Missing Modernism (Gide)

Abstract

Through an examination of the paradoxical case of André Gide—who is at once a towering intellectual figure and, for scholars ranging from Paul de Man and Roland Barthes to Emily Apter and Michael Lucey, a “missing” writer—this article proposes a broad reflection on French modernism as a “missing” aesthetic-political concept. Specifically, it shows how different conceptions of Gide’s relation to modernism and postmodernism inform subsequent and competing definitions of the French literary contemporary. Gide thus comes to represent less an exemplary writer of the modernist literary aesthetic than an exemplary figure for how we now miss modernism, not only in the forms it took in Gide’s work but also more broadly as an idea of a vital cultural politics, of a negativity or an authentic resistant space. Thinking about how that kind of modernism is missing or missed offers another way of thinking about our current relationship to French literary history.