The Literature Network - The Anarchic Commune as World's Fair in Emile Zola's Travail (1).

The Anarchic Commune as World's Fair in Emile Zola's Travail (1).

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From: Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Date: 20080322
Author:Febles, Eduardo A.

Though Emile Zola's aesthetic shift from naturalism to utopianism began well before the writing of Travail in 1900, Moissan's electric ovens displayed during the Parisian World's Fair of the same year served as a technological solution to the entropic conundrum that had informed his earlier novels. Electricity thus reconfigured allowed the functioning of Beauclair, Travail's anarchic commune, as a utopia. The utopian mode, however, is undermined by a passive subjective relationship to the real inherent in visitors' experiences during the Exposition Universelle and by capitalist fantasies of ...

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