Georges Perec’s Geographies

Material, Performative and Textual Spaces

Edited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips

ISBN: 9781787354418

Publication: October 14, 2019

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Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work is its intrinsically geographical nature. With major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban and architectural concerns, both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, homes and apartments, and in a methodological way, experimenting with methods of urban exploration and observation, classification, enumeration and taxonomy.

Georges Perec’s Geographies is the first book to offer a rounded picture of Perec’s geographical interests. Divided into two parts, Part I, Perec’s Geographies, explores the geographies within Perec’s work in film, literature and radio, from descriptions of streets to the spaces of his texts, while Part II, Perecquian Geographies, explores geographies in a range of material and metaphorical forms, including photographic essays, soundscapes, theatre, dance and writing, created by those directly inspired by Perec.

Georges Perec’s Geographies extends the body of Perec criticism beyond Literary and French Studies to disciplines including Geography, Urban Studies, Planning and Architecture to offer a complete and systematic examination of Georges Perec’s geographies. The diversity of readings and approaches will be of interest not only to Perec readers and fans but to students and researchers across these subjects.

Praise for Georges Perec’s Geographies

'This collection of essays... is Perecquian in all the best ways. It’s intelligent, systematic, and comprehensive, and at the same time playful and creative with its topic. The book as a whole is a delight: an excellent academic resource for those interested in Perec and the representation of space (especially urban space) and a celebration of how his unique approach to his environment has inspired a new generation of creative practitioners.'
French Studies: A Quarterly Review

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He works on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial literature and the cultures of slavery. His books include Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (2000) and Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures (2005).

Andrew Leak is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at UCL. He has written extensively on Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Haiti, and Georges Perec. He has translated Perec into English, resulting in the publication of A Man Asleep (1990) and Lieux (2001).

Richard Phillips is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Sheffield. His books include Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (1997), Sex, Politics and Empire (2006), Fieldwork for Human Geography (2012) and Creative Writing for Social Research (forthcoming).

Introduction: Georges Perec’s geographies; Perecquian geographies
Richard Phillips, Andrew Leak and Charles Forsdick

1. The mapping of loss

Andrew Leak

2. ‘Entre Frence et Engleterre: toponyms and the poetics of reference in Perec’s fiction

Derek Schilling

3. The subject and the city in Un homme qui dort

Julia Dobson

4. Poetics of scale: Perec and Gaullism

Douglas Smith

5. Accumulation versus Dispersion: Perec and ‘his’ diaspora

Anna-Louise Milne

6. Islands, camps, zones: towards a nissological reading of Perec