ABSTRACT
Julia Kröger focuses on the construction of Parisian “lived space” in the work of nineteenth-century naturalist author Émile Zola in “Zola’s Spatial Explorations of Second Empire Paris.” Following Henri Lefebvre’s triadic theory of space production, she begins by retracing the physical and conceptual appropriation of space by Zola documented in his notebooks, the dossiers préparatoires. The seemingly non-reflexive perceptions noted in the dossiers testify to an emotive and affective real-life encounter which, along with cognitive materials such as maps, are translated into the lived space of the storyworld via Zola’s various strategies of narrativization. Kröger argues that Zola thus helps us to understand the ways in which space is produced within the formal constraints of the novel and highlights the importance of real, material space in the understanding of lived space—a spatial facet that literary studies have often tended to ignore.
