The Affective Geography of Paris in the 19th Century Romanian Novel: Between Admiration and Aversion

Abstract

Based on “The Emotions of London”, a research project initiated at the Stanford Literary Lab, my article focuses on two relevant issues. First of all, I aim to demonstrate, as the “geography of emotions” experiment has already proved, that distant reading approaches and big data interpretation do not necessarily have to replace traditional methods of analysis. In other words, by using a corpus of 157 texts, I intend to outline the affective image of Paris as presented in the nineteenth century Romanian novel. Secondly, the aspect that makes my article different from “The Emotions of London” is that my purpose does not lie in analysing emotions associated with certain place-names in Paris, but with the overall image of the city, because Paris is an “abstract”, rather than a “concrete”, presence in the Romanian novel of this period. Another hypothesis that I will address is the interpretation of the emotions towards Paris, taking into account the two tendencies characteristic for the Romanian culture of the nineteenth century, namely the self-colonial tendency and the anti-colonial one.

Keywords

• distant reading
• geography of emotions
• emotions of paris
• nineteenth century novel
• romanian novel
• self-colonial
• anti-colonial tendencies