ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of contemporary writing from France which is involved with the experience of urban space as a complex and transposable form of constraint. The “geographies of constraint” it outlines are textual approaches of the urban which fuse a concern for the real-world blockages, obstacles, limits and impositions on the urban subject with a flexibly experimental and adaptive commitment to the potential of dispositif-based textual practice. The chapter sketches elements of a genealogy for these practices - referencing literary writers such as Gracq, Perec and Modiano and philosophical interventions by Foucault and Agamben - before offering brief forays into a number of works (by Maspero, Ernaux, Bellanger, Rolin, Vasset), some more wholly contemporary than others, which it sees as sharing related preoccupations concerning the spatialized representation of contemporary urban experience - and in particular with respect to the long-established problematics of the relations of “centre” and “periphery” and the creative exploration and use of the “margin” in the literary treatment of the urban context.
