Terrain vague: Aesthetics and poetics of urban interspaces in French modernity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfram Nitsch
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 248296090

The project focuses on the phenomenon of abandoned, neglected, and often forgotten urban spaces, described in French as "terrains vagues", a term which could be translated as fallow land, vacant land or waste land. But both the phenomenon and the concept of the "terrain vague" are hard to define; in fact, both remain somewhat unexplored, despite their topicality. In the arts the "terrain vague" is currently in vogue. Indeed, recent debates and literature on the theory and practice of space often mention the empty, disused and derelict urban spaces; however, they seldom receive deeper consideration. Not so well known are the historical antecedents of the concept, growing from the romantic aesthetics of ruins, and its particular semantic potential, developed in two centuries of literary use, which forms the basis of its enduring fascination. Based on a systematic consideration of its specific topology and of cognate concepts such as heterotopia (Foucault), non-place (Augé) or dead zone (Doron), the aesthetics, poetics, and conceptual evolution of the "terrain vague" in modern French literature and cinema will be explored. Special emphasis will be placed on the mythology of Paris, as created by surrealist poets and photographers, on conceptual urban explorations which haunt contemporary writing on the city, and on the representation of urban waste lands in French cinema. From an anthropological point of view, the study will consider the extent to which the "terrain vague" forms a sort of reservation for experiences which have lost their place in the course of increasing suburbanization and homogenization of urban space, and how such spaces can provide utopian settings or be otherwise creatively appropriated. The study of the representation of "terrains vagues" in literature and film provides three perspectives from which the handling of urban waste land, aesthetically and poetically, can be elucidated: (1) the "terrain vague" as a prismatic space or chronotopos, in which lines of urban development concentrate and refract and through which one can read the current condition of urban space in relation to its historicity and sociality; (2) the "terrain vague" as a place of experience that, representing the extraordinary that manifests at the margins and in the gaps between urban order, provokes liminal experiences of strangeness and transgression; (3) the "terrain vague" as a space of potentiality that, due to its lack of purpose and indeterminate meaning, can be reclaimed for imaginative projection, creative action or utopian visions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants