Home Matters: Space, Gender and Identity in 19th-Century France and Belgium

Overview

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the home in literature, art and architecture in 19th-century France and Belgium. Drawing upon a series of 19th-century artworks, poetry, prose, domestic advice manuals, magazines, housing plans and other artefacts, we will question how domestic space was configured and represented.

In particular, we will consider how issues of gender and class are articulated via divisions and tensions around space. Our discussion will centre firstly on the construction of the modern city, with a particular emphasis on housing in Paris and Brussels. We will draw upon a series of 19th-century and present-day critics (eg. Duranty, Benjamin, Bachelard, Marcus, Heynen) to interrogate the relationship between the home and its inhabitant in the age of modernity. We will then apply this contextual and theoretical knowledge to a series of case studies in three distinct fields: literature, art and architecture.

In literature, we will discuss the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Max Elskamp, together with extracts from Balzac’s novels; in art, we will consider the Impressionist paintings of Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte and Berthe Morisot and, in architecture, we will study Henry van de Velde’s own home Bloemenwerf House, a gesamtkunstwerk, which sought to exemplify artistic and social unity at the turn of the century.

Prescribed material: class dossier (available on Canvas)

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, students will:

1. Have acquired an in-depth understanding of the socio-political and cultural context of nineteenth-century France and Belgium.

2.Be familiar with a wide range of 19th-century texts, paintings and media.

3. Be able to engage with the work of different theorists in Art History, Literature, Cultural Studies, Material Culture and Architecture.

4. Know how to compare the works of artists, architects, designers and writers.

5. Be able to analyse works of art and literature in detail.

6.Understand the importance of interdisciplinary methodologies in learning about the past.

Skills

Close textual analysis.

Close visual analysis.

Comparative analysis.

Interdisciplinary analysis.

Critical engagement.

Assessment