La Nouvelle Revue Française in the Age of Modernism

Abstract

significance of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise twentieth-century French literary publishing has long been recognized and has given rise to an increasing number of studies. turn to sociological approaches to literature, and particularly Pierre Bourdieu's influence French literary history, has also heightened interest reviews, as evidenced by the creation of the review La Revue des revues 1986. This special issue of Romanic Review is thus an extension across the Atlantic of what is a lively field of inquiry France. But it is not only that, for it aims also to export, openly and self-consciously, into the French context a notion--modernism--that is, current usage at least, tightly bound up with the English language and American cultural priorities. If modernite seems unthinkable without reference to the French tradition, le modernisme is, however, much harder to place within those parameters. danger attempting to open trade lines both directions is, of course, that the institutional force behind as something akin to a literary brand is so great that it will swallow La Nouvelle Revue Francaise whole. But that prospect does not reckon with the uncertainties and reservations that eat into modernism, undercutting or countering its potentially expansive force. Propelling La Nouvelle Revue Francaise into the modernist constellation may also have the effect of restraining what has become an increasingly vacuous designation, stretched all number of directions as critics search for ways of identifying the elusive substance of modernism. La Nouvelle Revue Francaise poses a threat to the current ascendancy of this Anglo-American product inasmuch as any claim made now that it is a modernist review risks merely exposing the inconsequential nature of such a claim. pairing of this volume's title does not, therefore, imply any explanatory hierarchy, and the preposition in asks to be understood as a passing through and out the other side. trajectory of the one through the other tells us something about that environment or medium, while the context inflects our understanding of the review's trajectory. They interact ways that challenge the sort of stability that would be implied by reversing the title, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which makes the NRF merely capacious; or by changing the preposition to of, giving The of La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which reduces the NRF to being an exemplar of a larger phenomenon. Of course it remains possible to protest that the concept of the modern was first and foremost a French invention. There is undoubtedly a connection to be made between le moderne and modernism, yet it is not clear that this connection would operate most directly via a term like le modernisme. complexity of this lexical map is touched upon by Fredric Jameson his notes on a theory of modernism, which figure at the end of his major work on postmodernism We need fact to inflect the root adjective into three distinct substances--beyond modernism proper, the less familiar one of modernity, and then of modernization--in order not only to grasp the dimensions of the problem, but to appreciate how differently the various academic disciplines, as well as national traditions, have framed it. Modernism has come only recently to France, modernity only recently to us, modernization belongs to the sociologists, Spanish has two separate words for the artistic movements (modernismo and vanguardismo) etc. A comparative lexicon would be a four- or five-dimensional affair, registering the chronological appearance of these terms the various language groups, while recording the uneven development observable between them. A comparative sociology of and its cultures would alone offer an adequate framework for rethinking modernism today, provided it worked both sides of the street and dug its tunnel from both directions. …