| This dissertation will explore the relation between aesthetics, the occult, and mass culture in the French decadent novel L'Eve future by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. I read the novel with and against the concepts outlined in the works of Marxist literary critic and theoretician Walter Benjamin, especially aura and phantasmagoria, in order to explore the resonances Villiers's novel has with Benjamin's writing on Baudelaire, modernity, mass culture and the art object. I show, by looking in a Benjaminian way at how Villiers extends or alters Baudelaire, how the novel enters the larger epistemological debates of the last quarter of nineteenth-century French literature, culture, and science. I ask: how does this story of the creation of an automaton and its ultimate ensoulment by a spirit from the beyond represent the anxieties attendant on the emergence of mass culture, mass politics, popular spirituality, and popular science? Understanding how the concept of aura operates dialectically with the discourses of crowd psychology in the novel gives a new view on the phenomenology of both everyday and aesthetic experience (which in many ways are the same thing) in a moment of uncertainty and change in French social life. This understanding in turn will provide a correction to modes of scholarship on the novel that discount the role played by the character Sowana: understanding how she condenses the problem of auratic perception's interruption by the crowd's influence will show how the automaton is not simply a figure of subjectivity but of the social more broadly. |
