Maya Balakirsky

The summer grant awarded to me by the Center of Visual Culture enabled me to turn two years of research notes into a dissertation. While my plan this summer was initially to continue research for another chapter of my project, I switched gears and embarked on the process of writing.

I explore the visual representation of Émile Zola as a case study on the public image and media spin of French intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair. The dissertation is divided into two parts: the representation of Zola by the hand of caricaturists or avant-garde artists and Zola's self-representation via an avid interest in amateur photography. Each section is subdivided into four/five chapters focusing on specific works of art, series of posters, or a narrower thematic point. Zola, a Christian supporter of Dreyfus, is an exaggerated example of the general trend to collapse the categories of "intellectual" and "liberal" with "Jew" as evidenced through popular caricature which imaged both intellectuals and Jews as connected to anti-militarism, inactivity, homosexuality, degeneracy, deviance and disease. I suggest that Zola may have suffered from the feverish tempo of French fin-de-siècle antisemitism. I systematically examine the changing image of Zola, from his initial championing of Édouard Manet's Olympia in 1866, his career as an art critic, journalist, and novelist, and his support of the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, until the 1900 World's Fair, an event that signaled the end of the Affair for the masses. While I identify the categories of both fame and deprecation in the development of Zola's public image, especially in relation to the racial antisemitism of the late 1890's, my dissertation also reveals the desires and aspirations of Zola on the subject of his own image (perceived and actual). I examine Zola's own image-building through an analysis of photographs he took of family, landscapes, cityscapes, and the 1900 World's Fair. The conclusion points to the intersection between the image of the masculine Dreyfusard intellectual, or the opposing image of the effeminate or emasculated figure proffered by the anti-Dreyfusards, as one that either denied or linked the intellectual with medieval stereotypes of Jews.