COML675 - The Underground Imaginary

From the vast quarries and catacombs under modern Paris to coalminer's tunnels in the North and coastal caves of the South, France's underground spaces have been associated through fiction with themes of political revolt, violent crime, symbolic purification, and scientific inquiry. The nineteenth century in particular saw the institutional and discursive rise of what William Whewell called the "palaetiological sciences", in which inquiry into the (geological) past reveals the patterns of the present. Combined with France's turbulent Revolutionary history, these fields marked the national consciousness with the recurring notion of cyclical cataclysm. As the century progressed, positivist thought inflected the underground imaginary through scientific fictions of discovery and naturalist fictions of patriotic recovery. But despite surface ideology, each narrative text contains its own stratified layers and schistic rifts, which we will study through close analysis of subterranean spaces in novels by Hugo (Les Misérables), Berthet (Les Catacombes de Paris), Verne (Voyage au centre de la terre), Leroux (La double vie de Théophraste Longuet), Sand (Laura: Voyage dans le cristal) and Zola (Germinal). The seminar will also include secondary readings by figures like Nadar and Dumas and scholars like Williams, Rudwick, Harkness, Prendergast, and Pike.