The Street as Chronotope: Palimpsestic Memory in Hédi Kaddour’s ‘Rue de Tournon
Document Type
Presentation
Location
Magnolia Room, LSU Student Union / Zoom
Start Date
6-3-2026 11:50 AM
End Date
6-3-2026 12:10 PM
Abstract
Abstract
Hédi Kaddour’s poem “Rue de Tournon” collapses multiple temporal layers from the 1930s exile of Joseph Roth, a 1990s moment of personal remembrance, and the perspective of a contemporary reader onto the single, static location of a Left Bank Parisian street. This study investigates how the poem performs this temporal compression, asking: How does Kaddour’s “Rue de Tournon” transform a street-sign from a fixed marker of space into a dynamic conduit for layered time? Moving beyond linguistic formalism, this investigation traces the poem’s literary architecture. It analyses how the juxtaposition of historical vignettes and personal reflection creates a palimpsestic narrative, where past and present coexist and bleed into one another on the same urban stage. The figure of Joseph Roth becomes a ghostly flâneur, his exile forever inscribed in the modern city’s fabric. The work argues that Kaddour achieves this not through digital means, but through the lyric’s inherent capacity to re-enchant public space, turning a simple toponym into a resonant time-machine.
Utilizing a chronotopic framework based on Bakhtin’s theory of time-space configurations, this study integrates theories of urban memory and palimpsest from cultural geography to analyze the interplay of literary allusion and spatial deixis in Roth’s poetry. Through close reading and intertextual analysis, the research highlights how poetic form, including syntactic rhythms and enjambments, transforms the street into a site of mnemonic convergence, intertwining memory, history, and lyric subjectivity. Ultimately, this offers an immediately exportable model for pedagogy, showing how literature can actively fuse civic awareness, geographical literacy, and historical imagination in an age of ecological and technological displacement.
Keywords: Kaddour, toponymy, palimpsest, urban memory, French lyric, spatial humanities, chronotope, literary architecture.
The Street as Chronotope: Palimpsestic Memory in Hédi Kaddour’s ‘Rue de Tournon
Magnolia Room, LSU Student Union / Zoom
Abstract
Hédi Kaddour’s poem “Rue de Tournon” collapses multiple temporal layers from the 1930s exile of Joseph Roth, a 1990s moment of personal remembrance, and the perspective of a contemporary reader onto the single, static location of a Left Bank Parisian street. This study investigates how the poem performs this temporal compression, asking: How does Kaddour’s “Rue de Tournon” transform a street-sign from a fixed marker of space into a dynamic conduit for layered time? Moving beyond linguistic formalism, this investigation traces the poem’s literary architecture. It analyses how the juxtaposition of historical vignettes and personal reflection creates a palimpsestic narrative, where past and present coexist and bleed into one another on the same urban stage. The figure of Joseph Roth becomes a ghostly flâneur, his exile forever inscribed in the modern city’s fabric. The work argues that Kaddour achieves this not through digital means, but through the lyric’s inherent capacity to re-enchant public space, turning a simple toponym into a resonant time-machine.
Utilizing a chronotopic framework based on Bakhtin’s theory of time-space configurations, this study integrates theories of urban memory and palimpsest from cultural geography to analyze the interplay of literary allusion and spatial deixis in Roth’s poetry. Through close reading and intertextual analysis, the research highlights how poetic form, including syntactic rhythms and enjambments, transforms the street into a site of mnemonic convergence, intertwining memory, history, and lyric subjectivity. Ultimately, this offers an immediately exportable model for pedagogy, showing how literature can actively fuse civic awareness, geographical literacy, and historical imagination in an age of ecological and technological displacement.
Keywords: Kaddour, toponymy, palimpsest, urban memory, French lyric, spatial humanities, chronotope, literary architecture.
Comments
My name is Omar Harem and I am a PhD candidate at Maghnia University Centre enrolling for English Literature and civilization Studies, where my research focuses on comparative modernisms, postcolonial literature, and the intersections of form and decolonization. This doctoral project examines narrative innovation in 20th-century Irish and North African literature, with a focus on James Joyce and Kateb Yacine. They have presented on modernism and postcolonial theory within the MENA Seminar module at Tlemcen University and their work is informed by interdisciplinary approaches to global literary modernities. Omar Harem, Maghnia University Centre, Algeria