How does city space influence our behaviors in ways that might not even be perceptible? This dissertation examines Paris’s nineteenth-century urban upheaval in the works of Flaubert, Baudelaire and Zola. Haussmann’s comprehensive redesign of the French capital obliterated the narrow street patterns of medieval Paris, replacing them with wide boulevards lined with boutiques. This research shows how this radical transformation influences individuals’ inclinations.
This interdisciplinary research synthesizes various representations of Paris together as a multidimensional mosaic to see what they reveal about the city and about us. This work aims to help us understand, as David Harvey says, “what the city was” and also helps us understand the modern city today and “what it could become.” This dissertation coincides with a number of new theoretical studies in architecture that aim to help us create new rapports with our cities.
My argument is that the nineteenth-century French literature of this period portrays the urban space as a series of images to be visually and commercially consumed, a consumption that nourishes changes in the way individuals experience their daily lives and perceive their environment. By closely examining how these authors stress the dominance of the visual spectacle, this dissertation sheds new light on modernity’s immersion in the culture of the image, in which we even more today rely on images to experience the world and to interpret our daily lives. I use recent cultural and urban theories to show that the new open urban environment depicted in these texts created a milieu that encouraged individuals to display their personal lives before a quasi-invisible public. Flaubert, Baudelaire and Zola suggest that the dominance of commercial images in Paris brings with it a loss of reality. As a consequence, this world of illusion prompts individuals to engage in voyeuristic activities in an effort to find truth and reality. Ultimately, this research contributes to a broader understanding of our attraction to voyeurism and exhibitionism by linking the source of that attraction to nineteenth-century culture, particularly that of Paris as Walter Benjamin’s “capital of the nineteenth century.” / 2018-12-06T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/19731 |
| Date | 07 December 2016 |
| Creators | Mizouni, Sophia |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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