Eric Prieto

Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond

Those who study the representation of space and place in literature are well aware of the debt this subfield owes to work done in the social sciences. Many of the most exciting recent developments in this burgeoning area of literary studies have involved an interdisciplinary turn toward themes and analytic tools that borrow from fields like cultural and social geography, urban sociology, environmental studies, and the phenomenology of place. Such tools have greatly enriched the study of literary space. But what does literature have to offer in return? That is, how can the literary study of space and place contribute to the work being done in these other fields and in so doing enrich our broader understanding of and interactions with the natural and built environments through which we move? How can we, as literary critics, build on these developments, helping to bring literature into the larger conversation on space and place? My answers to these questions will be centered on a consideration of Bertrand Westphal’s La Geocritique: Reel, fiction, espace.1 Informed by postmodern, postcolonial, and poststructuralist theories of space, Westphal’s book argues forcefully for the strategic role that imaginative literature plays in a world marked irrevocably by postmodern epistemological and ideological uncertainty.

Literature, geography, and the postmodern poetics of place

Phenomenological Place Place, Subjectivity, and the Humanist Tradition Samuel Beckett and the Postmodern Loss of Place The Social Production of Place Poststructuralism and the Resistance to Place Beur Fiction and the Banlieue Crisis Postcolonial Place Place After Postcolonial Studies Evolution in/of the Caribbean Landscape Narrative Landscape, Map, and Vertical Integration

Listening in : music, mind, and the modernist narrative

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Music, Mimesis, and Metaphor Robert Pinget and the Musicalization of Fiction Music and Autobiography (Leiris lyrique) Beckett, Music, and the Heart of Things Music, Metaphysics, and Moral Purpose in Literature Bibliography Index

Paris à l'improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz, and Sub-Urban Beauty

Jacques Réda is best known as a poet of place, remarkable precisely for his interest in the unremarkable and his compelling descriptions of nondescript places, the kind that most of us traverse unseeingly in our day-to-day lives. He has also led a notable second career as a jazz critic, having written extensively on the music and its history. The relationship between these two pursuits seems to be a lopsided one: the influence of his poetic preoccupations on his jazz writing is clear and pervasive, but the influence of the music on the poetry is much less obvious and harder to characterize. And yet it played a crucial role in his development as a poet. Réda spent the early part of his career in search of his own distinctive voice and thematic territory. He found it in his somewhat eccentric approach to the evocation of place, which is most tellingly characterized by the apparent aimlessness of the flâneur, who works in what appears to be a random manner (à l’improviste), devoting himself to ephemera, and unapologetically refusing to monumentalize his subject matter. Having realized that his poetic vocation lay in this direction, but unsure precisely how to explain what made this subject matter so compelling to him, Réda found himself in need of a set of aesthetic principles—a way to explain and justify his poetic practice, if only to himself. It is, I argue, through his study of jazz that he was finally able to develop the vocabulary necessary to articulate such a set of principles and become the poet of place that we know today. In order to understand what is at stake in this endeavor, why he might deem such justifications necessary, it will be useful to consider a question from the essay/poem “Où, comment, quand, pourquoi?” [where, what, when, why] which problematizes his ongoing obsessions with flânerie, travel, and the evocation of place.

Musical Imprints and Mimetic Echoes in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Depuis la fin de la Renaissance [...] la musique occidentale, pour trois siècles au moins, se sera principalement définie comme musica ficta. Et même l’École de Vienne, mis à part peut-être Webern, ne remettra pas en cause cette détermination. Admettons pour simplifier, comme on le fait généralement, que cette nouveauté soit plutôt circonscrite à l’art du chant et que tout commence avec l’invention du stile rappresentativo et de ce que Monteverdi appellera la seconda prattica.1

Geocriticism Meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and Environmental Thinking

Since 2010, a significant amount of the American interest in geocriticism has been coming from ecologically minded literary critics, with Scott Slovic, founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and editor of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment), writing approvingly of Bertrand Westphal’s approach and encouraging the integration of his work into the ecocritical canon.1 Given their mutual interest in issues like place, space, landscape, and nature, it is not surprising to find this kind of convergence between ecocriticism and geocriticism. Nonetheless, the differences between geo-criticism and eco-criticism, like those between geography and ecology, are significant and worthy of close examination. Although the two approaches are clearly complementary, the questions and goals that shaped them differ in important respects. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of the zones of overlap between the two fields in order to consider some ways in which the two approaches can complement, correct, and inspire each other.

Rethinking Aimé Césaire: Presentation

This essay introduces the central themes of “Rethinking Césaire,” a special section of Small Axe, which gravitate in metacritical fashion around the various efforts to refashion Aimé Césaire’s legacy in and around 2013, the centenary of his birth. Included are essays devoted to Césaire’s poetic legacy, his theory of Negritude, his relationship to Marxism, and his intellectual partnership with his wife, Suzanne Césaire. What emerges is a sense of Césaire’s legacy as a living legacy, firmly rooted in a specific historical context but revealing different facets of its structure to successive generations as they seek to understand it in relation to their own preoccupations and challenges.

Settling Scores with Vinteuil: Musical Textures in Proust and Echenoz

Abstract This paper explores two notable moments in the history of musically inspired fiction: Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Jean Echenoz’s Cherokee. Focusing on the understudied question of music considered as a textural model for literary representation, I ask what the depictions of musical performances in these two novels reveal about their authors’ larger representational projects, and suggest that they provide revealing insights into their respective views on the relationship between foreground and background, character and place, consciousness and world. In this sense, it is possible to read the musical passages in Cherokee as a kind of ironic rejoinder to Proust’s depictions of Vinteuil’s music, elucidating Echenoz’s decision to set aside almost all consideration of his characters’ interiority in favour of an externalist poetics of surfaces and contingent encounters.

Rhetoric of the Belleville novel

Ever since the heroic days of the Paris Commune, Belleville has fascinated those interested in the kind of working-class exoticism Pierre MacOrlan called “le fantastique social.” But even as the neighborhood’s colorful proletarian reputation was being embellished by figures as diverse as Edith Piaf, Eugène Dabit, Jacques Prévert, and Willy Ronis (to name only these few), it was acquiring another, decidedly different reputation as an immigrant neighborhood. First came Eastern Europeans, then Africans, and, most recently, an influx of Asians. The most recent incarnations of the “Belleville myth” (Patrick Simon), then, are dual, evoking both a tough but vibrant working-class community and a multicultural melting pot. Even today, as Belleville enters into a phase of rapid gentrification, this dual image has persisted. It has, moreover, given rise to a veritable subgenre of the novel, one that is quite distinct from other forms of urban realism and that has taken the tradition of French social writing in some important new directions. In what follows, I seek to describe the implicit conventions governing this genre in order to ask what it contributes to current debates about class, race, and community in France. The novels considered here include Romain Gary’s La vie devant soi, Daniel Pennac’s Malaussène series, two novels by Calixthe Beyala (Le petit prince de Belleville and Amours sauvages), Michel Tournier’s La goutte d’or, Didier Van Cauwelaert’s Un aller simple, and Leïla Sebbar’s Le chinois vert d’Afrique. This list is not meant to provide an exhaustive survey but a point of departure for defining this genre that I call, perhaps somewhat recklessly, the Belleville novel. Thus it excludes texts that belong to more established genres like the autobiographical memoir or the polar, and does not consider the many films that could fall under this heading. Conversely, it includes three novels (Tournier, Van Cauwelaert, Sebbar) that are not set in Belleville but depict similar kinds of working-class immigrant communities. The Belleville label, then, is not meant to denote a specific locale (like Venetian painting) or a community of writers (like the New York school of poets) so much as a mode of urban writing that has identifiable thematic and stylistic contours. Belleville’s notoriety gives the neighborhood an emblematic status that makes