a landmark for research on music in literature, laying a sound groundwork for analysis of other ‘musical’ postmodernist narratives.”—Jean-Luis Pautrot, Comparative Literature
(Jean-Luis Pautrot Comparative Literature )"
Papers by Eric Prieto
“This kind of semiotic boundary crossing between music and literature is inherently metaphorical, but, as Prieto’s analyses of Beckett, Leiris, and Pinget show, these interart analogies provide valuable clues for bringing to light the unspoken assumptions, obscurely understood principles, and extra-literary aspirations that gave such urgency to the modernist quest to better represent the mind in action.”—Fabula
(Fabula )
"Carefully reasoned. . . . Difficult but rewarding. Highly recommended."—Choice
“A well-researched book likely to appeal to both scholars and students. Prieto’s style is clear and meticulous, and every key notion is explained…. [It] delivers a pertinent study of modernist literature, as well as a landmark for research on music in literature, laying a sound groundwork for analysis of other ‘musical’ postmodernist narratives.”—Jean-Luis Pautrot, Comparative Literature
(Jean-Luis Pautrot Comparative Literature )"