Suchergebnisse

The industrial exhibitions in Paris during the July Monarchy drew large crowds and broad coverage in the press. Reviews of these exhibitions frequently appeared in newspapers that covered the annual art Salons, and often in the same part of the publication — in the feuilleton space. Thus an aesthetic of the commodity emerges in the reviews of the industrial exhibitions, as readers were taught to view the objects produced by industry with the same eye that assessed the value of new works of art. This essay concerns the contours of this aesthetic and how reviewers produced interest in these objects on display. Coverage of these exhibitions reveals the dominance of progress as an organizing paradigm for the historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time, counterbalancing such a valuation of progress, objects are often represented as connected to or evocative of a lost pre-Revolutionary past.

Dora Bruder, unique to Patrick Modiano's literary repertoire, remains unclassifiable with respect to genre due to its constant oscillation between fiction, biography and autobiography. The publication of an English translation has further complicated the task of classification.While some scholars persist in their usage of the term 'autofiction' to describe this work, Modiano's reliance on visual elements such as photography and maps suggests that Dora Bruder would be more aptly classified as an instance of second-generation Holocaust ekphrasis. It is my contention that strict textual analyses that ignore Dora Bruder's distinctive publication history fail to grasp not only the work's defining image—text dynamic, but also its continued existence as a work in progress. The current analysis therefore proposes a new reading of Dora Bruder in an attempt to reach beyond the Western conception of canonical literature and to better understand Modiano's Dora Bruder project.