Aditi Khasa

Aditi Khasa is a specialist in French literature and visual culture, currently a doctoral student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on the illustrated editions of Émile Zola, combining literary analysis and visual studies. Her academic career spans several countries and languages. She holds a joint Erasmus Mundus Master's degree in European Literary Cultures, with a specialization in French and European art and literature. Her diverse experience includes work as an archivist at the Archives et Musée de la Littérature in Brussels and a visiting professorship at the University of Delhi. She is a teaching assistant at Western University, where she shares her passion for French language and history, bringing a multicultural perspective to her research, and highlighting the links between literature, visual arts and cultural history.

The project

Title: “Illustrated editions of L'Assommoir and Nana: A case study”

"As a witness to the visual flowering of the 19th century, Zola developed an original reflection on contemporary artistic works, and was very active as an art critic early in his career. Thus, his writing bears the imprint of the visual. It will therefore be interesting to see how Zola interacts with illustrators when publishing his works. The main aim of this study is to analyze the text-image relationship in the illustrated editions of Les Rougon-Macquart on several levels. We seek to examine the type of relationship the writer may have had with the illustrators and the instructions these artists received, either from the publisher or from Zola himself, through documented correspondence and other archival material, between the artists, the publisher and the author regarding images and sketches. We're also interested in examining how scenes are addressed in text and illustrations: how the theme is treated by the author in the text, and how it is then reinterpreted by the illustrators: how the theme is treated by the author in the text, and how it is then reinterpreted by the illustrators. This investigation will enable us to understand the degree of involvement of the author in the production of images upstream, and the differences between textual and visual media and their particularities downstream. Were these representations directed by the publisher or the writer? Were the illustrators free in their choices? Finally, we'll study the documented reception of these editions and their caricatured echoes in the press of the time."

Hosting institution: Recherche aux archives à la BnF et à IMEC