The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris

Authors

  • Essaka Joshua University of Notre Dame

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v31i3.1677

Keywords:

Accessibility, aesthetics, architecture, spatial rhetoric, synecdoche, Victor Hugo, visual rhetoric

Abstract

Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal functionality. Architectural language is a defining feature of disability in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and a universally accessible language. In emphasizing the synecdochic relationship between gothic buildings and the disabled body, Hugo demonstrates that he is not only a pioneer in urban and architectural semantics, but that he also understands the complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body. Defining beauty as atypicality, through the gothic aesthetic, Hugo presents Notre Dame Cathedral as a uniquely drifting symbol (with its multiple meanings, its transitional status and its cultural miscegenation) with a revelatory function: it expresses disability as normative.

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Published

2011-08-08

How to Cite

Joshua, E. (2011). The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(3). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v31i3.1677

Issue

Section

Disability and Rhetoric