Contenu du sommaire : Géographie et fiction : au-delà du réalisme

This paper explores the highly diverse relations between fiction and geography (some of which are explored in this issue of the Annales de géographie). The authors propose to consider three types of interrelation. First literature, cinema, video-games are the medium through which most people discover the world and its spaces they do not physically experience. Second, fiction also influences our perceptions of spaces and places. To quote Edward Soja our spaces are always “real and imagined”, we know them simultaneously through experience and imaginary settings produced by works of fiction. Last, but not least, authors of fiction are also geographers in their own way ; they often do what humanistic geography was trying to achieve, describe the human experience of space and therefore contribute to understanding it better. For all these reasons, the authors argue here that the study of fiction should not be considered as a marginal activity for geographers, but should be central in the discipline, close to its “heart”.

Fictional children's literature provides knowledge and modes of understanding that allow teaching/learning of a subjective geographical approach to the real. This programme- article explores the fictional narrative characters and in particular the specificities of fictional children's literature (novels and picture books). Fictional narratives, as experiment in thought, offer readers possible worlds and worlds crossed between imagination and reality. The wide scope of children's literature gives the opportunity to discover a rich spatiality and geographicity. Three children's novels from L. Sepúlveda are analysed as an example ; they are pertinent as “realistic fiction” and as having a perspective of “marvellous realism”.

This article attempts to define the way in which imagination contributes to the genesis of a place (considered as a chora which makes sense, not as a cartographic topos) by examining the process of semiotization engendered by fictions which became myths. It focuses on two cases : Libertalia and Lemuria, two utopias born from the European presence in the Western Indian Ocean since the 16th Century. Methodologically it connects sources and literature analysis with data collected in the field over a period of more than two years in Betsimisaraka land (Madagascar). Studying Eurocentric myths which take place in the Western Indian Ocean is heuristically efficient, showing the divergence between topos and chora and to bring to light factors involved in retroactive impacts exerted by the latter on the former. Firstly this article contextualizes those two utopias in the history of literature, in order to understand how they became myths. Then, by transferring on chora the distinction established by Berque between “imprint” and “matrix”, it questions the “imprint-chorality” of myths (giving sense through culture to spaces where these unfurl) and finally their “matrix-chorality” (transforming the reality).

The moving picture does not apply just to the presentation of landscapes and societies that have disappeared but also to the the investigation of any human production simultaneously from its anthropological, sociological and historical viewpoints. How therefore can the mining and industrial landscape be made to reflect a bygone temporality, through motion picture and its various film genres ? In what way does the cinematic transmission passing down this temporality, like an inheritance, immortalize the representations of the society over the course of successive decades? Through the study of an original commemorative site (Nora, 1984) the film, the representations of a mining and steel-making landscape, now disappeared, emerge as a stage setting for portraying memory.

This paper explores how fiction plays an important role in the sweeping change taking place in Western Montana, as a driving force and as a record of these trends. In fact amenity-rich regions of Western Montana have experienced significant growth over the recent decades, mainly due to the "get back to nature" movement. This article aims to highlight how this growth is nourished by new representations of the West as a place to escape to, mainly drawn by fiction (literature, cinema). This picture of Western Montana can be considered as a renewed identity, carried by new characters. If the Lonesome cowboy represented the West as a Frontier to conquest, now the Fly fisherman and the Amenity rancher embody that New West : these fictional characters shape appealing representations underlying amenity migrations, but in turn, show in the fiction the new dynamics that they help to create. What is the contribution of fiction in the sweeping change occurring in Western Montana ? And how does fiction bring onto the stage new characters who instigate as well as endorse these dynamics typical of the New West ?

Since Antiquity, Homer's Odyssey has shaped the readers' imagination regarding travel and perception of the Mediterranean space. This article examines one of the stages in geographical reflection with regard to the reality of the places described by the poet, revisiting the voyage of the author who sought to superimpose the fiction on the Mediterranean space with the greatest persistence, energy and evidence, Victor Bérard (1864-1931). By showing the ties of the author with the French school of Geography, this article shows the degree to which his theory (contested) about Homer's fiction was the product of the close association in French teaching of geography and history, as well as the “creative ferment” of the discipline at the time of the emergence of the Vidalian school of regional geography.

Immense, luxurious glass towers dominating endless miserable suburbs, inextricable traffic jams, pollution, terrorist attacks succeeding earthquakes. In a world where all the gaps have become gulfs, the West no longer gives any credit to Egypt, whose capital of 35 million inhabitants is shaken by strong social and shocks: an overview of Cairo in 2015 in the scenario of J. Nasir's novel, Tower of Dreams (1999). Ten years later, the portrait of Cairo in 2023, painted by A. Towfiq, in Utopia, is almost more daunting. There the Egyptian territory is split into two spaces at war ; the rich westernized Egyptians live entrenched in closed, gated residential communities whereas the rest of the territory is reduced to an immense shanty town where miserable populations are rotting away. In the light of the current contexts, and of the period when these two novels were written, the parallel representations of Cairo are analysed as foretellings of the future made by these dystopian narratives of anticipation.

Literary fiction is contributing to the conception of the Saint-Laurent Boulevard – The Main – as a symbolic place in the urban imagination of Montreal and as a national heritage. Literature describes the street in a lively and sensual portrait paying a lot of attention to the townscape, the sounds and the scents. Cosmopolitanism and nostalgia are recurring themes in works of fiction : they are continuing the myth of The Main, as the place where immigrants first settled during the XXth Century. As it creates a strong image in the collective memory, the literature also reveals the links between inhabitants and the street. Despite the departure of many immigrant communities elsewhere in the city, contemporary narratives plough back into the old ones. They tend to reinvent the street, its representation and cosmopolitanism. For example, in the old Red Light District, literature is mobilized against the Quartier des Spectacles urban project, as a form of recognition of its legitimacy.

Is dialogue possible between the imaginary representation of the world and its scholarly counterpart ? The article aims to show, by analyzing Philippe Claudel's novel, that the world invented by the writer carries knowledge which resonates with that of the geographer. However, the lack of any reference to a reality located in time and space seems to place Mister Lihn's story outside the world. This is precisely the point : this absence shows the existential condition of the rootless person through the image of a country that cannot be named or mapped. By depicting the exile through his relations to the space and to the landscape, the writer tells of the experience of being uprooted, more generally of being subjected to exclusion. Beyond that, he offers a reflection on geographicity.

The Géocinema film festival, the creation of a team of geographers from Université Bordeaux Montaigne, has provided an alternative venue for the informal study of geography for ten years now. Moving beyond the classroom into the screening rooms of central Bordeaux's legendary Utopia art and repertory Cinema. Géocinema attracts various publics : students, movie lovers, and neighbors of the movie theater where the Festival takes place. There, for three full days, audiences are able to experience mainstream films in which geographical thinking underpins conceptual structure and plot. Serving as supports for a conversation between the general public and accademics, these films also propose valid content for the study of geography and geographical approaches to knowledge. This paper looks back on the festival as a space of experimentations, for the public and for the invited speakers (all scholars) alike. We first present the innovations in higher education didactics tested at the festival, and how the festival makes geographical approaches and concepts accessible to general audiences. We then address Festival content, examining themes tackled over the years, as well as speakers conferences' outcomes from the various festival editions. Lastly, we focus on the science-fiction genre where geographical content tends to command a central narrative role, and where the idea that space is never merely décor is for us most evident. Geocinema shows how movies efficiently reveal the spatial dimension of any given society.