Lefebvre’s Spatial Philosophy and Representation in American-Jewish Bildungsroman

Abstract

Lefebvre’s triadic process consists of the relationship between “spatial practice”, “representations of space”, and “representational spaces”. This spatial triad as a unity describes how space is produced within society. Interestingly, Lefebvre’s space is closely related to the process of Jewish youth’s growing up when we put Lefebvre’s triad into American-Jewish Bildungsroman, in which spatial practice is related to the repetitive routines of everyday places and private life, and it is, in a large sense, an abstract process linking to the complicated relationships of ethnicity, gender, class, etc., while representations of space are the “real” lived space and representational spaces are a metaphorical and symbolic one, which is similar to Foucault’s space of power, under the function of which the Jewish protagonist goes gradually and paradoxically into the subject.