Writing Up Close and From a Distance: French and North-American Representations of Belleville (Paris) in Contemporary <i>Roman Noir</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Parisian quartier of Belleville is considered the ideal setting for roman noir. Post-1968 French néo-polar writers proffer a critical view of contemporary French society with its social inequality, racism, corporate and political corruption, unemployment and its consequences. This paper presents a transatlantic view of contemporary Belleville seen through the eyes of French author and journalist Serge Quadruppani, Canadian artist and author Blaise Giuliani, and American crime fiction writer Cara Black. How do these representations of Belleville differ from one side of the Atlantic to the other? From where do these differences stem? What is the relationship between fact and fiction in each of these portrayals? Does the authors’ readership affect the way Belleville is depicted? In attempting to answer these questions, this article contributes to discussions about place and setting in the roman noir/néo-polar, contemporary Belleville, and its reputation in and outside of France.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".