Andrew Kotick

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Harvey, David

Keywords

Montmartre, Cabaret, Paris

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

This thesis examines the establishments known collectively as cabarets-artistiques that emerged and proliferated throughout the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre at the end of the nineteenth century as a cultural medium for negotiating relations between the bourgeois and bohemian sects of urban society there. It problematizes the self-articulated function of the cabaret as the primary visual and cultural medium for constructing bohemian identity in fin-de-siecle Paris, by interrogating the manifold ways in which it reinforced bourgeois norms and values while ostensibly trying to deconstruct, satirize, and subvert them in an effort to codify the cabaret as bohemian space. The thesis' individual chapters represent the material, ideological, and sociocultural betrayals of bohemian artifice by collectively exposing the cabaret's commodification of Montmartre's historical memory as well as topical trends in the discourse of bourgeois-bohemian relations, primarily in the public political arena. Ultimately the thesis aims to demonstrate the bourgeoisie's profitable commercial reification of Paris' bohemian and subversive pasts, allowing entrepreneurial cabaret proprietors to present the cabaret as an authentic and historically valid bohemian experience mouthpiece for Paris' marginalized popular classes while participating in the proliferating and novel forms of commercial entertainment and public pleasure that characterized urban bourgeois society in the fin-de-siecle city. Such developments signify bohemia's status, as it existed and operated in the Montmartre cabaret, as a bourgeois invention.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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