The Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (SDN) announced the winner of this year’s Postgraduate Prize, which is awarded for the best postgraduate conference paper submitted for the Society’s Annual Conference.
Congratulations to Corpus PhD candidate Christopher Goring for his prize-winning entry: ‘The Allegorical Architectures of Pleasure and Joy in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames‘.
Founded in 2001, the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes offers a lively forum for the dissemination of research on French and Francophone studies in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Christopher presented the paper at the SDN's annual conference held at the University of Cardiff in early April this year.
The SDN judges wrote, "The readers were very impressed by your paper, commenting that 'This piece is a model of concision that wears its erudition lightly', 'making careful reference to theoretical works as well as embedding itself impressively within the discourse of Zola criticism', and noting that 'There is obvious potential to expand this paper and its reading of zolian spaces as allegorical to other Zola novels'."
The paper argues that the depiction of architectural spaces is an indispensable element of Émile Zola's allegorical schemes of meaning in two of his novels, Pot-Bouille (1882) and Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). Using theoretical frameworks developed by Gordon Teskey and Angus Fletcher, it examines how the articulations of architectural space in the novels create the divisions and structures necessary for the imposition of defined hierarchies of meaning. It ends by gesturing towards the ways in which these models might have broader applicability for analyses of other instalments in Zola's 20-volume magnum opus, Les Rougon-Macquart (1870-1892). The article is not yet available on-line but here is the abstract:
Allegorical Architectures of Pleasure and Joy in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames
Abstract:
In this paper, I will build upon the models of allegory proposed by theorists Gordon Teskey and Angus Fletcher to argue that the architectural spaces depicted in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882) and Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) are essentially allegorical in nature, with this allegorisation serving as a key component in Zola’s satires of bourgeois contentment and consumerist pleasure. My paper will follow two key strands of interpretation. Firstly, drawing on Fletcher’s suggestion that allegorical spaces tend to be segmented into discrete ‘demonic’ parts, each keyed to represent a narrowly circumscribed meaning, I will analyse the compartmentalised apartments, staircases, and kitchens of Pot-Bouille’s apartment building, and the various departments of the eponymous Bonheur des Dames superstore. Secondly, I will explore how Teskey’s assertion that allegories relentlessly figure physical spaces as hypertrophied humanoid forms can help us to make sense of Zola’s own anthropomorphising tendencies (as seen in the ‘haleine tiède’ exhaled by Pot-Bouille’s apartment building, or in the repeated comparison of the Bonheur to a ‘colosse’). Crucially, this obsessive anthropomorphism discloses the allegorist’s awareness that the structures, hierarchies, and pleasures vouchsafed by his architectural allegories are themselves human in origin – and, consequently, are subject to transformation and possible collapse.
