Morgane Cadieu, On Both Sides of the Tracks. Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature

On Both Sides of the Tracks demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are the digest of our literary and political moment, as well as the meeting points of class, race, sexuality, gender, and kinship issues. These overtrained readers of literary and social signs also challenge interdisciplinarity and the sociology of literature. In response, this book offers a new perspective on class mobility as a literary, formal question. It foregrounds a poetics of emancipation meant to address pressing social issues: Is upward mobility a matter of birth or becoming? How long does one remain mobile? Do social climbers emancipate others in return? How is reading a tool of emancipation? Through the neologism of the “parvenant,” we see that one-way success stories of upward mobility have been replaced by multi-directional trajectories of departure, arrival, and return, to a point where the idiom of the “social ladder” has morphed into the metaphor of the train. Nineteenth-century types and tropes have returned in the twenty-first century, but with a major difference: no longer ventriloquized by bourgeois narrators, cross-class protagonists have leaped off the page to write their own stories. As a result, we now have to turn to nonfiction and autobiographies to read successful plots of upward mobility (Angot, Condé, Éribon, Ernaux, Harchi, Louis, Taïa). Conversely, contemporary novels depict social immobility and precarity (Deck, Despentes, Houellebecq, NDiaye). Across seven chapters, the book tracks the causes and explores the consequence of this new partition, which reinforces the rarity of social emancipation. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Parvenant

1 Rastignac Redux

2 The Muddy Parvenant, Then and Now

3 The Transient Body of the Transclass

4 Self-Maid? The Social Mobility of Literary and Cinematic Servants

5 A Foot in the Door: Passing on Social Mobility

6 Travel Class: From the Ladder to the Train

7 From Rastignac to Subutex: The Immobilization of the Fictional Character

Conclusion: A Demoted Canon