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Identifier

000390557

Title

Γοτθική αισθητική και νεωτερική αστική κουλτούρα στο Παρίσι των αρχών του 20ου αιώνα : Εικονογραφία της πόλης και κατασκευή της ετερότητας στο φάντασμα της όπερας

Author

Παλόγου, Ιωάννα

Thesis advisor

Β. Αράπογλου

Reviewer

Χ. Κωνσταντινίδου

Reviewer

Β. Ρωμανός

Abstract

The dissertation explores the contested and ambiguous aspects of urban identities and culture of the ‘modern Paris’ by comparing the images of the monumental architecture of the Opera Garnier to its representation in a Gothic novel telling how a ghost helped in the construction and then inhabited the opera building. The theoretical framework draws on the iconographic approach, especially as employed in ‘new cultural geography’, viewing urban landscapes as encoded texts, whose meaning can be deciphered from their historical context, and therefore establishing a common ground between disciplines like sociology, geography, literature and history. The review refers specifically to Walter Benjamin and his critique of the phantasmagorias of urban life through the study of Paris in the Arcades Project. Το consider how modern identities can be shaped in urban spaces, I revert to the work of Sennett and Sibley and their emphasis on the role of urban spectacles and urban planning in the construction of gendered identities and forms of otherness. Crucial to the understanding of modern culture and modern identities is critical literary theory, considering gothic literature as a means of criticizing the values and norms of white male middle‐class culture, that were rooted in Enlightment, while, at the same time, treating gothic landscapes as symbolic sites of otherness and ‘abjection’ of white male middle‐class anxieties. My analysis focuses on the Opera Garnier, one of the most important cultural monuments of modernity and part of the ambitious plan of Baron Haussmann for the urban transformation of Paris in 19th century. First, I analyze the Opera through a series of symbolic images that were connected to the memory of the Second Empire, the myth of Paris and the phantasmagoria of the urban culture. Then I juxtapose these images to the ones of a haunted Opera House, to its underground and ill‐lit labyrinth passages, as they were represented in a gothic novel of the early 20th century, The Phantom of the Opera. The symbolic meanings of the gothic novel expose the class basis of the modernization of Paris and, more broadly, facilitate the critique of the myth of modernity, i.e. the belief that social progress entails a radical break from the past, undertaken by rational knowing subjects.

Language

Greek

Subject

Gothic

Modernity

Opera

Γοτθική αισθητική

Νεωτερικότητα

Οπερα

Issue date

2014

Collection