MIT Global France Seminar presents, Morgane Cadieu “The Infrastructures of Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature”

Abstract: Morgane Cadieu will discuss her book On Both Sides of the Tracks (Chicago, 2024), which demonstrates that socially mobile writers and characters are the digest of our literary and political moment. Focusing on works by Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, her research aims to offer a new perspective on class mobility as a literary question. It is through forms that the book addresses 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? The lecture will explore several literary devices used by authors to convey class mobility, as well as the literary settings that have replaced the idiom of the “social ladder” today, especially doors and trains. Morgane Cadieu will also share her current research on the ecology of social mobility and the importance of paintings and letters in Ernaux’s works.

Bio: Morgane Cadieu is Associate Professor of French at Yale University and the author of two books: Marcher au hasard: clinamen et création dans la prose du XXe siècle (2019) and On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature, published this year with The University of Chicago Press. She also co-edited the special issue Beaches and Ports for Comparative Literature (2021) and the volume Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig for Yale French Studies (2023). She is currently working on a new book on railroads, memory, and patrimony.