The modern urban in the journalistic prose of Théophile Gautier : ‘Crayonnons à la hâte…’.

Kerr, Greg (2009) The modern urban in the journalistic prose of Théophile Gautier : ‘Crayonnons à la hâte…’. In: Aesthetics of dislocation in French and francophone literature and art : strategies of representation. Edwin Mellen Press, Lampeter, pp. 165-182. ISBN 978-0-7734-4919-0

Abstract

The chapter forms part of a volume entitled Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art: Strategies of Representation, published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2009, co-edited with two other colleagues, Dr Daisy Connon and Dr Gillian Jein. This chapter is concerned with a new articulation of poetic discourse in the writings of the nineteenth-century French poet and journalist Théophile Gautier. Through analysis of his profuse feuilletons, travel writings and art criticism, this chapter argues that Gautier’s prose exhibits and acute perception of the facts determining its construction as text and dramatizes these as a means to explore a range of complex objects of representation which are encountered throughout the topography of the modern urban; the latter include train stations, ports and the Universal Exhibition halls. Taken together, these texts identify the shifting urban environment as a source of poetic renewal. In so doing, they reveal a dramatically more comprehensive and dynamic vision than is permitted by the narrowly aestheticist views by which Gautier’s work is normally characterized.