ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the 'metaphorics of modernization', for industrialization, urbanization and migration provides much of the explicit thematics of the Rougon-Macquart. It pays attention to Zola's sometimes equivocal, but more frequently dysphoric, reading of technological invention that anticipates a twentieth-century literature of industrial and urban critique. The study of Zola's material metaphorics will prepare the ground for a consideration of his analysis of a specifically modern sensibility — a set of cultural attitudes and assumptions marked by their unresolve and equivocation — that develops in response to the process of modernization. The chapter discusses aspects of Zola's aesthetic and stylistic modernism in relation to visual modernity. Zola's thematic modernity is plural and equivocal. It is the modernity of the enthralled train-spotter and the prodigious photographer. Zola's urban sublime contours a space of beauty and of unfathomability, an unexpected vision for one who analyses so powerfully the deleterious effects of modernization.
