Elizabeth McManus
Elizabeth Berkebile McManus is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian currently writing her dissertation under the guidance of Professor Michal Ginsburg. Her project examines issues of spatial perception and representation in 19th-century French culture through the literary architectural fantasies of poet, novelist, journalist and art critic Théophile Gautier. Elizabeth argues that these spaces, much like architectural fantasies composed by architects and visual artists, offer innovative solutions to problems of spatial representation. More specifically, they provide insight into cultural phenomena as diverse as utopian socialist communities, dioramas and panoramas, Egyptomania, the archeological imagination, and tales of intoxication, all of which are concerned with the (im)possibility of accurately seeing and displaying space and place. This research shows that Gautier’s architectural fantasies, though often dismissed as examples of the author’s descriptive verve, articulate a distinctly modern theory of perception and representation that in the same stroke makes the visual invisible, because it is impossible, and hyper-visible, because it is highly intertextual and reliant on a variety of disciplines.
