6 A modernism that has not yet been
-
Christopher Bush
Abstract
This essay discusses Victor Segalen’s collection Stèles (1912) and its close connection to China, and considers French modernism in global terms. Segalen’s literary and historiographic indeterminacy reveals the extent to which standard literary histories rely on a spatial imaginary of geopolitical unevenness that articulates itself along the terms of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Bush argues that Segalen is neither here nor there, his work is in French but not ‘of France’ as a closed-off nation, and is one of many multipolar actors of modernism. Framing French modernism as largely and already transnational and global in its scope, practice, circulation and impact, Bush proposes French-language modernism – distinct from the French nation-state or from Francophonie – as a lens through which to think modernism in global terms, more effective than the dominant in scholarship Anglophone modernism.
Abstract
This essay discusses Victor Segalen’s collection Stèles (1912) and its close connection to China, and considers French modernism in global terms. Segalen’s literary and historiographic indeterminacy reveals the extent to which standard literary histories rely on a spatial imaginary of geopolitical unevenness that articulates itself along the terms of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Bush argues that Segalen is neither here nor there, his work is in French but not ‘of France’ as a closed-off nation, and is one of many multipolar actors of modernism. Framing French modernism as largely and already transnational and global in its scope, practice, circulation and impact, Bush proposes French-language modernism – distinct from the French nation-state or from Francophonie – as a lens through which to think modernism in global terms, more effective than the dominant in scholarship Anglophone modernism.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
