On Both Sides of the Tracks

“Incredibly wide-ranging and rich, On Both Sides of the Tracks stands to be the definitive account of social mobility and class in contemporary French literature. Cadieu tracks the figure of the parvenant—the social climber whose climbing can never really end—as it works its way through and reshapes contemporary French literature, transforming social mobility from phenomenon into experience, one that is fundamentally rooted in language. Cadieu incites us to read these texts as closely as their authors read their own lives.” * Annabel L. Kim, Harvard University *
“On Both Sides of the Tracks shows the narrative of social mobility—at a time of increased immobility—to be an intimate, if ambivalent, structure of literary fiction and nonfiction. The intimacy works both ways: the parvenant is also an uncanny figure for the reader-writer, the class-crossing ‘I’/eye imparting to reality the force of the literary. Cadieu attends exquisitely to how details, language, style, tropes, punctuation, and intertexts encode the unending effort and self-consciousness of socio-symbolic passing. One can no longer write about class and the novel without engaging with this fine work.” * Thangam Ravindranathan, Brown University *
“In this lucid, well-documented, and engaging text, Cadieu shows that social mobility constitutes an important frame in terms of which contemporary French society and literature can be apprehended and that the figure of the (upwardly mobile) transclass individual provides an excellent entryway into the French landscape and literary field.” * Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania *