Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-05, Section: A, page: 1588.

Director: Denis Hollier.

The dissertation explores the textual and iconographic motif of Paris in ruins, induced by the "Bloody Week" that ended the Commune of 1871, as a forgotten figure for the "capital of the nineteenth century." My conceit is that the aesthetic and spatial characteristics of the "uncanny" provide a model for understanding the paradigmatic capital of modernity by connecting the cultural icon of the ruin to a variety of cultural documents, including poetry, the novel, guidebooks, essays, as well as photographs and other reproducible visual media.

The point of departure is a discussion of the ruinist aesthetic upon which many representations of 1870--71 Paris relied. The ruin extended its own breadth in the nineteenth century to accommodate new forms writers and visual artists began to qualify as ruins, such as barricades, the banlieue, as well as the chantier and demolition ruin resulting from Second Empire real estate speculation. These new ruins reconfigure the space-time principles of the former ruins and inform the representation of post-Commune Paris.

Art history has begun to mark out a territory for the visual culture of the Commune, including the Commune ruins. I emphasize that the primary art of the Commune is not painting, which did not seem to adequately represent the ruins, but photography. Photography's special mode of inscribing the past must be related to the ruin as a sign system. I will highlight one trope in the Commune ruins aesthetic---the open ruin---to examine how visual texts in particular exploited the perceptual breach of interior/exterior difference in this ruin as a spatial figure for civil conflict.

By analyzing the uncharacteristic presence of the Freudian uncanny in Zola's novel Paris, I show how the Commune resurges in the 1890s, in the historical context of socialist anarchist terrorism, as a cultural repressed that carries a sense of doom for the capital at the turn of the century. This study offers interpretations of a variety of texts and images, but more importantly shows how a reflection on the capital and its ruins leads to a reconceptualization of Parisian modernity.