Society in a mode of fragmentation – literature as a response to the crisis of representation: Robert Lukenda

Telling life stories: The illegibility of the social

Robert Lukenda, Social representation in the age of singularities: narrative responses to France's contemporary crisis of representation, Studia Romanica 246 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2025), 380 pp.

As Annie Ernaux wrote in her diary (Regarde les lumières mon amourIn her 2014 novel, "The French Revolution," about her observations in a Parisian suburban supermarket, Ernaux chooses a place that literature generally dismisses as unworthy of literary treatment: the checkout line, the shelves of special offers, the silent bodies of cashiers and customers. This contains a polemical impulse: Ernaux makes visible what has remained invisible because it is taken for granted, because it is commonplace and popular. Éric Vuillard proceeds similarly in his narrative about the French Revolution (July 14(2016), when he brings the artisans, washerwomen, and small traders of the revolutionary days, whose names are barely recorded, out of the silence of historiography—only to show that their presence in the sources had always been a sham presence, a filling of the picture with anonymous masses, not with individual subjects. And when Pierre Rosanvallon, in 2014, with the collective narrative project Raconter la vie When he calls on citizens to collaborate with writers, sociologists, and journalists to create the "true novel of today's society," he is responding to a finding he has been emphatically making for years: that the country does not feel represented, that political, scientific, and media discourses paint a picture of French society characterized by a deeply felt gap between those who represent and those who are represented.

These three moments – the supermarket as ethnology, the people as a historiographical phantom, democracy as a narrative project – encapsulate a problem that Robert Lukenda's 2025 habilitation thesis, published by Winter University Press, explores: How, and with which narrative, aesthetic, and epistemic means, is social reality represented in contemporary French literature? And what answers does literature offer to the "crisis of representation" that has preoccupied France for decades, repeatedly manifesting itself in the Yellow Vest protests of 2018/19, the banlieue riots of 2005 and 2023, the continued strength of the Rassemblement National, but also in a diffuse feeling of the illegibility of the social?

The book was submitted in 2024 as a habilitation thesis at the Department of Modern Philologies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and published in 2025 in the renowned series Studia Romanica Published, this work pursues a broad programmatic goal: it combines perspectives from political science, sociology, and literary studies to map contemporary French “crisis discourse” in its various fields of representation and to determine the role of literature within it. The title deliberately references Andreas Reckwitz’s sociological diagnosis of a “society of singularities”—a late modernity in which the social logic of the general has been supplanted by that of the particular and unique—and places it in tension with the question of how society is represented. For a society that has dissolved into ever finer particularities and in which classical collective categories such as class, party, or union have lost their binding force also poses a representational problem for literature: how can unity be represented where the experience of fragmentation prevails?

The work is divided into two main parts. The first (Chapter 2) is dedicated to political, social scientific, sociological, and media discourses on representation, thus establishing the interdisciplinary framework; the second (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on the literary field in the narrower sense, on poetics, strategies, and concrete textual analyses. A concluding Chapter 5 summarizes the findings. The bibliography comprises over 600 titles; an index provides reliable access to individuals and concepts.

The author draws on a corpus that goes beyond canonical contemporary literature: In addition to literary texts by Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes, Didier Eribon and Éric Vuillard, he analyzes sociological hybrid studies such as Pierre Bourdieu's. La misère du monde and the collective collection Invisible France, the digital storytelling project Raconter la vie, TV series such as Vernon subutex and Gears as well as translations into German. This is methodologically ambitious, but it also demands a breadth from the book, which occasionally comes at the expense of analytical depth.

Chapter 1: A “Discontent in Democracy”

The extensive introduction (Chapter 1, approximately 25 pages) outlines the problem in a concise form. Lukenda takes as his starting point Rosanvallon's diagnosis that the country no longer feels represented. ¹, and unfolds the threefold structure of the crisis of representation: firstly, it is a political crisis (erosion of traditional parties and trade unions, rise of the Rassemblement national, increasing voter apathy); secondly, a socio-economic crisis (erosion of the middle classes, emergence of new popular classes, spatial polarization between the well-connected France métropolitaine and the marginalized France périphérique in the sense of Christophe Guilluy); and thirdly, an epistemic crisis (illegibility of the social world, crisis of the categories with which society is described and analyzed).

Lukenda pays particular attention to the semantics of the term "représentation," which in French can simultaneously mean political representation, depiction, conception, and aesthetic staging—a polysemy that is analytically disentangled in German by differentiating between representation, representation, conception, and depiction, but in doing so, loses the intuitive connections that French establishes "naturally." It is precisely this semantic density, Lukenda argues, that explains why in France the question of political representation is so easily and consistently linked to the question of aesthetic representation—and why writers like Rosanvallon see literature as having a duty to make an analytical and committed contribution to crisis management.

The introduction clearly articulates the research interest: to make visible those “close connections” between political, social-scientific, and literary debates on representation that have historically developed in France, and to show how contemporary literature responds to the illegibility of the social world—not only mimetically, but also in a way that creates meaning, fosters collective development, and sometimes even resists. The benefit of this introductory chapter is the coherent problem statement that provides cohesion to the heterogeneous analyses that follow.

Chapter 2: Social science, political and media representation discourses

The second chapter, at almost 130 pages, is the most extensive and also theoretically dense. It is divided into three main sections: a conceptual and theoretical history of "représentation" (2.1), a historical perspective on the problem of representation in France from the Revolution to the present (2.2), and an analysis of contemporary crisis symptoms and discourses (2.3).

Section 2.1 develops the concept of representation in cultural studies, social science, and philosophy. Starting from Foucault's epistemological diagnosis (in Words and thingsLukenda traces the poststructuralist deconstruction of the concept of representation—a deconstruction that, in the classical age, led to the perception of representational systems as adequate to reality before this certainty shattered at the end of the 18th century. He deliberately contrasts this deconstruction with more recent currents that—for example, in Bruno Latour's actor-network theory or in Rancière's political aesthetics—restore the analytical value of the concept by liberating it from its static nature and understanding it as a dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion. Lukenda's engagement with the concept of translation, following Latour, is particularly fruitful: representation is understood as a process of translation that always also produces transformation, distortion, and invisibility—an idea that is later applied to textual analyses, especially those concerning Ernaux's translation politics.

Section 2.2 lays out a concise yet instructive historical line from post-revolutionary France to the present day: Lukenda convincingly demonstrates, drawing on Rosanvallon's studies in the history of democracy and Claude Lefort's political theory, how the problem of representing a society of equal individuals after the end of the class system has manifested itself in France since the beginning of political modernity as a constitutive tension between the juridical-political unity of the people and the sociological reality of unequal individuals. Particularly illuminating is the analysis of how French republicanism, through the primacy of the "volonté générale," structurally hampered the political representation of particular interests—such as those of linguistic or cultural minorities, but also of the working class—and thus produced the ambivalence that continues to characterize the country today.

Section 2.3 addresses contemporary symptoms of crisis: the tension between the individual and the collective in late modernity (2.3.1), socio-geographical fragmentation (2.3.2 and 2.3.3), the media representation of the banlieue riots and the Yellow Vest movement (2.3.4), and the relationship between the crisis of representation and populism (2.3.5). The analyses of the "France périphérique" and the Yellow Vest movement—the high-visibility vest as a semiotic object simultaneously embodying professional affiliation, feelings of social decline, and the need for visibility—are among the most vivid passages in the book. The subsections on the media's portrayal of social conflicts demonstrate how banlieue riots and Yellow Vest protests in the mass media were dominated by a perspective that spectacularly highlights the conflict while systematically obscuring its structural causes. The result of the second chapter is a comparatively nuanced foundation that makes the literary analyses of the second part understandable only in their political dimension.

Chapter 3: Elements of a Poetics of Social Representation

Chapter 3 forms the theoretical core of the literary studies section. In three main sections, it examines class discourses in literature (3.1), epistemological and aesthetic strategies of contemporary social representation (3.2), and the relationship between literature and TV series in France (3.3).

Section 3.1 examines the literary representation of the "classes populaires" and situates contemporary literature within a historical-aesthetic discourse informed by Rancière's concept of the "aesthetic regime" and Auerbach's notion of mimesis, as well as by Nelly Wolf's studies of democracy in the French novel. Lukenda's analysis of the "transfuges de classe"—those authors like Eribon, Louis, or Ernaux who are social climbers and write from this marginal position—is particularly insightful as central figures representing the "classes populaires" in contemporary literature. He demonstrates how these authors perform a twofold gesture: they make their social milieu visible, but in doing so, they also generate a new kind of invisibility by inevitably speaking from the perspective of upward mobility, from the outsider's point of view. Lukenda discusses the question of whether one can depict “simple circumstances” in literature without exoticizing or victimizing them, with a view to the historical debate between realism and “misérabilisme” as well as to Ernaux’s “aesthetics of equality” – the decision to portray the father in La Place not to portray them as pitiable, but as sovereign subjects who dignifiedly take their place in an unjust world.

Section 3.2 examines the “documentary tour” in contemporary literature: the resurgence of documentary, journalistic, and sociological writing styles. Lukenda analyzes “new dispositifs of social investigation” beyond canonical literature—investigative hybrid projects such as Invisible France, the magazine XXI, forms of “littérature de terrain” – and shows how literature, sociology, and journalism in contemporary France merge in a field that belongs clearly to neither one nor the other. Particular attention is paid to the panorama principle as a historically rooted form of social representation: from the Physiologies of the early 19th century about Balzac's Comedie humaine up to contemporary series formats. The observation that the rediscovery of panoramic and collective narrative forms is a symptom of the need for legibility in a fragmented social world is made plausible by numerous examples.

Section 3.3 turns to the relationship between literature and TV series. Lukenda shows that the principle of seriality has developed into a cultural paradigm that also shapes literature: Despentes' Vernon subutexThe trilogy is not coincidentally conceived as a series – its broad social perspective and its shifts between social milieus are reminiscent of contemporary quality TV series. Based on the adaptation of Vernon subutex as a Canal+ series and based on the crime series Gears Lukenda analyzes the transformations that occur when literary material is transferred to serial media and the consequences this has for the representation of social marginality. The thesis that TV series partially displaces literature in its function as a direct medium for contemporary history writing, while simultaneously providing new aesthetic impulses, is convincing, but not new.

Chapter 4: Texts and Projects

The fourth chapter is analytically concrete and methodologically heterogeneous. It is divided into four studies: on Vuillard's July 14 (4.1), regarding the project mentioned above Raconter la vie (4.2), to Ernaux' Regarde les lumières mon amour (4.3) and on the translation policy of Ernaux texts in German-speaking countries (4.4).

In his analysis of Vuillard (4.1), Lukenda demonstrates how the text, in its documentary fictionalization of the storming of the Bastille, not only reconstructs an image of the revolution but also exposes the mechanisms of historiographical invisibility: The nameless artisans, small traders, and washerwomen who carried out the storming of the Bastille always appear in the sources—even in Michelet's seemingly populist historiography—as an anonymous mass, never as individual subjects with names and histories. Vuillard's method of fictitiously giving them names and reconstructing their individual fates is not a naive illusion of completeness but a reflexive marking of the historiographical deficit. At the same time, Lukenda reads the text as a mirror of a contemporary protest culture: The cast of characters of ordinary people who stormed the Bastille is explicitly contextualized with the France périphérique of the Yellow Vests.

The analysis of Raconter la vie (4.2) is extensive and theoretically rich. Lukenda precisely reconstructs Rosanvallon's project: It was intended to produce a "true novel of society"—not as a fictional construct, but as a collective narrative project in which citizens, together with writers, sociologists, and journalists, wrote life stories. From 2014 to 2017, 26 volumes were published in the book series by Seuil, and around 800 contributions appeared online. Lukenda analyzes the program of "narrative democracy" (Rosanvallon), the connection between sociological knowledge formation and democratic participation, while simultaneously revealing the project's internal contradictions: The necessity of pooling Rosanvallon's symbolic capital in order to generate visibility at all reproduces the very structure of inequality that the project aimed to counteract. The analysis of Ernaux's contribution Regarde les lumières mon amour As part of the book series, it concretely illustrates how the program is realized in texts: The supermarket as a paradigmatic place of shared desires and socio-cultural inequalities is explored ethnographically by Ernaux – as a space in which the collective everyday life of the “classes populaires” takes place and which has therefore been neglected in literature.

The study on translation policy (4.4) is methodologically innovative and opens the book up to translation studies. Lukenda shows how Ernaux was initially received in German-speaking countries as the author of an erotic-autobiographical narrative – her text Passion simple It was released in 1992 as A perfect passion: the story of an erotic fascination at Fischer Verlag – before she was rediscovered as a classic of critical class literature following the boom in autosocio-biographical translations by Eribon and Louis. The textual comparison between the French original and the German translation illustrates how translation decisions constitute the context of reception and how a translator can turn a literary pioneer into a latecomer. This is a genuine finding with a certain irony.

Chapter 5: Concluding Remarks: Representation and Mediation

The concluding section, “Beyond Representation? Literature as Relation and Mediation,” summarizes the central findings and draws a final conceptual arc. Lukenda proposes supplementing or partially replacing the concept of representation with that of mediation: contemporary literature is no longer primarily a stand-in that makes the absent visible, thereby necessarily reinforcing its invisibility, but rather a medium that establishes relations—between fiction and reality, between the individual and the collective, between social diversity and political unity. This reformulation is theoretically stimulating but remains somewhat abstract in its elaboration. The outlook identifies a desideratum for future research: the question not only of the origin of fiction in reality, but of the origin of reality in fiction—a topic that is indeed becoming more urgent in light of the increasing constitution of reality through media and social networks.

Thoughts afterwards

The structural absence of elites

Lukenda's analytical focus lies almost exclusively on the "populist classes" and their invisibility, not on those who render them invisible. The most striking finding is therefore a negative one: in most of the texts Lukenda discusses, the elites do not appear as protagonists, but rather as a structuring void. In Ernaux's work, they are the implicit yardstick by which the father's world of origin is measured and deemed inadequate – in La Place The elites appear as those whose speech, housing, and food constitute the unspoken norm, against which the father represents a deficiency. The violence lies not in an explicit class conflict, but in the internalization of this norm by the characters themselves. Eribon describes this in Return to Reims as symbolic domination in the Bourdieuian sense: The working class of his origin has adopted the conviction that their world, their language, their taste are less valuable – without direct coercion, through mere structural effects.

With Vuillard, it's different and more interesting from a literary perspective. July 14 The elites of the Ancien Régime appear as those who erase the people from history—not through active oppression, but through the logic of tradition, which reserves names and biographies only for dignitaries. The aristocrats and courtiers are present in Vuillard's text, but they are ironically deconstructed: In L'ordre du jourLukenda only mentions in passing that the German industrialists who came to terms with Hitler in 1933 appear as an elite that systematically denies its agency—that portrays itself as driven by events when it was actually the actors. This is Vuillard's real theme: not the malevolence of the elites, but their narratives of self-exoneration.

In Virginie Despentes' Vernon subutexIn the most comprehensive social panorama in the corpus, the elites are explicitly present—and this is analytically revealing. The novel's well-to-do characters are not morally more corrupt than others, but they live in a bubble of reality that is structurally shielded from the precariousness of the rest of society. What Lukenda highlights in the TV series adaptation also applies to the novel: the camera—or the narrative perspective—is a bourgeois art form that views the proletarian milieu from the outside. Despentes, herself a woman who rose from humble beginnings, is aware of this tension and incorporates it into the text as a problem for reflection. The question "une vision du prolétariat par la bourgeoisie?"—which Lukenda quotes as a chapter heading—is not a rhetorical one, but a genuine aporia: Who speaks about whom, for whom, and with what right?

In Eribon's work, there is a shift that Lukenda observes but does not systematically analyze. The elite against which Eribon's text is directed is primarily the intellectual and academic left—that which once constructed the working class as a revolutionary subject and then, with the structural transformation of society, turned away from it without truly realizing it. This is an internal critique of the elite to which Eribon himself belongs: as a university professor, he writes about the world of his origins, from which he has fled. Here, the intellectual elite is not the external enemy, but rather his own second-order family of origin—the cultural space into which he has ascended, but which simultaneously produced blindness to his world of origin.

What Lukenda's book demonstrates overall, without explicitly stating it as a finding, is this: The literature he discusses lacks a fully developed image of elites because its analytical energy is directed toward the underbelly of society. This has a political logic—making the invisible visible is more urgent than analyzing those who are already overrepresented. But it also produces a narrative imbalance: Elites appear diffusely as a structure, a gaze, an absent norm, but rarely as acting, contradictory, and themselves trapped subjects. This is a productive objection that can be raised against the corpus: Literature that shows the underbelly without analyzing the upper echelons risks portraying the relationship between the two as natural or inevitable—instead of showing it for what it is: the result of decisions, interests, and historically sedimented power relations.

Literature as an answer to populism?

The most obvious answer is diagnostic: literature describes populism as a social phenomenon, analyzes its emotional foundations, and makes its actors and their lifeworlds visible. Didier Eribon does this, for example, in Return to Reims, when he explains why his family went from being communist to National Front voters – not as a moral condemnation, but as a sociological reconstruction. Similarly, Nicolas Mathieu in Their children after themThe novel shows how the deindustrialization of Lorraine in the 1990s lays the foundation for later resentments, without the word populism ever being mentioned.

Another answer is narrative competition: literature offers alternative narratives of community that counteract the populist us-versus-them mentality. Rosanvallon's Raconter la vie Lukenda's book serves as a programmatic example – an attempt to portray social reality in a more pluralistic, contradictory, and less generalizable way than populist discourses do. The problem Lukenda highlights is the inherent paradox of this project: it aims to make the invisible visible, yet it employs the symbolic capitalist logic of the literary establishment, which structurally excludes the invisible.

Conversely, are there populist strategies in literature? At least three levels can be distinguished here. First, the level of content and attitudes: Some literature operates with populist figures—the authentic people against the corrupt elite, the lost homeland, the healthy national sentiment. This is not necessarily right-wing: Even parts of politically engaged literature on the left construct a noble "peuple" against a contemptible elite, without seriously questioning the heterogeneity of the former or the legitimacy of the latter. Chantal Mouffe would call this left-wing populism and defend it as necessary; Rancière, on the other hand, would object that the people are not a sociological given, but must constantly be reconstructed—and that literary constructions of the people that pretend to merely depict them actually reproduce the populist illusion.

Secondly, there is the level of form: Populism favors immediacy, authenticity, the seemingly unadulterated voice. This is precisely what characterizes the boom in autosociobiographical writing—Eribon, Louis, Ernaux. The texts claim to speak directly from experience, without literary mediation. This is rhetorically highly effective and morally well-founded; but it is also a construct that conceals its own artificiality. Lukenda touches upon this problem in connection with Bourdieu's "biographic illusion," without fully exploring it. The question of whether autosociobiography is a literary form of populism—or at least plays with populist promises of authenticity—has not yet been truly addressed in literary theory.

Thirdly, there's the market level: Literature that makes the invisible visible has been a bestseller since the 2010s. This creates incentives for the production of texts that cater to certain signals of authenticity—the right origin story, the right milieu, the right anger. Édouard Louis sensed this: In interviews, he speaks of being expected to embody a figuration of poverty that the literary establishment needs. Frédéric Beigbeder smugly called him the "PDG of the victim company"—a right-wing polemic, but one that touches on a structural point: the market rewards certain popular-appealing gestures.

The relationship between literature and populism is so productive because both respond to the same problem: the feeling that something is wrong with society's official self-description, that certain realities are not represented. Populism resolves this through simplification—the true people versus the false elite. Literature, in its most reflective forms, resolves it through complication: it shows that the people are not a coherent actor, that the elite are not a homogeneous class, that the conditions are more contradictory than any narrative can capture. But in its most marketable form, it approaches the populist pattern—and this is the blind spot that Lukenda's book reveals without fully illuminating it.

The absence of politics

Similar to the elites, it is immediately noticeable that politicians hardly appear as active figures in the texts under discussion. This is quite deliberate: the autosocio-biographies of Ernaux, Eribon, and Louis are not interested in politics as a sphere of decision-making, but rather in its effects on bodies, homes, and the voicelessness of the working classes. In these texts, politics appears as something that happens to the characters, not something they shape. This is most evident in Eribon's work: the political events of postwar history—de Gaulle's return, May '68, Mitterrand's rise, the end of communism—are background noise that barely alters the social situation of the working-class family. This is itself a political thesis: that the parliamentary system structurally fails to address the lived realities of the working classes.

Lukenda mentions Macron's 2017 election several times as a political symptom, but does not analyze it from a literary perspective. It would have been interesting to note that Macron's rise—without a party, with the promise to overcome the left-right divide—is implicitly present in several of the texts discussed, without being explicitly named. Despentes' Vernon subutex Published shortly before Macron's election, the novel anticipates a society in which traditional political coordinates have collapsed without anything new taking their place. The characters navigate a political vacuum that, while emotionally charged—with diffuse anger, nostalgia, and resentment—lacks any institutional form. This is the literary equivalent of what is sociologically described as the conditions that give rise to populism.

Vuillard's reference to the political present is more direct, but encrypted: July 14 Published in 2016, shortly before the Yellow Vest protests, Lukenda explicitly reads the text as a reflection of a contemporary protest culture. The key point is that, in Vuillard's work, the revolutionary people have no political representative and need none – they act independently, spontaneously, collectively, without a leader. This is an implicit critique of representative democracy, which Lukenda identifies but does not further contextualize politically.

France's image: a country in structural self-failure.

What emerges from the sum of the texts discussed is an image of France that could be described as a structural self-failure: a country whose self-presentation—republican equality, cultural grandeur, political representation of all—persistently and systematically deviates from its social reality. This is not the image of a failed state, but one that does not fulfill its own promises and conceals this discrepancy with considerable rhetorical effort.

Lukenda quotes Ernst Robert Curtius's famous 1930 formulation that literature in France fulfills the function elsewhere distributed among philosophy, science, music, and poetry—it is the representative expression of the nation. This is the self-image. The literature Lukenda analyzes works precisely against this claim to representation: it shows a France that does not recognize itself in the mirror of official culture.

Specifically, this creates a multi-layered picture. First, there is the geographically divided France: Guilluy's "France périphérique" is not an analytical concept that Lukenda merely refers to, but rather it implicitly underpins most of the texts – the Lorraine of Mathieu and Eribon, the Normandy of Ernaux, the suburbs in Despentes, the rural regions that are in Raconter la vie To gain a voice. The metropolis of Paris rarely appears in these texts as a center of national unity, more often as a symbol of a world that does not perceive the rest of the country.

Secondly, there is socially stagnant France: Contrary to the republic's self-image as an upwardly mobile society in which education is the decisive instrument of emancipation, Eribon, Ernaux, and Louis consistently demonstrate how the grande école, the gymnasium, the universe of high culture, functions as a selection mechanism that reproduces rather than transcends social origin. The school, which is supposed to fulfill the republican promise, appears in these texts as a place of shaming and social sorting.

Thirdly, there is France, which is controversial in terms of its politics of memory: Vuillard's July 14 It invokes the founding narrative of the Republic – the Revolution, the people, the Bastille – only to demonstrate that the people have been structurally rendered invisible within this narrative. This is an attack on national memory, one that carries significant political weight in France, where the Revolution serves as the source of legitimacy for the Republic.

What these texts—and Lukenda's analysis—notably omit is the institutional dimension: How do the institutions meant to embody the Republic's aspirations—schools, the welfare state, the judiciary, the army—actually function? In the texts under discussion, they appear almost exclusively as machines of disappointment, never as ambivalent, contradictory structures within which emancipation is also possible. This creates an image of France that is consistently more bleak than reality likely is—and which, in turn, obeys an ideological logic: that of writing from the position of the loser, the one opposed by the structure.

This is not a criticism of the texts themselves, but rather an indication of their perspective, something a critical review should actually demand. Lukenda touches on this only peripherally when he Raconter la vie The study cites as a counterexample – a project that, despite all its ambivalences, demonstrates that the country also holds together. But this objection remains marginal compared to the dominant picture painted by the study: France as a country whose self-narrative and self-perception are chronically at odds.

Overall assessment: Fictionalization of reality

What has Lukenda shown? First, that contemporary French literature exists within the context of a comprehensive crisis of representation, one with political, social, and epistemic dimensions, and historically shaped by structural features of the French Republic—the primacy of the "volonté générale," an ambivalent relationship to particular interests, and the prominent position of literature in the national self-understanding. Second, that contemporary literature responds to this crisis with a broad repertoire of narrative, aesthetic, and media strategies, ranging from autosociobiographical introspection (Ernaux, Eribon) and documentary historiography (Vuillard) to collective narrative practice (Raconter la vie) and the TV series. Thirdly, these reactions refer to a historically rooted tradition – to 19th-century realism, the social function of literature in post-revolutionary society, the tradition of literary engagement – ​​which is currently less continued than re-appropriated and critically examined.

The strengths of the work lie in the interdisciplinary breadth and conceptual precision of the problem statement, in the historical depth of the framing, and in the convincing analysis of Vuillard's July 14 and in the innovative study on Ernaux's translation politics. Lukenda is one of the Romance studies scholars who consistently pursues the debate on representation in its entirety—from political science and sociology to translation studies—and productively applies it to literary analysis. The book thus fills a genuine research gap, one that the author himself identifies: the neglect of contemporary social class issues in literary studies.

The weaknesses include: The breadth of topics sometimes leads to individual threads only being sketched out where a more in-depth analysis would be desirable. The TV series analyses, especially regarding Gears and Vernon subutexThe second main section (chapters 3 and 4) remains comparatively superficial. Methodologically, it is less consistent than the first: the category of "poetics of social representation" is introduced, but not systematically applied to all the texts discussed. The concluding remarks formulate the final synthesis (literature as relation and mediation) too concisely to convey the conceptual weight the author attributes to it. Furthermore, it is striking that the book—despite its emphasis on interdisciplinarity—virtually ignores Francophone literatures outside of France; colonial past and postcolonial contemporary literature are identified as desideratums, but not integrated.

Finally, the design of the corpus deserves a methodological question mark: the juxtaposition of canonical texts (Ernaux, Eribon, Vuillard) and marginal or institutionally non-canonical projects (Raconter la vie(Life stories on websites) is a deliberate programmatic approach, but is not always analyzed with the same rigor. The digital texts on the Raconter la vieWebsites that are no longer accessible pose a source-related problem, which Lukenda mentions but does not reflect on further.

Lukenda's study appears at a time when the constellation she describes—crisis of representation, rise of populist movements, invisibility of the "working classes," literature's search for new social alliances—has intensified. The protests against the 2023 pension reform, the 2024 parliamentary elections with the renewed rise of the Rassemblement National, and the increasing fictionalization of politics in series such as... Fever (2024) – all this shows that the dynamics analyzed by Lukenda are by no means complete. His book provides the conceptual tools to contextualize these developments.

For Romance studies and European literary studies as a whole, the significance of this work lies in its interdisciplinary model: it demonstrates that literary analysis gains explanatory power when it treats political, social, and media contexts not merely as background, but as constitutive fields in which literary meaning is created and negotiated. Open fields of research emerge particularly in the area of ​​Francophone literatures, which frame the problem of representation within a postcolonial context, as well as in the area of ​​digital literary forms, which, after the end of Raconter la vie live on in other formats. Last but not least, the question raised by Lukenda at the end regarding the "fictionalization of reality"—the origin of political reality in media fictions—remains an urgent program for a culturally sensitive Romance studies discipline.

1. “Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté”>>>