Several French novelists have attempted in recent years to portray inner-city youths’ habits and forms of socialization. This study focuses on the representations of inner-city space in Patrick Goujon’s novel Moi non, a novel that epitomizes the desire to give symbolic value to the lives of inner-city youths. The novel presents itself as a critical reassessment of the stereotypes usually associated with inner cities. However, Moi non proposes an ambiguous reading of the forms both of social mobility offered inner-city youths and of their socialization. Without condemning them beforehand, Goujon shows they tend to reproduce the pattern traced by the doxa.
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