Peripheral vision: the aesthetics of political marginality in contemporary French fiction.

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From gilets jaunes to general strikes, France's streets have become a theatre of dissent for thedisregarded and downtrodden, whose high-visibility jackets ultimately constitute a call to be seen.Outside the country's globally connected cities, in the banlieue and beyond, can be found a populationwhich feels invisible, but which has begun to protest. Pushed to the side-lines by post-industrialcapitalism, in a country that has long been bureaucratically centralised, the inhabitants of this "Francepériphérique" are marked by a political marginality that raises questions of democratic and aestheticrepresentation. Recent French fiction has not shied away from interrogating the shadow cast by neo-liberal expansion, and the pervasive sense of alienation that accompanies it. My thesis explores how thecontemporary novel brings into focus the lives that have been discounted in the socio-economic situationwhich has dominated France since the turn of the twenty-first century. Through the lens offered by thephilosopher and anthropologist Georges Didi-Huberman, I seek to examine how literature, itselfincreasingly marginalised in the cultural marketplace, represents these endangered existences atFrance's edges and offers potential forms of resistance to their effacement. I ask how, as afundamentally figurative genre, the novel's visual dimension enables its heuristic potential, as well as itsempathetic and ethical force, and how the fictional images it portrays bear implications for democraticparticipation and social identity.