ABSTRACT
In his study Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Richard Terdiman argues that the nineteenth-century newspaper and the department store are organized around a paradigm of 'disorganized organization'. Theophile Gautier's feuilletons and travel writings are particularly attentive to the pervasiveness of ideological formations throughout what he called modern 'civilization', by which can usually be inferred a disparaging reference to the emergent bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century. Amongst the complaints registered by Gautier concerning the damaging effects of his occupation on writing, some of the most frequent concern the impersonality and urgency which the press medium imposes on writing. On a formal level Gautier's texts are sensitive to the impact of those effects of juxtaposition and sensual immediacy which the representational structure of the Exhibitions attempts to trigger in the spectator.
