Preliminary Programme

The artificial Interior in nineteenth century literature as a code for bourgeois culture. The cases of Huysmans's À Rebours and Galdós's La sombra


According to count des Esseintes, the hero of Karl-Joris Huysmans's À Rebours (1894), "nature had had its time." In contrast, the count very explicitly extols the beneficial artificiality of his home that he arranges as the emanation and duplication of his own his pure and untainted authenticity. His interior is his double and exposes in that sense the very artificial nature of the count's radical subjectivity. In Benito Pérez Galdós's La sombra (1871), don Anselmo's threatening double is a painted character that comes to life. It steps out of one of the numerous paintings and the bits and pieces of works of art that make up the endlessly vast, chaotic and nauseating interior of don Anselmo's home. In various ways, don Anselmo's double incarnates the artificiality, even the diseasedness, of literary representation itself, in a way that premonitions count des Esseintes equally sickening interior.
In this paper will be shown, first, how the interiors and doubles in À Rebours and La sombra are representative of a widely spread literary imagery throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Second, they do so in a way that exemplifies distinctive aspects of bourgeois culture. On a subtextual level, they operate as distinctive codes of the problematic nature of subjectivity and authenticity in the culture of the day. It will be explained how the intimate connection and ambiguity within the literary framework between the artificiality of representation on the one hand and on the other hand the protagonists that represents themselves in doubles and interiors in fact communicate the very ambiguity, on various levels, of the bourgeois citizen as a self, as an interpersonal, as a social and as a political being
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Eating is not only an essential individual necessity, but also a multi-layered social phenomenon and a crucial political issue. According to the French sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss it can, therefore, be described as a “social total phenomenon”. The Nazis were definitely well aware of this fact and did everything to ensure at least a minimal nutrition standard for each German citizen in order to strengthen the foundations of their dictatorship. In this context the so-called “Eintopfsonntage” (“stew Sundays”) that were introduced on 1 October 1933 had to serve a triple purpose: Besides the nutritional aspect of “governmental catering” they also – and foremost – were meant as an appropriate propagandistic symbol for the Nazi approach of providing social welfare on the one hand and social disciplining by “public dining” on the other hand. Thus (at first sight completely innocent) socializing became easily connected with obedience and control – remarkably enough, without acts of obvious violence and terror on the part of the state in this case.
But the chapter of “stew Sundays” in the Third Reich, however, is still unwritten. Hence some of the central questions the paper wants to deal with are the following ones:
• What does the concept of “political culinarism” mean and to what respect can it be made applicable for a better understanding of National Socialism?
• How exactly did the Nazis perform “governmental catering” and “public dining” on “stew Sundays” and what were the reactions within German society?
• What were the ideological intensions as well as the practical achievements of the “stew Sundays” with regard to the establishment and consolidation of the Nazi state?
In order to examine the concept of “political culinarism” on the example of “stew Sundays” in Nazi Germany more detailed, the paper is planned to be arranged as follows:
1.) Introduction
2.) Nazism and nutrition – Theoretical reflections upon the concept of “political culinarism” regarding National Socialism
3.) Digestion and dictatorship – “Stew Sundays” between propagandistic spectacle and political instrument
4.) Conclusion (Show less)

The paper studies the place of women in Bulgarian reputational elites from the late 19th century to the 1950s. As in other nation-states, the Bulgarian national project was leaded by elites and had created a new symbol system in which they legitimated themselves in different ways: through its inclusion in encyclopedias and dictionaries, by creating of a literary canon, by given new names of streets and public institutions, and by establishing of a state award and decoration system.
This research proposes an empirical investigation on sets of encyclopedic publications in Bulgaria (general national encyclopaedias, national historical biographical dictionaries, and national ’Who is who’ type dictionaries of contemporary personalities), published up to the 1950s. It deals with gender differences and answers the question when did women start to be listed and in what proportion.
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In this paper I will study the formal call and the room made for receiving visitors: the drawing room. I will argue that the ritualized formal call played an important role in bourgeoisie self understanding and distinction in the 19th Century. The drawing room was one of the urban places where bourgeoisie habitus and gender were performed and shaped. (Show less)