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Gautier, Boileau and Chenavard: interrelations of utopia and architecture in nineteenth-century France - DELC research seminar
Date: 24 November 2010 Time: 5.00 pm
Venue: Bowland North Seminar Room 16
DELC Research Seminar
Greg Kerr (Lancaster)
'Gautier, Boileau and Chenavard: interrelations of utopia and architecture in nineteenth-century France'
As 'non-place', utopia inaugurates a space in which established cultural and national boundaries yield to an imaginary of universal association. Focussing on the aesthetic projects which emerge from some strands of nineteenth-century French utopianism, this paper will explore a privileged architectural figure in the textual and visual culture of the Saint-Simonian and Buchezian movements - that of the temple. In a range of images, poems and doctrinal texts the temple is presented as an instrument of social regeneration that presents a dramatic synthesis of the contributions made by diverse cultures and civilizations to the progress of humanity.
I propose to explore the critical and imaginative appropriation of aspects of these fanciful temple projects by the poet and art critic Théophile Gautier. I will argue that the art and architecture of Paul Chenavard and Louis-Auguste Boileau prompt Gautier to meditate on the potential for the aesthetic work to interrelate a vast array of cultural references in a dynamic form, but also to problematize what he sees as the ideological closure towards which these utopian projects frequently incline.
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Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Organising departments and research centres: European Languages and Cultures
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
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United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510851
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