The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted both the importance of care and a global crisis in care. Since its beginnings in the US in the 1980s as a feminist theory within virtue ethics, care ethics has emerged from the margins of the domestic sphere in the West to become a species theory and a force for radical societal change. Influenced by Joan Tronto’s work, Alexandre Gefen has integrated the approach into literary studies in France as an interventionist reading strategy, offering therapeutic benefits to the reader as well. In a new intersectional approach, I argue that reading literature through a care ethics model can improve lives. I compare literary testimonies on either side of the patient/carer divide, Annie Ernaux’s pre-Covid-19 care home narrative and Michael Rosen’s Covid-19 patient testimony, which, read together, expand the field of medical humanities to promote a relational reconception of society over individualist neoliberalism.
Long associated with negative images culminating in the violence of the Clichy-sous-Bois riots in 2005, the Parisian banlieues are now increasingly recuperated as the site of renewed encounter with the other and with diversity. Written at the time of the riots, Philippe Vasset's Un livre blanc forms the case study for this article. Vasset explores apparently empty Parisian spaces that have been ignored or erased from the map. Writing against the gentrification and museumisation of the city, he takes the travel writing subgenre of the 'récit périurbain' in new directions to suggest a tabula rasa of many of Paris's iconic monuments which he provocatively suggests would be more beneficially replaced by 'friches'. I will firstly consider the 'récit périurbain' as a record of the real and an indictment of Neoliberalism before questioning the notion of shared cultural heritage and ending with the idea of the text as a substitute repository and living testimony to existence.
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