Marc Brosseau

The City in Textual Form: Manhattan Transfer's New York

From the geographical novel to the novel as a geographer iterature has become a significant source of inspiration for geographers in the Llast 20 years. Papers, books and review articles on the subject, most of which have been published in English, are now a well-established part of a geographical discourse that transcends the ’geography-and-literature’ subfield. More and more geographers working in different areas are quoting or referring to poets or novelists in order to provide meaningful insight into their subject matter. More generally, the growing interest in the role of discourse and writing practices has led many geographers to question their own use of language and, in this regard, literature and literary theory may provide valuable food for thought. Humanistic geographers have played a role in drawing their colleagues’ attention to meaning, subjectivity, agency, imagination and, in so doing, to literature.2 Until the 1970s, this interest was minimal and mainly focused on the ’documentary’ value of literary sources for regional geography. In a bid to bring human perspectives and values back to the core of geography, humanists focused on various aspects of ’sense of place’, landscape perception and, occasionally, on the didactic relevance of literature. In the process, various other currents of the discipline have contributed their points of view to the examination of lit-

Chronotopic Reading of Crime Fiction: Montréal in La Trace de l’Escargot

Crime fiction, more specifically noir fiction, thrives on urban space. At the very least, the city is its favorite territory. The city depicted in noir novels does not exactly correspond to that of our everyday experience nor, indeed, to the city represented in the many other fiction subgenres. The particular constraints and generic conventions of crime fiction influence and condition the representation of city space, with its particular settings, characters, events, and the sense of place that unfolds there. Literary scholars and, more recently, social and cultural geographers, have identified the specificities of the representation of space associated with these literary subgenres. They have highlighted the decadent, corrupt, violent, and despairing image of the city that emerges from the coalescence of a world of criminals and police forces. While certain areas of the city tend to be overexposed, others are almost completely neglected. The same applies to the various segments of the urban population. The result is a recurrent urban atmosphere: dark, gloomy, tense, or frightening.