| This dissertation examines three prominent figures of fin-de-siècle French popular culture: the machine, the fantom and the detective in order to challenge the restrictive critical assumption that late nineteenth and early twentieth century works of a lower canonical status are either rigidly counter-discursive or necessarily complicit with the strategies of dominant discourses. These figures represent what Michel Serres calls points of exchange between typically popular idioms (science fiction, fantastic, detective) and traditionally elitist discourses (technology, socio-pathology, ethnology) of modernity. As such they reveal a problematic and uneasy tension between the dominant and marginalized culture of this epoch, which I suggest, aptly defines modernity as a nexus of discursive contention. In my analyses of L'Eve future by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the fantastic tales of Guy de Maupassant, the Fantômas detective series and the trick films of Georges Méliès, I demonstrate that French popular culture, as the collaboration of ostensibly incompatible discourses, is the privileged site for the articulation of modernity and is therefore integral to the understanding of French Culture in general. |
