Émile Zola and Japonisme: the Novelist as Japanese Artist Event
- Time:
- 16:00
- Date:
- 13 March 2024
- Venue:
- Online only
Event details
In the 1860s and 1870s Japanese art was all the rage in fashionable Parisian circles and among French artists. Such intense modishness risked tipping into mere superficiality, and yet at the same time Japanese art was revealing a whole new way of seeing the world.
This dual response is explored in Émile Zola’s novel Une page d’amour (1878). Zola shows us japonaiserie — the fashionable collection and imitation of Japanese objects for their exotic appeal — in the Japanese pavilion decorated by a society hostess, and in fancy dress costume worn by the heroine Hélène’s daughter.
This japonaiserie is portrayed through ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation. But Japanese art also influences description in Une page d’amour, and most of all the five great cityscapes that show Paris seen from Hélène’s apartment at different times of day.
Here however Zola is demonstrating that true art responds to the new forms of Japanese art not through mere exoticism, but through a deeper transformation of our way of seeing the world: japonisme. These descriptions use pictorialism, in which verbal art recreates the effects of visual art. Zola contrasts japonaiserie and japonisme, via ekphrasis and pictorialism respectively, in order to assert the superiority of his own verbal art.
Speaker information
Jennifer Yee, is Professor of Literature in French at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). She has published three monographs on colonialism and orientalism: Clichés de la femme exotique: un regard sur la littérature coloniale française entre 1871 et 1914 (2000); Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (Legenda, 2008) and The Colonial Comedy: Imperialism in the French Realist Novel (2016). She has also co-edited two volumes: France and ‘Indochina’: Cultural Representations (2005) and French Decadence in a Global Context (2022), as well as a special issue of French Studies on ‘A Postcolonial Nineteenth Century’ (2018). She has also published articles on subjects including colonialism, exoticism, postcards, Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, Baudelaire and the connections between the verbal and visual arts.