Book Projects
I am currently at work on two book projects: a monograph and an edited volume.
Writing Claustrophobia
Enclosure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
by Kathryn A. Haklin
Before the term ‘claustrophobia’ existed, French writers penned vivid scenes of spatial enclosure. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry teems with the horror and melancholy of the shifting urban landscape in mid-century Paris, whose sky is famously figured as the lid of a coffin. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea ensnare their protagonists in mucky, dreadful deaths by quicksand and drowning. Jules Verne’s extraordinary voyages highlight the perils of exploration as adventurers find themselves trapped in futuristic vehicles soaring across outer space or traversing ten thousand leagues of the sea. Émile Zola’s novels cage their characters in the suffocating confines of disorienting yet recognizable locations, such as a department store, a locomotive, and a coal mine.
Writing Claustrophobia: Enclosure in Nineteenth-Century French Literature examines the evident but unexplored proliferation of enclosed spaces in literature just prior to the first definition of ‘claustrophobia,’ coined in 1879 at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. However, before any medical definition existed, French writers began to conceptualize an emerging anxiety of confinement. In Writing Claustrophobia, I offer historically-grounded close readings of works by Baudelaire, Hugo, Verne, and Zola to demonstrate the variegated ways in which these authors persistently deploy scenes of spatial enclosure. I argue that French writers mobilize what would later be called ‘claustrophobia’ to respond to evolving anxieties about urban renewal, industry, progress, the environment, social injustice, and imperial rule—sociopolitical tensions emanating from the rapidly modernizing society of nineteenth-century France.
Research for this project has been generously funded by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, a Gilman Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University) and fellowship year at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris - Ulm), and an Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Graduate Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University).
Manuscript currently in preparation.
Image: Charles Marville, Passage de l'Opéra, vue prise de la rue Lepeletier, 9ème arrondissement, Paris. 1865–68. Paris Musées, Public Domain
Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century
Eds. Dominique Bauer, Jill Cornish, Alexandre Dubois, and Kathryn A. Haklin
The edited volume Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century brings together eight chapters in which spaces are analyzed as porous, liminal, in-between locations found in the built environment, as well as in literature, aesthetic and architectural theory, and visual representations dating to the modern period. From the Eiffel Tower as seen by Maupassant, to Zola’s Edenic garden and sweltering hothouse, to Khnopff's studio-villa and Boulée’s sublime architecture, to finally domestic interiors by Verne, Huysmans, and Proust, these porous spaces foreground a blurring of the epistemological dichotomies they purport to exemplify, dualisms such as interiority and exteriority, public and private, human and non-human, masculine and feminine, nature and culture, etc. The volume demonstrates that space is not formed of both interiors and exteriors, but of neither of them, which urges us to reevaluate, historicize, and contextualize many dichotomies often taken as given, ultimately underscoring the diverse cultural meanings embodied by spatial imaginaries.
The researchers who contribute to this collection of essays work at institutions in the U.S. and in Europe and study spatial and/or architectural imageries in critical theory, literature, art, the built environment, and cultural history.
Manuscript currently under review with Amsterdam University Press for the Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective series.
Image: Georges-Félix Garen, Embrasement de la tour Eiffel. 1889. Paris Musées, Public Domain.