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The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable
preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the
1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been
drawn to articulate France's contrasting spatial qualities, from
infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports,
to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves.
In doing so, they explore how the country's acute sense of national
identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic
terms. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the
contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a
range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and
photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary
fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation
in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global
flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through
attention to the specificities of place and topography.
Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and
abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant
smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory
(and, by extension, a national identity) through the figure of the
hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of
flight which render it increasingly unsettled.
Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France
have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout
the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first
book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines
work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune
viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but
which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than
they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris,
peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those
that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in
Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts,
images that signal the emergence of a "topographic turn" in
contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and
sensing France's diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests,
they also represent a visual laboratory through which to
investigate how landscape "scapes" our understanding of French
culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and
time-worn idea of France's shared common space, topographic
photographs animate conversations about capital and class; cities
and their peripheries; the politics and impact of development;
migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and
postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing environment.
The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in
pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation
in flux.
The look and feel of metropolitan France has been a notable
preoccupation of French literary and visual culture since the
1980s. Numerous writers, filmmakers and photographers have been
drawn to articulate France's contrasting spatial qualities, from
infrastructural installations such as roads, rail lines and ports,
to peri-urban residential developments and isolated rural enclaves.
In doing so, they explore how the country's acute sense of national
identity has been both asserted and challenged in topographic
terms. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores how the
contemporary concern with space in France has taken shape across a
range of media, from recent cinema, documentary filmmaking and
photographic projects through to television drama and contemporary
fiction, and examines what it reveals about the state of the nation
in a post-colonial and post-industrial age. The impact of global
flows of capital, trade and migration can be mapped through
attention to the specificities of place and topography.
Investigation of liminal locations, from seaboard cities and
abandoned industrial sites to refugee camps and peasant
smallholdings, interrogates the assertion of a national territory
(and, by extension, a national identity) through the figure of the
hexagon, and highlights the fluidities, instabilities and lines of
flight which render it increasingly unsettled.
The explosive proliferation of pictures in advertising and pop
culture, mass media, and cyberspace following World War II, along
with the profusion of critical thinking that tries to make sense of
it, has had wide-ranging implications for cultural production as
such. "Pictures into Words" explores how this proliferation of
graphic images has profoundly affected narrative writing in France,
especially, as Ari J. Blatt argues, the structure, content, and
symbolic logic of contemporary French fiction. By examining a
specific corpus of narratives by authors Claude Simon, Georges
Perec, Pierre Michon, and Tanguy Viel--books that originate amid,
conjure up, and indeed are essentially about pictures--Blatt
addresses the most salient questions pertaining to the relationship
between literature and visual culture today.
Each of the novels considered here engages the work of several
postwar artists, from Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Vincent van
Gogh, and Orson Welles to Jeff Koons, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Pierre
Huyghe, and Marcel Duchamp. As Blatt's cross-disciplinary readings
show, despite their gleeful raiding of the visual archive to
generate and enrich their stories, many contemporary narratives
that tell tales about pictures simultaneously express a cautious
skepticism toward vision and visual representation. "Pictures into
Words" examines how such novels, while seemingly complicit with the
visual, simultaneously "write back" against the images they
exploit, reclaiming some of literature's lost ground in our
visually inundated world.
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