FFS 232 - The Modern Age

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as GNCS 232) Topic for 2022/23b: Shopping in Paradise: Consumption and Modernity in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames. Nineteenth-Century Paris has been famously designated as the “capital of modernity.” The site of the massive urban renewal project known as “Haussmannization” and numerous political and cultural revolutions, Paris also witnessed transformative social shifts. Workers fled the provinces for the city to work in the growing commercial sectors of the capital, and women became more visible in public spaces, strolling along newly built boulevards and shopping in recently constructed “cathedrals of consumption,” such as the Bon Marché. What some called progress, however, others viewed as catastrophe: small family businesses were ruined, and the urban center was gentrified, displacing many to the periphery of the city. Emile Zola’s 1883 novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, provides a complex literary case study of these tensions. Zola’s centering of the novel around the “grands magasins” allows us to consider the impact of the rise of the department store and the emergence of modern marketing and consumption practices in nineteenth-century Paris. We expand our analysis of the novel with explorations of cultural history and the nineteenth-century fashion and daily press, explorations of visual culture and filmic adaptations of the novel, and virtual and field visits to contemporary temples of consumption. Susan Hiner.

Prerequisite(s): FFS 212 or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS