Browsing by Subject "France"

This dissertation examines a corpus of 486 satirical images of artistic life in Paris. The Parisian art-world was regularly the subject of a form of satirical criticism conducted in visual media. More significantly, this satirical criticism was produced in the medium of print, and in its reproducibility, could broadcast its satire to large audiences. By doing so in the amusing and subversive tone of satire, it constituted a visual counterpart to art criticism. I examine what these images reveal to us collectively over time as they overlap with representations of the art world disseminated in other equally understudied popular media, namely popular theater (vaudeville and opéra comique) and panoramic fiction (physiologies, short fiction, and so on).

This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.

This dissertation, For God and King: Jesuit Ephemeral Spectacles in France Under the First Bourbons, examines the contributions of the French Jesuits to the production, staging, and commemoration of festivals in the Assistancy of France. Members of the Society of Jesus produced the spectacles in this study and were the authors of the festival books that commemorated the events for posterity. Beginning with the nuptial entry of Maria de’ Medici into Avignon in 1600, and ending with the death of Louis XIII in 1643, the festivals analyzed were instrumental for cultivating the relationship between the Society and the Bourbon monarchy at a time when both entities were experiencing a rise in power and influence before arriving at an apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century. Crucially, this dissertation interrogates the use of ephemeral architecture and other apparatuses as a means of manipulating and transforming existing architectural spaces in order to construct new spaces that were agents in the transmission of the multi-layered messages on display in the festival’s iconographic programs.

Scholarship on the early modern Jesuits, Jesuit theater, and early modern festivals is extensive. The concentration of the literature on the Jesuits in Italy, Germany, and their missions outside the European continent belies the importance of the kingdom of France to the history of the Society and misrepresents the importance of the Jesuits to France and the Bourbon monarchy. The emphasis on Jesuit theater outside of France, or on French Jesuit theater under Louis XIV, disregards the important role played by Jesuit theater and ephemeral spectacles in promoting Jesuit colleges and reinforcing the Society’s standing in the kingdom in the early part of the century. Similarly, the perceptible trend in festival scholarship to eschew the early seventeenth-century, and the reign of Louis XIII specifically, discounts the function of festivals in asserting Louis XIII’s power and in cultivating an environment in which the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV could take root. A significant portion of festival scholarship present studies that either: a) analyze only part of the festival; or, b) fail to consider the implications of the sites and the architectural history of the built environment occupied by the festival.

Adopting a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the study and interrogation of early modern festivals and ephemeral spectacles that is reflective of the multifaceted, multimedia nature of the subject, this dissertation analyzes early modern festivals as complete, multimedia works of art using a combination of site-specific, textual, and visual analyses. It examines the Jesuit contributions to these festivals and redirects the attention of Jesuit and festival studies to the first half of the seventeenth-century in France.

How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

This dissertation seeks to reevaluate French repertoire for the organ in the broader context of French music and society in the years between the two world wars. I argue that leading composers for the instrument were not cloistered between the musically conservative walls of the church but were rather fully engaged in cultural and musical shifts occurring across the Parisian musical scene. By analyzing music of Louis Vierne, Jehan Alain, and Olivier Messiaen, I address different ways in which these composers wrote for the organ in the early twentieth century as well as ways in which these composers engaged the world around them. Louis Vierne – older than Alain and Messiaen by forty years – represents an older generation rooted in late nineteenth- century romanticism. The way in which he composed for the organ was not only influenced by composers around him but also in the links to French musical heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alain and Messiaen – born three years apart – were colleagues who shared similar interests and were inspired by influences beyond the borders of the church and the state. For these composers, the organ was not an instrument tethered to conservative styles of composition but rather one that was fully able to engage with contemporary musical styles and absorb outside influence just as much as music of other genres and for other instruments.

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.

This dissertation examines the “memory economy” of church reform from the late ninth through thirteenth centuries. It argues that monastic communities and aristocratic households of the period used the human body as a touchstone for the discussion of memory as a key stake in the social and political life of the high middle ages. The argument centers around several key sites of analysis: excommunication, burial, bodily wounding and mutilation, and liturgical cursing. Centering the analysis on these sites of cultural activity allows close readings of the complex dialectic which develops around memory. Using memory as the central focus of the study allows insight into the ways in which the semi-literate communities of the secular nobility participated in and drove the course of church reform, rather than functioning as mere sources of converts or sources of gifts. Doing so allows an intervention that shits the field of medieval memory studies away from manuscripts and narratives, and towards a methodology that puts activity and social practice at center stage.

This dissertation posits that Nouvelle Cuisine brings together two of the most powerful cultural forces involved in constituting French national identity: food and revolution. As a result of this privileged position, Nouvelle Cuisine offers scholars a particularly rich object of study that can be related to larger issues at play in the formation and performance of national identity. In this work, I will argue that the revolutionary rhetoric used in the articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine serves several distinct and, at times, oppositional purposes. On the one hand, the revolutionary rhetoric is intended to create a break with a tumultuous and painful past, while asserting a new paradigm of national strength. On the other hand, however, the revolutionary rhetoric of equality and freedom also somewhat paradoxically participates in and supports the dark side of democracy, which includes but is not limited to behind-the-scenes jockeying for power and the elimination of groups that threaten or curtail either the power at the top or the legitimacy of the revolution itself.

This work will also argue that because of the very malleability of the revolutionary rhetoric and because French cuisine is considered such an important expression of the French nation, Nouvelle Cuisine and the contemporaneous culinary discourse transforms France's fine dining domain into a sort of theatre where national attitudes are not only represented to a socially diverse French public, but where the public itself is invited to participate in this performance of the nation: rehearsing, refining, and rejecting what it means to be French and, as a result, projecting both aspirations and anxieties of nationhood through this culinary landscape.

In writing this dissertation, I have drawn heavily on my training in literary studies, but have tried as much as possible to allow the subject matter to dictate an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach. I engage frequently with a wide variety of scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Roland Barthes, Michel Winock, Jean-Robert Pitte, Claude Fischler, and Stephen Mennell. Consequently, my argument places the classic literary tools of linguistic and semiotic methods alongside investigations that call on cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political philosophy, and of course food studies. I use cookbooks, guidebooks, newspapers, magazines, menus, interviews, and multiple editions of the Larousse Gastronomique to provide first and foremost the context but also the evidence for this dissertation. I concentrate the bulk of my critical energies on the food and leisure magazine Le Nouveau Guide (founded by food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau) and the cookbook series entitled "Les Recettes Originales de...", paying particular attention to Nouvelle Cuisine foundational chefs Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard.

The narrative of Nouvelle Cuisine is equivocal, but it does not defy conclusions. My final analysis in this dissertation is that in the production and articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine, we see how food and revolution are used to reorganize the hierarchies and composition of a society. We see a reorganization that restores bourgeois, patriarchal values and clings to a hexagonal interpretation of France that prioritizes resistance over incorporation. We see a revolution that is perhaps less the French Revolution than the July Revolution. We see a revolution that is an alibi for restoration.

Filmmakers shared in the social and political struggles that took place globally around the year 1968, by registering the movements and forging new approaches to filmmaking. Focusing on the cases of France and Italy, this dissertation explores how different sonic strategies were deployed at the time in the staging of the emerging voices—feminist struggle, workers’ fight—and to counter dominant discourses, particularly those broadcast on official media. Political films in the seventies often relied on the promise of Eisensteinian montage to awaken spectators’ consciousness. Yet, those years were also marked by a distrust and a critique of the visual: Laura Mulvey definition of the “male gaze” or Guy Debord critique of the “society of spectacle” amongst others challenged the frameworks of representation. I argue that some directors turned to the soundtrack of their films to stake a position within the political debates of the time. For Deleuze, this moment coincided with the advent of cinema into a true audio-visual media: sound emancipated itself from images. I suggest that this new autonomy closely tracks the emancipation of the repressed voices from institutions’ discursive codings. Interlacing film and sound studies with history, “The Sound and the Flurry of 1970s French and Italian Cinema” focuses on works by Chantal Akerman, Claude Faraldo, Marco Ferreri, Elio Petri, and Ettore Scola in their contexts. Analyses of this corpus mobilize the concepts of asynchrony and polyphony as investigative tools into both the relationships between sounds themselves and the relationship between sound and image. The use of asynchrony—as theorized by Pudovkin—allows for a representation of the social conflicts as collective experience while still rendering the individual struggle. The polyphonic dimension of soundtracks enabled directors to stage the conflicts and challenges carried by these emerging voices. The simultaneous diffusion of multiple and dissonant sounds allowed movies at once to grasp and partake in 1970s political, aesthetic and social tensions.

What are the meanings of "here" and "there" in a digital age? This dissertation explores how blogs reveal new meanings of being "here" in a political space, how blogs reveal new meanings of being (or not being) "here" in a textually-mediated universe, and how blogs reveal new ways of being seen to be "here" when most internet users are just looking and log on and off without saying a word. Beginning with a reflection on the possibilities of democracy in a world where the interface is drawn to the forefront, I argue that the internet presents a new (and imperfect) way for citizens to operate the machinery of government. Next, I consider the consequences of this interface being available to people regardless of their geographic locations or national origins. I argue that citizenship in a digital moment is more closely bound to participation than it is to blood or territory and construct a notion of virtual transnational citizenship.

Such a notion of transnational citizenship does not signal the end of place and the irrelevance of presence and absence. Instead, it reveals that these concepts must be rethought and refigured. Bloggers flicker between absence and presence: in the blogosphere, every post may be a blogger's last, but there may just be another one waiting for us if we'll click reload. With this ambiguity in mind, I outline a digital ethics of reading that is attentive to both of these possibilities. Finally, I turn to the vast majority of blog users: the "lurkers" who read silently but do not write. I untangle reading, writing, and inscription in order to produce an understanding of how reading works in the blogosphere and argue that the lurker is not so much the reader who does not write as the reader who has not yet written.

By tracing the meanings of "here" and "there" through the blogosphere, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of what it means to be -politically and metaphysically -in the age of the internet.