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

From gilets jaunes to general strikes, France's streets have become a theatre of dissent for the
disregarded 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 population
which feels invisible, but which has begun to protest. Pushed to the side-lines by post-industrial
capitalism, in a country that has long been bureaucratically centralised, the inhabitants of this "France
périphérique" are marked by a political marginality that raises questions of democratic and aesthetic
representation. 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 the
contemporary novel brings into focus the lives that have been discounted in the socio-economic situation
which has dominated France since the turn of the twenty-first century. Through the lens offered by the
philosopher and anthropologist Georges Didi-Huberman, I seek to examine how literature, itself
increasingly marginalised in the cultural marketplace, represents these endangered existences at
France's edges and offers potential forms of resistance to their effacement. I ask how, as a
fundamentally figurative genre, the novel's visual dimension enables its heuristic potential, as well as its
empathetic and ethical force, and how the fictional images it portrays bear implications for democratic
participation and social identity.