Fleuve glauque : les départements de la Seine, banlieue des romans « Spécial Police » de Frédéric Dard

This paper studies the representation of suburbs as a place of anguish in the “Special Police” novels (Fleuve Noir publisher, Paris) by Frédéric Dard. This anxiety, it is argued, is what lends this collection of 25 novels some of their essential qualities, their unhealthy climate and absolute darkness. Dard’s suburbs fit into the traditions of realism; but the atmosphere, characters and plots owe to the American hardboiled school and like in film noir, space is stylized and dramatized, and often used to express a judgment of moral nature. Spatial representations in these novels are part of a critique of civilization and constitute a comment on the social modernization and public intervention in the development of the French territory in the postwar period. The novels written by Frédéric Dard from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s offer a profoundly original representation of suburban angst and what was not yet known at the time as the suburban malaise. Avoiding clichés and excessively connoted referential spaces, Dard anchor these noir novels he called “novels of the night” in landscapes that are both biographical and intertextual. The West Suburbs of Paris and what was
to become the Yvelines department are at the centre of Dard’s novelistic geography, turning into a mythical and deadly space in which is negotiated an acculturation in France of the evil and ruined world described in American noir.

Frédéric Dard: Romans de la nuit

Préface et notices accompagant la republication de sept romans parus dans la collection Spécial Police dans les années 1950 et 1960. Ces romans de suspenses psychologiques à l'atmosphère sombre, inquiétante étaient parfois désignés par les initiés sous le nom de « Romans de la nuit ».
Cette anthologie regroupe sous ce titre sept oeuvres dont l'intrigue prend la forme d'un piège à la mécanique implacable, ainsi resituées dans leur contexte culturel

. Cette mort dont tu parlais
• C'est toi le venin
• Des yeux pour pleurer
• Le Monte-charge
• L'homme de l'avenue
• La Pelouse
• Une seconde de toute beauté

Les salauds vont en enfer:Pièce en 2 actes de Frédéric Dard

Edition présentée et annotée par : Hugues Galli, Thierry Gautier et Dominique Jeannerod

Sound Art and Spatial Practices: Situating Sound Installation Art Since 1958

This dissertation examines the emergence and development of sound installation art, an under-recognized tradition that has developed between music, architecture, and media art practices since the late 1950s. Unlike many musical works, which are concerned with organizing sounds in time, sound installations organize sounds in space; they thus necessitate new theoretical and analytical models that take into consideration the spatial situated-ness of sound. Existing discourses on “spatial sound” privilege technical descriptions of sound localization. By contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which concepts of space are socially, culturally, and politically construed, and how spatially-organized sound works reflect and resist these different constructions. Using an interdisciplinary methodology of critical spatial analysis and critical studies in music, this dissertation explores such topics as: conceptions of acoustic space in postwar Western art music, architecture, and media theory; the development of sound installation art in relation to philosophies of everyday life and social space; the historical links between musical performance, conceptual art, and sound sculpture; the body as a site for sound installations; and sonicspatial strategies that confront politics of race and gender. Through these different investigations, this dissertation proposes an “ontopological” model for considering sound: a critical model of analysis and reception that privileges an understanding of sound in relation to ontologies of space and place.