Landscape, and the Aesthetic Sensorium in Germinie Lacerteux

Abstract

Jacques Rancière has argued that in the nineteenth century, literature invents an aesthetic sensorium that reconfigures the relation between beings and their manner of inhabiting a space-time, such that any type of being may demonstrate the capacity for any type of feeling, sensation, passion, or action. Drawing upon this insight, my article studies the relationship between being and environment in the Goncourt Brothers’ Germinie Lacerteux. Germinie’s ways of experiencing a space or perceiving a landscape construct an aesthetic, sensual pleasure, whose refined artifice sits at odds with her brutish station in life. My conclusion reflects upon the politics of gender that may be deduced from such an aesthetic sensorium and the production of space that obtains from it.

Keywords

• germinie lacerteux
• space
• landscape
• aesthetic sensorium
• aesthetic pleasure
• flâneuse