Serge Jaumain – författare

Originally published in 1999, Cathedrals of Consumption examines the history of the department store. After many decades in which it was almost exclusively historians of retailing and company biographers who were interested in the phenomenon, the department store has now come to attract the attention of historians of culture, consumption, gender, urban life and much more. Indeed, the department store in its classic era of expansive growth has often seemed better than anything else to embody the cultural and social modernity of its time.

The articles in this book range widely in presenting the breadth of these new approaches to department store history. An introductory essay explores the questions that surround the department store from its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, through its golden age in the decades before the First World War, to the challenges posed in the more competitive world of inter-war Europe. A dozen contributors - writing about Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Hungary - then examine themes as varied as the new public space which department stores provided for women, the politics of consumption, the architecture of the new stores, the training of the workforce, the cult of shopping, advertising strategies, shoplifting, employer organisations, and the geographical spread of the new stores, while a comparison with eighteenth-century London raises the question of just how new the department store was.

Originally published in 1999, Cathedrals of Consumption examines the history of the department store. After many decades in which it was almost exclusively historians of retailing and company biographers who were interested in the phenomenon, the department store has now come to attract the attention of historians of culture, consumption, gender, urban life and much more. Indeed, the department store in its classic era of expansive growth has often seemed better than anything else to embody the cultural and social modernity of its time.

The articles in this book range widely in presenting the breadth of these new approaches to department store history. An introductory essay explores the questions that surround the department store from its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, through its golden age in the decades before the First World War, to the challenges posed in the more competitive world of inter-war Europe. A dozen contributors - writing about Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Hungary - then examine themes as varied as the new public space which department stores provided for women, the politics of consumption, the architecture of the new stores, the training of the workforce, the cult of shopping, advertising strategies, shoplifting, employer organisations, and the geographical spread of the new stores, while a comparison with eighteenth-century London raises the question of just how new the department store was.

La dramaturgie québécoise présente des survivances du personnage, quand d’autres ne cessent de le remettre en question. Loin de présenter des individus psychologiques, les dramaturges québécois détournent le réalisme pour proposer des figures hors du commun. Ce livre propose d’abord un panorama de tous ces protagonistes en emmenant le lecteur dans une traversée de nombreux textes écrits dans les années 2000 mais dont les auteurs sont de plusieurs générations, traditions et formations théâtrales. Vous y découvrirez des personnages sans famille, sans passé, sans territoire, des personnages qui viennent d’autres œuvres. Cette galerie de portraits nous invite à entrer dans la fabrique des auteurs pour interroger le partage des voix qu’ils opèrent dans l’écriture.

En effet, les auteurs dramatiques, face à la difficulté de plus en plus grande de faire entendre leurs voix, choisissent souvent de se représenter dans leurs œuvres et exploitent dans leurs créations leur moi d’auteur comme un matériau. C’est cette voix de l’écriture aux limites de l’autofiction et de l’autobiographie qu’explore la seconde partie de l’ouvrage. Pour cela, l’autrice s’intéresse à des œuvres plus proches du plateau et montre comment les auteurs, souvent aussi acteurs, metteurs en scène, se pensent et se représentent dans leurs œuvres et interrogent leur pouvoir de création de la fiction.