CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism

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Adrien Chiroux, Benoît Monginot, Francesca Quey, Émilien Sermier — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:17:05 +0100

1922/2022: Total Modernism - Vol. 2

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Adrien Chiroux, Benoît Monginot, Francesca Quey, Émilien Sermier — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:18:20 +0100

1922/2022: Total Modernism - Vol. 2

Total Modernism

Adrien Chiroux, Benoît Monginot, Francesca Quey, Émilien Sermier — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 11:52:39 +0100

1922/2022: Total Modernism. Vol. 2

“Mais ce soir je suis seul”

Annalisa Lombardi — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 10:05:13 +0100

The year 1922 marked Philippe Soupault's withdrawal from the Surrealist movement and his entry into the novelistic genre, with the writing of “Le Bon Apôtre”, which appeared the following year. In this novel, we will read signs of the author's need for individualisation and resonances with modernist narrative research.

“Une année de romans”

Émilien Sermier — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:09:08 +0100

This paper shows how the publishing year 1922-1923 coincided with the debut of several modernist poets in the novel (Cocteau, Delteil, Radiguet or Soupault). Looking beyond the canonical cases of Joyce and Proust (who disappeared in 1922), it primarily focuses on a text by Louis Aragon in order to examine the effervescence of francophone novel revivals. The article thereby highlights the extent to which the genre became an object of intense emulation within the Parisian networks.

Dal Dada all’impostura

Silvia Ulrich — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:01:23 +0100

After abandoning Dada, Walter Serner, a Bohemian Dadaist writer who had drafted the influential Zurich manifesto Letzte Lockerung, began writing short stories with a criminal setting. The break from Dada marks a caesura in Serner’s production; however, his short stories still move within the conceptual perimeter of the avant-garde, albeit with clear parodic intentions, aiming at ridiculing Dada itself and its adherents, in particular Tzara. This explains, for example, the modifications to the manifesto from the second draft, the adherence to the stylistic and formal canons of the New Objectivity, and the decision to entrust its ‘message’ to the human type of the ‘Confidence-man’, which already had illustrious antecedents in Germany at the time. In order to explain the paradox of the totality of Serner’s work that takes place within the confines of continuity and discontinuity, the present paper proposes an analysis of the short-story Eine eigenartige Konversation (1921), with the depiction of its writing phases, its philosophical-cultural influences, its elements of continuity with the manifesto and the main divergences from it.

L’imaginaire de la circularité dans trois oeuvres collectives de 1922

Bastien Mouchet — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 19:38:27 +0100

In this article, we postulate that the imaginary of circularity, clearly visible in the review Le Disque vert, the film La Roue and the ballet Skating-Rink, participates in the experimental turning point of 1922. In these works resulting from collaborations with artists from every corner of Europe, circular forms are omnipresent, the renewals made possible by technological progress are celebrated, and life is represented as a cyclical phenomenon. From the first texts by Henri Michaux to the poetry of Ricciotto Canudo, from a screenplay by Blaise Cendrars to another by Abel Gance, from posters by Fernand Léger to a choreography by Jean Börlin, geometry questions the myth of “eternal return.”

Karl Kraus “und die Folgen”

Riccardo Morello — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 16:52:57 +0100

Between 1915 and the end of the war, Karl Kraus, an Austrian intellectual who had made political satire and criticism of journalistic language, engages in a fierce battle against the inhumanity and cruelty of war. On the pages of “Fackel,” a magazine published by him for over thirty years, from 1899 to 1936, he gathers many texts that then come together in the tragedy of the “Last Days of Mankind,” a great work, dripping horror, which seeks to represent the ‘unrepresentable’.

“Il luogo comune della fedeltà”

Franco Arato — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 16:31:48 +0100

Universally recognized as one of the most influential Italian novelists of the XX century, Riccardo Bacchelli (1891-1985) was strongly engaged, mainly in his youth, also in theatre. Among the titles of the years 1918-1930 are: a semi-parodic rewriting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1918-1923, on stage only in 1956); the historical drama Spartaco e gli schiavi (1920); the one act La notte di un nevrastenico (1925, on stage in Rome at the Teatro degli Indipendenti, directed by A.G. Bragaglia), that eventually became a libretto for an acclaimed opera buffa by Nino Rota (1960); several pastiches, as Una mattina a Bologna (1930), written with the flair of Goldoni’s comedies. Tempted both by the ambiguities of modern literature and by the Neoclassical rappel à l’ordre, Bacchelli’s early theatre seems to deserve today a critical reappraisal.

“In the Spreading Roots of Events”

Matilde Manara — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 16:09:19 +0100

The aim of this essay is to address one of the most frequently discussed aspects of Modernist poetry: the relationship with the literary tradition. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on prepolitical authority and its transformations will help us to analyze the way Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke interact with the models and the forms of the past. Thomas Stearns Eliot’s and Paul Valéry’s theories will allow us to better inquire the stakes of such a relationship and to question the relevance of a notion often used to define Modernist poetry: Classicism.

Hesse, Woolf, and the Art of (Re)Construction

Adrien Chiroux — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 18:47:59 +0100

Written at the end of the 1920s, Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) are marked by the developments of their time, psychoanalysis in particular. However, this article will show that far from being a literary transposition of psychoanalytical theories – with which Hesse and Woolf partially disagreed – these two novels propose a different conception of the subject. This article will demonstrate that the novelistic divisions as well as the multiplication of voices generate the presence of different points of view that enter into dialogue with each other and interweave until they form the novels themselves. I will eventually argue that these novels, conceived as the result of a dynamic between deconstruction and reconstruction of the self, constitute a modernization of the Bildungsroman that I would like to call Gebildete Romane (“constructed novels”).

Fra polifonia e “Gesamtkunstwerk”

Simona Carretta — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:19:15 +0100

The first part of the article is an analysis of some contemporary novels whose structure recalls musical forms; the author identifies in modernism the causes by which “artist’s novel” became “art novel”, the latter intended as a novel featuring other arts’ formal principles. In the second part, the article explores how this kind of novel renewed during the 20th century and established itself as a means of knowledge alternative to that of the mediatic narrative genres.

Procédés d’écriture du réalisme magique historique de langue Allemande

Hubert Roland — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 16:00:59 +0100

Contemporary critical literature on international Magical Realism overwhelmingly associates this aesthetics with the postmodern and postcolonial currents of thought. This article wants to recontextualize the historical roots of Magical Realism as a poetics in German and European Modernism of the interwar period. To do so, it examines the paradigmatic case study of Elisabeth Langgässer's novel Der Gang durch das Ried [Walking through the Ried] (1936), published under National Socialism, and analyses the particular writing processes that also make of magical-realist allegorisation a politically subversive mode of writing.

Autoesotismo e intertestualità in “House of Mist” di María Luisa Bombal

Iole Maria Caterina Scamuzzi — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:28:19 +0100

Quando María Luisa Bombal decide di comporre House of Mist a partire dall’idea centrale di La última niebla non fa una traduzione, ma compone un’opera nuova che ritiene adeguata alle circostanze. Grazie alla sua competenza nelle lingue e nelle letterature europee, attinge contemporaneamente alle proprie opere in spagnolo e al romanzo inglese vittoriano per creare un prodotto dal gusto esotico ma familiare al pubblico ricevente.

Leopold Bloom nel labirinto della solitudine

Alessandro Raveggi — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:50:49 +0100

The paper discusses the assimilation of Joyce in Ibero-American literature of the late twentieth century, focusing particularly on the Mexican context where the modernist turn introduced by the Irish writer is reconsidered as a "multilingual turn" (Taylor-Batty 2013). This turn not only challenges nationalistic representations but also promotes the use of multilingualism itself. Examining Joyce's influence on authors such as Fernando Del Paso, Salvador Elizondo, and especially Carlos Fuentes, the article reflects on the contribution of this Joycean multilingual turn in reshaping the narrative of national identity. It explores the questioning and renewal of the Spanish language, acknowledging the traceable debts, including those of Borges as a translator and critic of Joyce.

Modernità caraibiche

Francesca Valentini — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:45:53 +0100

Starting from colonial independence, the Caribbean Islands begin a path that will lead to the liberation of national literatures from the Eurocentric paradigm that has influenced official culture for centuries. From the insertion of the autochthonous element, from the delineation of the Neo-Baroque as an art of counter-conquest, to the affirmation of the diatopic variants of the colonizers' languages, modernism in the Caribbean archipelago acquires peculiar characteristics which will lead, to use Silvia Albertazzi's paradigm, to the anthropophagic phase of culture: the European model is in fact copied, rejected and finally adopted by Caribbean cultures through what Ortiz has defined as transculturación. The contribution aims to highlight the peculiar characteristics of Caribbean modernism and postmodernism, in particular in relation to the affirmation of neo-baroque aesthetics in Spanish- and French-speaking literature.

Sospendere il modernismo

Pierluca Nardoni — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:30:27 +0100

Beginning in 1922 a series of events marked the spread of Magic Realism in Europe. The Italian magazine Valori Plastici ceases publication but its main theoretical orientation flows into the new figurative classicism of the artists of the Novecento group. In its most algid and suspended outcomes such classicism corresponds to a general tendency toward Magic Realism, whose peculiar character is the fusion of painting and photography. The most striking consequence of that fusion, still not addressed by scholars, is a kind of genetic shift in painting practice that seems to become as objective and impersonal as a photographic shot. In Italy in 1926 Ubaldo Oppi even became a case for what commentators call a “photo-painting” capable only of tracing magazine photos. In Germany, critic and theorist Franz Roh highlights the virtues of this approach by extolling in the magic realists the tendency to annihilate the pictorial treatment of figuration. Through studying the ways in which the photographic code is assumed in the painting of these artists the paper intends to read European Magic Realism as the first major setback of Modernism. By attempting to reproduce the “non-artistic” elements of photography, soon also discussed by Walter Benjamin, 1920s painting suspends many modernist paradigms, including that of the medium's specificity and autonomy and opens up to a postmedial attitude.

Le manifestazioni sensibili dell’uomo moderno

Raissa Baroni — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 17:33:40 +0100

Gli anni Venti sono segnati da profonde trasformazioni dell’orizzonte sensibile, sia per il rapido sviluppo della tecnica cinematografica, sia per il limite in cui incorrono le arti figurative e letterarie tradizionali nel rappresentare l’esperienza della modernità, con le sue contraddizioni interne e le trasformazioni sociopolitiche in atto, a seguito del primo conflitto mondiale. Sono gli anni, infatti, in cui il teorico del cinema Béla Balázs decreta l’affermazione e l’autonomia di un nuovo tipo di linguaggio, quello della visuelle Kultur, non più soggiogato al primato del logos ma imperniato sulla dimensione visiva e iconica. La cultura visuale, da quel momento, legittima a pieno titolo la capacità dei media visivi di trasformare la nostra percezione della realtà e, in particolare, la facoltà del cinema di contribuire a nuove forme della nostra esperienza del mondo, forme complesse di relazioni reciproche tra reale e immaginario, frammentate e “totali” al contempo. Come osserva Siegfried Kracauer, il cinema diviene voce – o eco – dell’inconscio collettivo della società di massa, specialmente in Germania, dove sorgono, secondo Georg Simmel, sia le metropoli dell’uomo moderno, sia le forme drammatiche di un espressionismo in cui acquisiscono centralità le percezioni della soggettività e la forza del simbolo. Fioriscono gli studi sulle manifestazioni del visibile e sugli stili, sulla forma, sulle «analisi delle manifestazioni superficiali di un’epoca», nei quali la tensione tra uniformità e differenziazione diventa un nodo cruciale per la comprensione del magmatico e disorientante ribollire di contraddizioni del Modernismo. L’uomo moderno delle metropoli, come individuato da Simmel già nei primi anni del Novecento, è un nuovo tipo umano che abita i grandi agglomerati urbani, in cui i processi di frammentazione del presente e di individualizzazione nelle relazioni sociali sono una reazione alla funzionalizzazione determinata dall’economia monetaria occidentale ormai affermatasi. In questo contesto, caotico e razionale, di appiattimento delle relazioni come tecnica di preservazione del sé, entra in gioco una necessità di differenziazione della personalità e di esaltazione delle qualità personali come meccanismo di liberazione e di socializzazione. Ed è per assolvere a questo compito che le manifestazioni esteriori e l’estremizzazione delle apparenze iniziano ad assumere quel portato che Kracauer ricondurrà, in seguito, a manifestazioni superficiali (di superficie) di un inconscio collettivo più profondo, di cui il cinema è in grado, in quegli anni, di farsi portavoce, rendendo conto dei desideri e delle pulsioni che scaturiscono dalla massa e influenzandoli al contempo, in una relazione dialettica di reciprocità. Il presente intervento mira ad indagare alcuni nessi tra la messa in scena inconscia delle manifestazioni esteriori dell’uomo moderno e la funzione del cinema degli anni Venti nell’istituzione delle nuove modalità percettive che porteranno al consolidamento della cultura visuale.

Robert Desnos, Surrealist Radio, and Popular Culture

Jessica Passos — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:38:48 +0100

If the futurists had Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise (1913) and F.T Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La Radia for guides, by 1933, when the latter was published, there was still a dearth of surrealist writings and artistic productions aimed at confronting the challenges posed by radio. Such an anomaly has not been left unnoticed by surrealism scholars. Literature and media scholar Anke Birkenmaier, for instance, asks: “How could the surrealists not be taken in by a medium that seemed to promise liberation from analytical “written” reasoning and grant access to amass audience that had been out of reach until then?” (2009, 358). In this paper, I offer a counterpoint to Birkenmaier’s supposition by uncovering some of the most popular, though forgotten, of Robert Desnos’s contributions to the radio. I show how the interest of this surrealist poet in radio should be understood in contiguity to his work in poetry and engagement with popular culture. I demonstrate how he explores in these fields a capacity that sound, more specifically poetic voice, has to create points, or echoes that animate auditory perception and memory. These points allow the audience to hang on to and experience auditory surprises, as well as participate in cultural debates, and potential reconciliations. Borrowing a term from Marie-Claire Dumas, I call these points accrochages sonores.