Full Description
"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.
Contents
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski
SECTION I: MODERNITY
Introduction by André Dombrowski
1 Architecture's Capital? Revisiting Benjamin's Paris
Charles Rice
2 How Haussmann's Hegemony Haunted the Early Third Republic
Peter Soppelsa
3 The Guillotine Sublime
Marc Gotlieb
4 Victorine's Secret: Baudelaire and the Ambiguity of Commodities
Paul Smith
5 A Laughter of the Look: Manet, Mallarmé, Polichinelle, and the Salon Jury in 1874
Margaret Werth
SECTION II: GEOGRAPHY
Introduction by Hollis Clayson
6 Revisiting the 1860s: Race and Place in Cape Town and Paris
Tamar Garb
7 Osman Hamdi Bey and Ottoman Aestheticism
Mary Roberts
8 Paris, Japan, and Modernity: A Vexed Ratio
Ting Chang
9 White City vs. La Ville lumière: Electrical Displays at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893)
Hélène Valance
SECTION III: CIRCULATION
Introduction by Hollis Clayson
10 Manet and the Multiple
Anne Higonnet
11 Gesture, Pose, Practice: Charles Nègre and the Image of Instantaneity
Jacob W. Lewis
12 Living on Manet's Balcony, or the Right to Privacy
André Dombrowski
13 Mary Cassatt's Lamp
Hollis Clayson
Afterword
Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski
Further Reading
Index
