Geographies of Everyday Urban Life: French Literary and Cinematic Experiments in the Contemporary City

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  • March 19, 2019
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  • Peterson, Sarah
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Romance Studies
Abstract
  • This dissertation examines the city as space and place in select French texts and films from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Through the use of experimental techniques that call into question literary and cinematic conventions and genres (such as the essay, the diary, and the documentary), contemporary French authors and filmmakers offer distinctive accounts of everyday urban space. Authors Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux and filmmakers Agnès Varda and Chris Marker frequently represent the city in their works, not as a background for a narrative, but rather as a terrain upon which to explore questions about everyday social practices and relations. Conducting in situ experiments in observation (such as Perec's fastidious notation of the details of a Parisian square) and representation (as in Varda's focus on the physicality of the denizens of a lively French market street), these four authors and filmmakers project themselves into the city in ways that both document and interrogate everyday urban life. I argue that what emerges from these experiments is a new manner of understanding space and place in literature and film, one that has affinities with concepts in contemporary cultural geography. By examining intersections between literature, cinema, and cultural geography with respect to such topics as everyday life, scale, place, subjectivity, embodiment, and dialogue, I propose a geocritical approach that demonstrates the social and relational nature of the city in particular and space in general.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Melehy, Hassan
  • Fisher, Dominique D.
  • Pickles, John
  • Welch, Ellen
  • Sharma, Sarah
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2014
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Place of publication
  • Chapel Hill, NC
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  • This item is restricted from public view for 2 years after publication.
Date uploaded
  • April 22, 2015

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