Parisian Culture Research Articles

<i>A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960</i> by Colette Colligan (pp 469-471)

<i>A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890–1960</i> by Colette Colligan (pp 469-471)

SMUT AND ART, THEN AND NOW * A Publisher's Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960. By COLETTE COLLIGAN * The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. By KEVIN BIRMINGHAM

SMUT AND ART, THEN AND NOW * A Publisher's Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960. By COLETTE COLLIGAN * The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. By KEVIN BIRMINGHAM

Psychostimulants and Artistic, Musical, and Literary Creativity.

This chapter explores links between psychostimulants and creativity in the arts. These links are set in the context of an overview of the association between mind-altering drugs in general and specific branches of the arts, particularly literature. The economic impact of the psychostimulants both historically and in today's world has been substantial and this is mirrored in the culture of the countries involved with the trade in these special commodities. As with other families of addictive drugs, the psychostimulants are sought out more frequently than is the norm by creative individuals who then may represent the drugs in their art or associate the drugs with their creativity. The creative process is outlined and it is noted that if a drug helps at all with creativity then the specific properties of the drug may link it to a particular stage of the creative process. Stimulants are particularly associated with the evaluation and elaboration stage of the creative process and in particular nicotine and caffeine have been used in this way by writers when putting words on paper. The ability of psychostimulants to boost convergent thinking is the main mechanism at work but this is at a cost as divergent thinking is diminished. The other findings of note in this review are that particular venues based around the consumption of a psychostimulants can act as a creative hub-café culture in Paris and Vienna and early modern Europe-and that particular drugs can come to define an artistic grouping as with the Beats and the group around Warhol who had a preference for amphetamine.

A Publisher's Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

A Publisher's Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

The Art Press and Visual Culture in Paris during the Great Depression: Cahiers d'art, Minotaure, and Verve

This paper discusses several aspects of the “art des masses” concept that flourished in Paris during the Popular Front years (1936–1938) and the contribution of three of the most important Parisian art magazines to the establishment of a visual imagery: Cahiers d'art, Minotaure, and Verve. These magazines addressed in each case the ideological and formalist concerns of their editors in respect to the contemporary discussions on the place of the artist in society, the leftist anti-capitalist discourse against social inequality, and the Popular Front cultural policy as reflected in the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Discussing the period of the 1930s, it is pertinent to consider the conditions of artistic production during the Great Depression along with the sociopolitical turmoil that the rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Joseph Stalin's (1878–1953) dominion in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reinforced. Focusing on Verve magazine, this article seeks to identify the factors that led this publication to put into practice, as early as 1937, the idea of a “museum without walls” that André Malraux (1901–1976) would explore on a theoretical level during the following decades and the editorial lines that this luxurious art magazine adopted in reference to the developments in the artistic and intellectual spectrum only a few years before the outbreak of World War II.

“A perfect present”: A Review of <em>T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year</em>

While knowledge about much of T.S. Eliot’s life and early work has become available in recent years, a major gap has been the profound impact of his 1910–1911 year in Paris. By focusing on both Paris itself and the cultural milieu Eliot found there, Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s book, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year provides important insights into what Eliot called “ un present parfait .” In an original and distinctive style, she suggests the complexities of that pre-War Parisian scene and its influence on Eliot’s thinking and poetry. Hargrove’s study creates a wide-ranging analysis of the arts, politics, and technological changes of the period, and examines Eliot’s personal relationships. Her book incorporates previous disparate suggestions and possibilities into a new, coherent whole that illuminates Eliot’s pre-war experience of Parisian culture and its centrality to the development of his modernism.

Edouard Vuillard: a painter and his muses, 1890-1940

In many of Edouard Vuillard's (1868-1940) most famous paintings, figures are nestled in intimate settings among bold patterns and colours. As the viewer's eye adjusts to the complexity of the scene, the artist's world opens up. At a young age, Vuillard was one of a group of avant-garde painters in Paris who favoured rich palettes and dreamlike imagery. He was equally a member of the literary and theatrical circles that included writers like Marcel Proust and Stephane Mallarme. As his career progressed into the new century, he entered the rarefied society of upper-class French families - many of them Jewish - who collected the new art, published the new poetry, and wrote the new criticism. This beautifully illustrated book examines the master artist's work in the context of a unique circle of friends and patrons between the turn of the 20th century and World War II. Essays by leading scholars explore the artist's relationship with key members of this glamorous social circle, as well as the connections between Vuillard and Proust as two of the world's great observers of a world now lost. A fascinating exploration of artistic culture in Paris before the war, Edouard Vuillard establishes the artist as one of the masters of the modern portrait.

'Dans le palais du son, on fait de la farine': Performing at the Opera during the 1870 Siege of Paris

The period of the 1870 siege of Paris has often been dismissed as a musical vacuum; few new works were written, and many of the capital’s theatres closed. But as the war persisted, initial objections to entertainment were overridden by a desire to escape the tedium of life under siege. In response, the artists of the Opera formed a cooperative to present a series of soirees musicales . The hitherto neglected archives for these concerts offer a fascinating insight not only into the difficulties faced by musicians, but also into the ideological and aesthetic debates that preoccupied the musical culture of Paris in this time of political crisis. Central to these debates was the prominence of the enemy’s music in the concert programmes: investigation of this repertory’s reception reveals the complex nature of French attitudes to German culture during this period. But the unique performing conditions imposed by the siege provoked as much discussion as the chosen repertory. The Opera and its audience were forced to adapt to the absence of costumes, decor, and lighting—a compromise that would bring with it intriguing aesthetic consequences.

Când măiestria este tot ce contează: noţiunea de „artă pentru artă” a lui Théophile Gautier

Abstract This essay traces the beginnings of the formalist notion of “l'art pour l'art”, or art for art's sake, proposed by Théophile Gautier's in the groundbreaking preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier's contributions to Parisian culture spanned almost half a century, beginning with his youthful defense of Romanticism, to the aestheticism of his famous novel „Mademoiselle de Maupin”, to his leadership in the circle of formalist poets associated with Le Parnasse. He wrote on a wide range of topics, including literature, art and dance. However, Gautier is best known for his preface to „Mademoiselle de Maupin” (1834), where he proposes the modern aesthetics of art for art's sake, which would have a big impact on art and literature, all the way to the twentieth-century formalist movement.

Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922: Transatlantic dialogues and the racialized performance of Brazilian national identity

This article interrogates the presence of Afro-Brazilian popular culture in Paris in 1922 in the context of bi-directional transatlantic currents between performance spaces in the French capital and in the city of Rio de Janeiro during this era. It focuses on a group of predominantly Afro-Brazilian musicians, the Oito Batutas, who performed in Paris between February and August 1922. This article highlights how transatlantic dialogues informed the performance of Brazilian “race” in Paris and Brazil in the 1920s. Via an examination of the impact that the Parisian sojourn and the cultural interactions it led to had on the Oito Batutas, both in terms of their musical repertoire and their visual style, it situates their self-representation in Paris within dominant discourses of the era surrounding black US musicians and the African continent. Taking as its point of departure Hermano Vianna's acknowledgement of the varied agents associated with samba's consecration as “national” music, the wider ambition of this article is to bring to light the central role played in this process by transatlantic currents. It argues that it was only thanks to dialogues with “black” Paris that Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, like the samba, were accepted by the Brazilian elite as quintessential elements of a homogenizing “national” culture in the 1930s. This article thus seeks to broaden our understanding of how an “Atlantic” perspective, and more specifically a focus on the Paris-Rio axis, can explain and nuance the shifts in racial self-definition that took place in Brazil in the 1920s, paving the way for samba's canonization as “national” rhythm during the regime of President Getúlio Vargas (between 1930 and 1945).

PIERRE BOULEZ IN INTERVIEW, 1996 (I) MODERNISM, HISTORY AND TRADITION

The following interview with Pierre Boulez contains arresting statements from the composer, casting new light on his musical and historical thinking. New insights emerge in an elaborate discussion of his compositional techniques in Pli selon pli and other main works. Surprising to some readers, Boulez the modernist here admits his constant dependence on personal choices and musical taste. He gives his views on modernism's intriguing relation to the classical musical tradition. He describes the cultural situation immediately following the Second World War and he discusses the complex relation between ‘life’ and ‘work’. Boulez takes up his experience as a conductor and points to the influence of Wagner, Debussy, and Mahler on his later conception of musical form. He finally airs his opinions on some lighter issues like Parisian culture, early music, rock, and opera.

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Mastering the Art of the Sensible: Julia Child, Nationalist

Mastering the Art of the Sensible: Julia Child, Nationalist Kennan Ferguson (bio) Cookbooks are not usually conceived of as political texts, as the demands they make upon us are not traditionally within the realm of politics. They do not declaim, as do manifestos. They do not constrict, as do laws. They do not command accord, as do arguments. Their stipulations are often vague (“until browned”) and their audiences inattentive (many cookbooks, after all, are bought for the ideals of cooking and the beauty of the photography). Indeed, even their narrative form is different from most texts: they fail to tell a story, and one dips into them depending upon one’s time, appetite, and taste. But cookbooks do form who we are in ways large and small. “Tell me what you eat,” Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, “and I will tell you what you are.” In this essay I follow the insights of Jacques Rancière, who attends to politics as the “distribution of the sensible”: the means and effects of what we can sense determine the boundaries of what we can do and who we are. To look at the openings and promises of sensation is to analyze political potentiality and possibility, as well as to note their limits and constraints. Such affective dynamics have material (and materialized) traces, and a cookbook provides a printed, textualized locale of taste and identity. Arts of nationalism “Democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form,” argues Rancière, not because it is indifferent to such formulations, but because “the power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms.”i Rancière privileges people over the modes of governmentality that both claim to represent those people and derive their legitimacy from such claims. In doing so, he seeks to deactivate the historically naturalized affiliation between governmental structures and humans, between the always-partially-illegitimate claim of representation and those thus represented. The traditional and exemplary governmental structure which purports to represent the people is the state. In its most unproblematic forms, the state closely overlaps its powerful counterpart: the nation. When nations and states definitively coincide, state-identities become strongly affective, emotional, and beloved; thus the “French,” for example, begin to self-identify with a state-centric geographic identity. So the nation (France) arises from a juridico-political authority recognized by a consortium of post-nineteenth century statist entities. But how is the nation more than this? That is, short of reducing France to a singular procedural entity (a constitution, for example), how do people inside or outside of France’s political boundaries conceive of – and engage with – such an ideo-identity formation? Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community” provides a start to answering this query; for Anderson, the emergence of a common linguistic normativity (specifically via print capitalism) initiates imaginative demands on a set of people who begin to consider themselves a citizenry.ii But Anderson’s conceptualization not only oversimplifies a confluence of currents, folding a large series of state-making practices into a single European model, but also begs the central question by presuming the very nation that it attempts to explain: what determines the specific makeup of the nation so imagined? For Anderson, the substance of the nation (France) remains less important than the mechanism. Yet without a comprehension of the meanings of “France,” one cannot properly trace what print capitalism brings into the imagination of its created citizens. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson provides one intriguing interpretation of this dynamic: she argues that Paris centered the French imaginary. This is neither the political centralization of the French Government (which undergoes radical changes over the course of the nineteenth century, for example), nor even the standards and centralization of Parisian culture (which does as well). Instead, she argues, the multiple iterations and interwoven pluralities of Parisian cuisine form France.iii Ferguson places this emergence at the intersection of French cooking and the creation of the spatial locale where food would be purchased and eaten by the emergent middle classes: “The early nineteenth century conjunction of the cuisine – the culinary code – and the restaurant, henceforth the site of culinary invention, gave the social organization of the...

De Corbière à Tristan: "Les amours jaunes," une quête de l'identité (review)

Reviewed by: De Corbière à Tristan: “Les Amours jaunes,” une quête de l’identité Heather Williams Rannou, Pascal . De Corbière à Tristan: “Les Amours jaunes,” une quête de l’identité. Paris: Champion, 2006. Pp. 560. ISBN 2745314823. Pascal Rannou's contention that Corbière's work must be understood as the result of cultural hybridity was already familiar to specialists from shorter pieces such as his contribution to Visages de Tristan Corbière, ed. Pascal Rannou (Morlaix: Skol Vreizh, 1995), but it seemed more a hypothesis than a definitive argument. Here, in contrast, we have the detailed, tightly structured and full argument in the form of an updated and revised version of his doctoral thesis of 1998 (initially published by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, at Lille, 1999), and it has earned him the Prix Henri Régnier for 2007. "Cerner la 'bretonnité' éventuelle de notre auteur" (14) may seem a somewhat modest aim. Indeed to many it will seem a marginal, or even irrelevant one, as Corbière criticism tends to see the investigation of Breton culture as unnecessary for appreciating Corbière's originality, and views discussion of his Bretonness as sufficiently unimportant to be left in the ghetto of "Corbière criticism from and for Brittany." However, Rannou shows this attitude to be caught in the trap set by Verlaine over a century ago in Les Poètes maudits, when he claimed to prefer the Breton Corbière to the Parisian. Rannou exposes critics from Brittany, France and beyond as anti-Breton, or shows how they have misunderstood the (Francophone bourgeois) cultural milieu into which Corbière was born, overstated his knowledge of the Breton language and culture, or even been too pro-Breton. Having set the record straight, with a thorough état present, Rannou's contribution in this study is to demonstrate that [End Page 173] Corbière's encounter with Breton culture plays a key part in the multifaceted search for identity and voice that can be traced in Les Amours jaunes. Taking "la problématique identitaire" as its main issue and organizing principle, this book is highly ambitious both in the boldness of its vision and the thoroughness of its investigation. Rannou posits a tripartite movement, from what he calls "Corbière" (the author), to "Tristan," the "voix singulière et multiple" (134), that is the creation and projection of the author. The first stage in the progression from one to the other is a fragmentation of voice that is discernable in the interplay of various "responsables de la parole" (74), which he analyses in a selection of poems. The second is the rejection and denial of the culture of origin, that is the Francophone bourgeoisie of Morlaix (for this Rannou's analysis inventories clothes, food, education, the canon, Romantic poetry, religion, the conception of woman, versification, language in the sense of "bon usage"). This rejection leads to a "désarroi identitaire profond," and a sense of "aliénation" or exile, which Rannou then explores with the help of theorists Kristeva and Sélim Abou. The third stage is a desire for certainty, and the affirmation of an identity, which is where Bretonness comes in, as it offers an alternative culture, just as Bohemian Parisian culture posed an alternative. Breton culture is only one way in which "Tristan" the projection searches for an identity, in a culture "dont son origine familiale aurait dû lui interdire l'accès" (391), but discussion of this particular way is also the crux of the book: "la partie où nous pensons avoir le plus d'informations originales à donner" (391) states Rannou. His assessment of Corbière's likely exposure to Breton culture proves enlightening. An authoritative review of the Bretonisms in his language was long overdue, and sets us straight on calques, syntax, lexical exoticism, supposed "mistakes" and so forth. This provides a definitive correction of Verlaine's 'Breton bretonnant' to "bretonnant approximatif" (405), with Rannou concluding that Corbière had a "connaissance profonde," but not a "connaissance érudite" of Breton culture. More importantly Rannou has finally demolished the dichotomy between Paris and Brittany that was taken for granted by generations of critics, and was also attributable...

TERRA INCOGNITO SURREALISME YOGYAKARTA

Surrealism, which was coined in the First Manifesto o f Surrealism by Andre Breton in 1924, indeed begun and was centred in Paris, before spreading nut to a number o f countries beyond F.urop?, including the Pacific region. Interestingly, in the Surrealist international map published in 1929, France was not there, and it was as i f the USA never existed, whereas it was the Pacific Regioti which was regarded as the centre o f the world. The Parisian Surrealist highly appreciated art from the region. As a mutter offad, there were really artists in a number o f countries, including Indonesia, who were well-accepted and appropriated Surrealism according to their respected culture. In Yogyakarta, surrealists' works o f art emerged phenomenally in the 1970s and have been continuously produced until now. Regarding Indonesian surrealism, M. Dioi Marianto suggests that surrealism exists in any culture and society. The Parisian culture did not come to Yogyakarta directly but through reproductions o f Surrealists’ w o rk printed in Modem Art books. Images o f surrealist works were then seen and adopted by many artists as uxiys o f producing surrealistic works o f art. In this resjyect it is more appropriate to regard the Parisian Surrealism as having triggered surrealist virtual potentials or tendencies that hud indeed been embedded in the culture and sub-cultures streaming through Yogyakarta as a state o f mind. Keyu>ords: Surrealism, Parisian Surrealist, state o f mind

:The Spitz Master: A Parisian Book of Hours

The Spitz book of hours is one of the finest French manuscripts in the collections of the Getty Museum. It is also one of the most original and inventive manuscripts painted in the International style. The Spitz Master, its primary illuminator, allows the narrative of the miniatures to fill the borders, bringing its pages alive in a fresh and engaging manner. In his art-historical research, Gregory Clark places this manuscript's vivid, even witty imagery in the turbulent context of Parisian culture around 1420. Clark also examines the book of hours in the context of mediaeval culture, the book trade in Paris, and the role of Paris as an international centre of illumination. This study is devoted entirely to the manuscript and reproduces all the book's miniatures in colour. It should serve as an introduction to the Spitz Hours for scholars and the general public alike.

Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century

Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century

Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century

Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century

3D Models of Urban Icons: Tracing Benjamin and Koolhaas

Walter Benjamin and Rem Koolhaas developed two significant investigations, which explored the culture of Paris and New York through the analysis of their architectural artifacts. Their research projects successfully construct, from a few meaningful components of the built environment, an understanding of the overall city and its society. The objective of this paper is to address the similarities between the research carried out at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the work of these two acclaimed writers. Our group aims to select urban icons, from different moments and areas in Rio de Janeiro, to be studied in order to understand the city evolution in the XX Century. The distinguished Ministry of Education building is the investigation's prototype, analyzed thorough several 3D models and other digital techniques. We conclude that a thorough study of Benjamin's and Koolhaas' work should be considered a primary support for the interrogation of our own investigation.

Introduction: Symposium on the Life and Writings of Eric Williams

... to inform of [the] past as an essential guide to ... future action.--Eric Williams, 31 August 1962 Earlier versions of the following three papers were presented at the 87th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), held in Orlando, Florida, in October 2002. session was devoted to The Papers of Williams: Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century, and was chaired by Professor Learie Luke of South Carolina State University. In their presentations Professors Selwyn Carrington, Howard University; David Barry Gaspar, Duke University; and Tony Martin, Wellesley College confirm that Williams by his mindset, writings, and activism belongs squarely within the pantheon of African American notables, albeit hailing from the West Indies. Williams was the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and remained in office for a quarter of a century until his death in 1981. He not only led his country to independence from Great Britain (1962) and to republicanism (1976), but was also deeply involved in the movement for Caribbean integration and cooperation from the early 1940s, and was highly respected internationally, serving as one of the founding members of the Governing Council of the United Nations University headquartered in Japan. He was also at one time president of La Societe Africaine de Culture in Paris, France--otherwise known as Presence Africaine--which was associated with President Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, and although the mission never materialized, Williams was one of only four Commonwealth Prime Ministers selected to visit Vietnam, in hopes of mediating that years-long conflict. A noted historian, Williams by most accounts defined the study and greatly affected the writing of Caribbean history when he published his 1944 classic, & Slavery, an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation. By that time, Williams was Associate Professor of Social and Political Science at Howard University, where he compiled and edited its earliest three-volume social sciences textbook. Professor Martin's well-documented essay Eric Williams and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission: Trinidad's Future Nationalist Leader as Aspiring Imperial Bureaucrat, 1942-1944 vividly captures the high-powered circles in which Williams traveled in the 1940s and his eventual appointment to this internationally influential commission. Martin paints a picture of Williams both as scholar and activist who remained attached to his Caribbean roots and who used his position on the commission to demonstrate and advance his knowledge, research, and connections to the region in order to articulate the aspirations of his people. They could never have too much of my work was how Williams characterized his relationship in the 1940s with Dr. Carter G. Woodson and the prestigious Journal of Negro History. David Barry Gaspar's essay examines Williams' contributions to Journal of Negro History, the first of which--The Golden Age of the Slave System in Britain--won the $100.00 prize as the best article published in the journal in 1939. Well-prepared and documented, Williams' articles presented forceful arguments in support of his basic proposition that West Indian slavery and the slave trade were responsible for the rise of the British Industrial Revolution. This interpretation was considered revolutionary by many at that time, and thus Williams succeeded in catapulting himself to the attention of his regional and national constituencies as well as the colonial powers whose tug-of-war over the Caribbean would continue unchecked for decades. And the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, this perspective is even more relevant than perhaps Williams himself would have imagined, given the current controversy igniting passions globally over reparations for enslaved workers and their descendants. Selwyn Carrington's Capitalism & Slavery and Caribbean Historiography: An Evaluation describes how almost sixty years later, the book still informs the ongoing debate on the Atlantic Slave Trade. …