Nineteenth-century Bourgeois Research Articles

Review: The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes, Photographs, Debates, edited by Idurre Alonso and Maristella Casciato

Review: <i>The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930: Cityscapes, Photographs, Debates</i>, edited by Idurre Alonso and Maristella Casciato

The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Nineteenth-century Jewish portrait albums

ABSTRACT The portrait albums of nineteenth-century bourgeois Jews, which reified their social world, provided a space in which women exerted their agency and forged new identities, in national and cosmopolitan environments, beyond the family.

De Béranger à Bruant. Chansons sur les gueux – chansons pour les gueux ?

The literary history of the ‘gueux’ in the nineteenth century, to which Victor Hugo contributedas well with his story Claude Gueux (1834), takes place mainly in the literary/musical genre of the ‘chanson’ and in feuilletonistic and sociological texts of the paupérisme-debate of the time. Béranger’s Les Gueux, emphasizing the intrinsic value and the autonomy of the social outsider in contrast to his criminalization which dominated the contemporary discussion, remains tinted with epicurean vision and is still too uncritical of the status quo to remain unchallenged in the course of its literary reception – ranging from Gustave Leroy and Jean-Baptiste Clément, who protested just as vigorously as Jules Vallès, to the ‘limonadier’ and disciple of Béranger, Jean-Louis Renaudot, Jehan Rictus, Jean Richepin’s Chanson des Gueux, and the commercialization of the topic of the outcast by Aristide Bruant’. Doubtless, these reactions to Les Gueux reflect the political-ideological debates of nineteenth century bourgeois society on the solution of the social question.

“M. Zola n’observe plus”: The Bourgeois Type in Zola’s Pot-Bouille

In this article, I analyze Zola’s often-understudied 1882 novel of the bourgeois apartment building, Pot-Bouille, to show how it stages the particular impossibility of accurately capturing the nineteenth-century bourgeois type and, more generally, a critique of naturalist method. Pot-Bouille exposes the hypocritical, even deceptive nature of the immeuble’s residents through scenes where the narrator is the only one able to observe their duplicitous behavior; simultaneously, it offers numerous instances of imperceptibility or events that cannot be documented or observed. Studying this work alongside Zola’s own preparatory notes and the novel’s critical reception, I suggest that in this urban novel of the interior, the theories of observation imagined by the naturalist author (and by the first sociological thinkers too) prove at once indispensable and impossible. Ultimately, I argue that in its attempt to expose the difficulties in reducing the bourgeois to a knowable or essential type, Pot-Bouille anticipates twenty-first century scholars such as Sarah Maza, Franco Moretti, and others who write about the porous, even mythical nature of the concept of the bourgeoisie.

La Modernidad política según Nietzsche: crítica de la cultura, esfera pública y antagonismo

Nos proponemos abordar el vínculo de Nietzsche con la modernidad política tomando como punto de partida su crítica del espacio público burgués en el contexto de la Alemania de Bismarck. La Kulturkritik nietzscheana apuntará así a recuperar una concepción nihilista del antagonismo en el plano estético e intelectual con implicancias radicalmente transformadoras en el plano de la vida social. Pese a su rechazo de la democracia y su cuestionamiento permanente de las ideologías modernas, en el pensamiento tardío de Nietzsche la politización y la temporalización propias de la experiencia política del Sattelzeit (Koselleck) constituirán elementos por igual influyentes tanto en su visión de la cultura como al nivel de su reflexión ontológica. Ellas aparecerán así fuertemente reflejadas en una concepción de la crítica y en su versión particular del “antagonismo cultural” (Geisterkrieg), dos preocupaciones específicamente dirigidas contra los efectos despolitizadores de la moral cristiana en el periodo decimonónico burgués.

Slavery, Sympathy, and White Self-Representation in Dutch Bourgeois Theater of 1800

Unlike the German, French, and particularly Anglo-American cases, the Dutch theatrical imaginings of colonialism, slavery, and race have been largely neglected by scholars of imperial culture. Looking at two early nineteenth-century bourgeois dramas, Stedman (1805) and Kraspoekol (1800), this article examines the complex nexus between slavery, sympathy, and the self-representation of the white middle class in the Netherlands of 1800. As a genre, bourgeois theater cultivated middle-class ideals of compassion, integrity, and benevolence in order to let spectators sympathize with poor, excluded or abused victims. This article explores the constellation of suffering slave characters in relation to the white bourgeois heroes in the plays and to their middle-class audiences. The central argument will be that bourgeois dramaturgy succeeded in conveying antislavery messages, yet primarily delineated and secured a superior white Dutch identity. Consequently, these dramas are considered as segments of the ‘Dutch cultural archive’, defined by Gloria Wekker as a large reservoir of memories, knowledge, and affects that has been crucial to the creation and continuation of white dominance in modern Dutch society.

Fannish Storytelling and Interpreting the Fairy-Tale Narrative

The Grimms' fairy-tale collection is widely acknowledged to have been updated by the brothers, forever influencing the conception of "fairy tale"; yet changes and adaptations have continued long after their final 1857 edition. Technological innovations have added to the ways these tales can be distributed and adapted—and, with the advent of the Internet, fan fiction has become a notable means of reinterpretation. Grimm fan-fiction adaptations in a German fandom often emphasize a feminist reimagining of the canon texts that served to demonstrate nineteenth-century bourgeois representations of appropriate social and gender relations. Fan texts highlight the mutability of the fairy tale and its adaptability across different forms of media.

The Berlin Room

This article traces the history of the Berlin Room—a characteristic feature of Berlin's nineteenth-century layouts of flats. The Berlin Room was a space that connected the street-facing salon rooms to the back bedrooms, utility areas and servants’ quarters in the side wing. It functioned as a spacious thoroughfare, rather than the vestibule it would originally have been, and became the room where the family gathered for meals. This room became common in the early nineteenth-century bourgeois flat, where it embodied the new domestic ideals of the bourgeoisie: namely, informal social interaction and tight-knit family bonds. As a wave of immigrants came to Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century, the city's urban fabric was transformed by the construction of tenement housing. A municipal building officer, Gustav Assmann, developed a series of plans to serve as guides for tenement design and, rather than developing a distinct dwelling type to suit Berlin's lower-middle and working classes, Assmann developed a pared-down version of the bourgeois flat. Within this new typology, the Berlin Room remained the nucleus but was recast as a vehicle for conservative social reform. This article considers the changing values of the Berlin Room as it moved from one dwelling typology to another. Believed to have been unaffected by the corruptive Parisian property development industry, conservatives viewed the Berlin Room, as it reappeared in the tenement, as the last vestige of pre-modern German family life.

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's &lt;em&gt;Madame Bovary&lt;/em&gt;

Some Stylistic Considerations of Free Indirect Discourse in Film Adaptations of Flaubert's Madame Bovary Colin Gardner (bio) Variously known as style indirect libre or erlebte Rede, free indirect discourse has always been of particular interest to both literary and film theorists because of its identification with the modernist innovations of Gustave Flaubert and the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel as well as the narrative properties of traditional Hollywood cinema. Gilles Deleuze, for example, ties it directly to his discussion of what he calls the "perception-image." In film, a perception has two poles, subjective and objective. Thus, "a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and in all their parts."1 However, it is important to note that the narrative film's scopic economy is not a simple binarism between subjective point of view and objective rendering on-screen (expressed most economically, for example, in shot-reverse-shot editing), but also behaves in accordance with a free indirect discourse that is able to express characters' inner states via the mise-en-scène, while the character is also present within the mise-en-scène. The free indirect discourse therefore suggests the possibility of expressing a first-person focalization (inside), while continuing to present the character in the third person (outside). This complication of the subjective-objective duality is acknowledged by Deleuze in his analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Cinema of Poetry"2 and its relation to the free indirect in Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Here, Deleuze argues that the perception-image is often able to override the intentionality of bodily motility (the vectorial space of Deleuze's "action-image") via a form of camera self-consciousness. "We are no longer faced with subjective or objective images," notes Deleuze; "we are caught in a correlation between a perception-image and a camera-consciousness which transforms it (the question of knowing whether the image was objective or subjective is no longer raised)."3 Deleuze calls this "a very [End Page 587] special kind of cinema" because it makes the presence of the camera both felt and palpable.4 In this way, the perception-image takes on the guise of a free indirect subjectivity as soon as it manifests itself through an autonomous camera-consciousness. Consequently, the free indirect allows us to get a clearer idea of how a pure perception-image—with its specific roots in bodily affect—might work when freed from the subjective baggage of suturing film language. Earmarked as a direct advance on, and contrast to, the all-seeing, God's-eye objectivist realist novels of Balzac and Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is often cited specifically as the prototypical text of this hybrid subjective / objective style, although Pasolini has traced a variation of its use as far back as Dante.5 Given this general hermeneutic regard for the free indirect as a historicizing, ideologically motivated textual practice, the paucity of discussion concerning its application to film is all the more surprising, especially given the import of Deleuze's analysis in both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. With that in mind, this essay thus posits the following questions: What is free indirect discourse? How does it work in the literary context of Flaubert in general and Madame Bovary in particular? Does it translate directly into cinematic terms? If so, how has this affected film adaptations of Madame Bovary, specifically those of Jean Renoir, Vincente Minnelli, and Claude Chabrol? If not, and this constitutes the crux of this essay's thesis, is there an indirect filmic substitute that can generate equivalent stylistic effects? The short answer to the last question is yes, and it lies, as we shall see, in film's ability to foreground the body's performative ability to express inner states as an outward form of affect or gest. First, let us clear some semantic ground and try to establish a terminological consensus via some specific definitions. In A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince defines "direct discourse...

Espacios desde objetos. Relaciones entre modos de vida y arquitectura a través de muebles

This article is a reflection on the relationship between space and the body of its inhabitants through furniture. It explores the ways in which the furniture arranged in space shows a social or family structure and a time. A review of housing projects is made, from the spatial structure in the nineteenth-century bourgeois house, through modern housing, and to sophisticated contemporary Japanese housing proposals. Using the concept of ‘structures of placement”, coined by Jean Baudrillard in his book The system of objects (2003), we propose here a look from which architecture is understood as incomplete without furniture, since it is precisely through furniture that the ways of life which occupy it are defined.

Godard in the Karoo: J. M. Coetzee’s Screenplay Adaptation of &lt;i&gt;In the Heart of the Country&lt;/i&gt;

In an important early study of the relationship between literature and film, Keith Cohen argues persuasively that the emergence of European modernist fiction in the early twentieth century does not stem solely from a disenchantment with the tired realism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel. It also drew on the stylistic inventiveness of an entirely new art form: cinema. A rapidly developing cinematic language in the early silent film era (Eisenstein, Bunuel, Griffith) fed a similar inventiveness in the novel, catalysing a dynamic handling of space and time, the radical shifting of point of view, and the reconstituted patterning (montage) of fragmented narration (Cohen108). Cohen's argument involves a close reading of key works by Proust, Joyce, Woolf and Stein, showing how these texts drew from the innovative representational techniques of the new medium of film. Literature and film fed off each other to create the aesthetic revolution that constituted the cultural modernity of the early twentieth century.

A Christmas Story with a Fairy-Tale Twist: Paul Arène's “The Gospel According to Saint Perrault”

Translator's IntroductionOne of the most recognizable names in the classical fairy-tale canon is that of Charles (1628-1703). In 1697 published Histoires ou contes du temps passe: Contes de ma mere l'oye, a collection of eight literary fairy tales based on folkloric and literary narratives.1 With this collection, consisting of La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le petit chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le petit poucet (Tom Thumb), Riquet a la houppe (Piquet with the Tuft), Le chat botte (Puss in Boots), and Les fees Fairies), became one of the masters of the fairy-tale genre at the end of the seventeenth century2 and, in popular consciousness, the unmistakable author of the immortal old wives' tales-tales that have withstood the test of time and continue to speak to us today.Perhaps the endurance of Perr auk's name and the transcendence of his stories encouraged Paul Arene (1843-1896) to honor his work by writing a piece with the title L'Evangile selon Saint Perrault (The Gospel According to Saint Perrault). L'Evangile selon Saint Perrault is a recast of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus focalized through a 4-year-old girl named Simonette, who conflates catechetical teachings with the tales of Perrault. In the opening line of this frame story, the little girl, who has lost her train of thought, decides to restart her narrative from the beginning, when baby Jesus, born in a crude stable, is placed in a straw-covered manger. Simonette's account unfolds in an intimate setting with characters that seem to reflect the daily life of a nineteenth-century bourgeois family. The seven characters of the story-Simonette, a nursemaid, a priest, Monsieur, Madame, a cat, and the narrator, whose identity is unknown-are gathered in a hearth-warmed room listening to the girl.3 It is unclear from the larger context of the telling, however, whether or not this is a nuclear family spending some quality time with its visitors. The narrator is the girl's primary listener, and his use of Madame and Monsieur to designate two of the characters leaves readers wondering whether there is a familial bond between them and the child.In her version of the Nativity, Simonette tells about three affluent men who, led by a star, find baby Jesus lying in a cold manger. Unlike the gospel of Matthew, the visitors are not wise men from the East but three marquises from Carabas; we recall from Puss in Boots that Marquis de Carabas was the name that the shrewd cat created for his master. Instead of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the distinguished foreigners bring gifts that include a pot of butter and a cake-items reminiscent of those that Little Red Riding Hood was about to deliver to her sick grandmother. Similar to the biblical account, the story mentions a nefarious ruler determined to murder baby Jesus as well as the escape of the Holy Family into Egypt. Here, however, the threat comes not from King Herod but from an ogre called Bluebeard. In an attempt toffee to safety, the family departs toward the land of the Nile but leaves behind an ailing grandmother who is unable to walk; it is the desire of baby Jesus to reunite with his grandma that brings him into contact with Prince Charming, the Fairies, and eventually the Wolf.The Gospel According to Saint Perrault along with other fairy taies4 appeared in Nouveaux Contes de Noel (New Christmas Stories), a tome of twenty-six brief stories from the series Collection des Auteurs Celebres (Collection of Famous Authors) published by the Parisian house Flammarion in 1890. Arene wrote several children's stories and fairy tales, which he published in various volumes; among them are Les Ogresses Ogresses, 1891) and La Chevre d'or GoldenFleeced Goat, 1889), one of his best-known works. Arene's writing career, however, started with articles and short stories that he contributed to newspapers and literary periodicals. …

Después de las utopías, la nostalgia. El siglo XIX y su recepción en el siglo XX

Este artículo propone una reflexión sobre la historiografía de la fotografía decimonónica como empezó a realizarse en el siglo XX. Aborda dos libros de Enrique Fernández Ledesma para analizar las formas de representación textual y visual de la experiencia burguesa en el siglo XIX, en particular la romántica. Resalta la importancia que tuvieron las construcciones de comportamientos de clase social y de género pensando en la complementariedad de la dupla tradición/modernidad como una tensión casi inescapable en la construcción de una modernidad nacional. Por ello se vinculan con los sueños utópicos y las remembranzas del pasado tanto virreinal como decimonónico. Es decir una nostalgia del pasado como actitud histórica, como una expresión más de lo paradójicas que fueron las energías que movieron la cultura después del renacimiento cultural de la posrevolución y de las formas de irse dando la modernidad en el país.

Counterculture, Capitalism, and the Constancy of Change

Drawing upon the thought of Timothy Leary, the purpose of this article is to examine the uncomfortable relationship between his conceptualisation of ‘counterculture’ as the perpetual generation of the new, and the processes of accumulation that drive post-industrial capitalism - the very system that this account of counterculture seeks to undermine. The argument, in short, is that the countercultural, as defined by Leary, plays an essential role in the accumulation of capital that drives our economic system, and accordingly, it cannot be plausibly understood as external to the structural conditions that it opposes. This is not to suggest that counterculture does not produce new possibilities, new opportunities, and new ways of living, but instead to illustrate the contradictions that might emerge when the notion of counterculture as resistance to capitalist hegemony is coupled with the identification of counterculture as an authentic repetition of the new.

For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism by Armine Kotin Mortimer

is Meltzer’s rendition of “Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant” (136). Most of her arguments are lucid, firmly articulated, and also persuasive. But a few do overreach. Surely, the end of the envoi in Edmond Rostand’s famous “Ballade du duel qu’en l’hôtel bourguignon / Monsieur de Bergerac eut avec un bélître” has little to do with touching a ladylove and much to do with touching the vicomte de Valvert with a blade. More generally, determining the unwitting nature of various manifestations of Baudelaire’s double vision can be problematic. Still, Seeing Double constitutes a splendid performance and will represent a significant stop for anyone interested in Baudelaire and in modernity. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince MORTIMER, ARMINE KOTIN. For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8142-1169-4. Pp. xi + 333. $52.95. While the author specifies in her introduction that “the reader will not find here anything like a complete interpretation of La comédie humaine” (8), she does provide a very thorough and convincing roadmap of Balzac’s vast literary domain. Mortimer insists on the interaction, rather than the static dichotomy, of what she repeatedly calls the “Prime Movers” of Balzac’s realism, or “the root causes of everything” (301) in the Comédie humaine: “what Balzac invented was precisely a world in which Love needs Money and vice versa” (5). However, even though the two basic forces are inextricably intertwined, relatively few of the multitudinous Balzacian characters can aspire to both: “Happiness means either Love or Money” (133). Indeed, the interaction of the “Prime Movers” usually takes the form of a drawn-out (and most often unequal) struggle, the results of which are frequently visible under the veneer of nineteenth-century bourgeois propriety: “Everywhere Money contaminates Love: greed destroys all the possible family bonds that love might make” (148). The twenty-one chapters of this study are organized into three broad sections—“Rhetorical Forms,” “Semiotic Images,” and “Mimetic Structures” of realism—that recall (but do not mirror) the tripartite structure Balzac chose for the Comédie: “Études de mœurs,” “Études philosophiques,” and “Études analytiques.” Mortimer offers a succinct overview of the three interrelated levels of meaning that she identifies and examines: “the plot, what is being conveyed to inform the reader constitute[s] the mimesis; the semiosis concerns the methods for conveying that information; rhetoric (taken broadly) provides the tools for mimesis and semiosis and in a sense subsumes both” (11). Despite the level of sophistication of the analysis, most chapters in For Love or Money are refreshingly jargon-free. Several chapters are devoted to, or touch on, the issue of Balzac’s famously elaborate family genealogies, which not only structure the plot and adumbrate the dénouement of numerous novels, but also reflect the convoluted financial transactions that link the characters: “The circulation of money, never secondary or insignificant in Balzac, follows a complex structure analogous to the excessive complexities of the genealogy” (158). Other chapters scrutinize the variety of Balzacian character types, which, as it turns out, “are not limited to people, as there are cities, streets, dwellings, furnishings, and clothing that function as types as well” (298). Another analytical thread running through the chapters is Balzac’s notable use of “explications nécessaires”—“where he writes the instruction manual Reviews 831 for his writing” (179)—ostensibly to supply useful background and causality, thereby guiding the reader through the intricacies of the plot, but also to arrive at a sharper or more precise level of realism. One entertaining as well as perceptive chapter is devoted to Balzac’s “Language of Sex”—which, despite being euphemistic and elliptical, usually remains clear. Unsurprisingly, Mortimer illustrates her close readings by regularly supplying quotes in French, followed by English translations. A very minor quibble: one wonders why it was necessary to translate , for instance, “condottieri de l’Industrie moderne” into “condottieri of modern Industry” (95). Consistently insightful and elegantly written, For Love or for Money will likely become an incontournable text for Balzac scholars. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin REGGIANI, CHRISTELLE. L’éternel et l’éphémère: temporalités dans...

Where Is National Cinema Today (and Do We Still Need It)?

"National cinema" is often questioned as a category, yet persists as a way of advertising national qualities, both culturally and economically. Although a founding concept in the writing of cinema history, it has recently been stigmatized as an equivalent of the national literatures promoted by nineteenth-century bourgeois elites, and also challenged by an emphasis on the transnational, yet can be demonstrated to have an empirical basis in audience studies.

Henrik Ibsen, the Quest for Realism and the Rise of Greek Theatrical Modernism

As is well known, the birth of theatre modernism intersects with the crisis of nineteenth-century bourgeois society and its realistic ideals. Modernism found expression in naturalism at first as bo...

The Origins of the Concept of ‘Palaeolithic Art’: Theoretical Roots of an Idea

This paper explores the origin and theoretical roots of the concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1895–1906). It identifies three main sources for this concept: the Western category of ‘art’, the idea of evolution and the notion of primitive. This article shows how the traditional conception of ‘Palaeolithic art’ is a particular case of the wider idea of ‘primitive art’, a category that was born as an attempt to harmonise the notion of ‘primitive society’ and the nineteenth-century bourgeois concept of ‘art’. Additionally, I discuss this traditional conception as the source of a number of ideas that have persisted in our way of interpreting Palaeolithic images until recently, including the understanding of prehistoric images through the lens of the modern notion of ‘art’, their interpretation in symbolic-religious terms and their formal definition based on the idea of naturalism.

‘El hombre fino’ : Courtesy Books and Male Bourgeois Conduct in Nineteenth-century Spain

During the course of the nineteenth century about 300 books on civility, etiquette and good taste were published in Spain. Most of this literature was imported from other European countries - mainly France and England - and translated and adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish reader. Courtesy and etiquette books served to disseminate in Spain models of conduct prevalent in the western world. In their pages Spanish men and women could learn about the norms that they needed to follow in order to join the ranks of the dominant polite societies. In other words, courtesy books provide a portrait of the nineteenth-century ideal bourgeois, a model that upward-bound Spaniards strove to imitate. This article analyses the content of this literature and its role in the consolidation of nineteenth-century bourgeois Spain.