Guillaume Apollinaire Research Articles

The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan

The Shadow of the Object in Peter Pan Eyal Amiran (bio) J. M. Barrie, particularly in his fantasy novel Peter Pan, which is the focus here, arrives late on the late-Victorian scene of eroticized childhood.1 Barrie’s work joins a much-discussed line in British literature, which includes such works as Swinburne’s “The Flogging-Bock” and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, that portrays child beating as erotic (Kincaid, Annoying 235–37) and that, more importantly, sutures mainstream culture to what James Kincaid calls the “long pornographic tradition” of erotic child abuse (236; and see Marcus 60–61). That is not to say that there is anything pornographic about Peter Pan (the play or the book), which always hints ironically instead, if at length. Peter Pan, and Barrie’s earlier works on which [End Page 161] it is based (notably The Little White Bird), share the more knowing and suggestive fascination with perverse sexuality, including the sexualization of children, found in Charles Dodgson’s photography, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, and John Everett Millais’s painting “The Woodsman’s Daughter,” to name some usual suspects.2 Barrie is at once knowing about his interest in the sexualization of children—unable to resist puns and allusions to a painful and complex psychological landscape—and elusive about it or is willing to hide from his self-knowledge through dismissal and humour. Barrie’s defensiveness is built in to the subject matter of perverse sexuality. Steven Marcus concludes that the Victorian literature of flagellation in particular “represents a kind of last-ditch compromise with and defense against homosexuality” (260): it expresses a wish, conscious or not, for identification with a boy who is being beaten, “that is, loved—by another man” (260). This wish is strong in Barrie, but behind it lies an even earlier infantile moment, whose construction (and concealment) is one of the objects of Barrie’s work. For one thing that differentiates Barrie’s episteme from that of earlier British writers preoccupied with child sexuality is the rise in late Victorian-modernism’s culture of understanding early childhood psychology and its relation to linguistics. This new understanding of the child mind both allows a new reading of Barrie and opens directions for reconsidering perverse sexuality in late Victorian-modern literature. I argue here that Barrie is concerned with infantile sounds that reflect psychological crises and that he uses material features of written language, such as its shapes, sounds, and stresses, to construct a psychological portrait of the infantile mind. Barrie’s interest in symptomatic language differs from the general modernist preoccupation with psychology and with linguistics. While early modernist literature uses Oedipal paradigms explicitly, as Joseph Conrad does in Nigger of the “Narcissus,” for example, or as Virginia Woolf does in the opening scene of To the Lighthouse, Peter Pan is governed by paradigms that define Barrie psychologically and that reflect preverbal conflicts of early infancy. When Wendy gives Peter a thimble instead of a kiss because he does not know the word “kiss” (Peter Pan 25), their exchange suggests a libidinal reading of the arbitrariness of language, so that when the acorn button Peter gives Wendy in return, and which she wears around her neck on a string, saves her from the Lost Boys’ arrow, we see (the arrow of) eros attracted [End Page 162] to and fended off by the physical object that represents the arbitrariness of language: for Barrie the physical features that make language arbitrary also make it sexual. Modernist literature is also often interested in material qualities of language (as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Marcel Duchamp’s readymade puns,3 and F. T. Marinetti’s tin books, to name three different kinds), but Barrie’s text develops an idea about the place of sound and shape in infantile consciousness. For many writers of the period, material features of language seem to offer a sanctuary from psychological motivation because they are understood to be mechanical and non-semantic and so are indifferent to psychodynamic logics. But as a line of thought in Freudian and post–Freudian analysis has argued, the indifferent physical properties of language often carry psychological meanings. The visibility of...

Francois Mauriac, journaliste: les vingt premieres annees, 1905-1925

This volume provides the most substantial collection to date of François Mauriac's early critical writing and journalism. It presents some forty-six articles out of a total of more than three hundred published in the twenty-year period before his breakthrough as a novelist thanks to works such as Genitrix (1923) and Le Désert de l'amour (1925). John Flower's Introduction offers a thorough and substantial biographical account of the occasionally faltering initial stages of Mauriac's career as he attempted to establish himself as a writer. He contributed literary reviews and articles for various Catholic journals, including Les Cahiers de l'amitié de France and La Revue hebdomadaire, and more politically oriented pieces for the conservative press, including the Journal de Clichy, Le Figaro, and Le Gaulois. By the end of the collection, in 1925, we find Mauriac contributing short review articles to the Nouvelle Revue française, having finally, after several years of trying, come to the attention of the literary avant-garde led by André Gide and Jacques Rivière. Flower's edition provides a very useful insight into Mauriac's aesthetic, cultural, and political preoccupations as they took shape during the first decades of the twentieth century, although it would have been helpful to have some account of the rationale behind his selection of articles. The collection also serves more broadly as an interesting example of right-wing perspectives on France at the time. For, despite some flirtation with the progressive social Catholicism of Marc Sangier's Sillon movement, Mauriac's writing of the period, as Flower notes, is defined by his conservative instincts. Hostile to parliamentary democracy, he is convinced of the privileged role Catholicism must be given in shaping French society. His conservatism is manifested too in his critique of more avant-garde forms of contemporary culture, as he takes issue with Guillaume Apollinaire's defence of cubism in 1919, and expresses unease over the emergence of the ‘jazz-band’, ‘dont il ne faut pas dire de mal parce que des raffinés en raffolent’ (p. 237). For those familiar with his work, there is nothing especially revelatory in these articles. Indeed, they serve mainly to confirm the impression of the early-career Mauriac as something of a young fogey. They are nevertheless important for our understanding of his subsequent trajectory as a journalist, particulary when, in his articles for the Nouvelle Revue française, we see a sharpened mood of contrariness and intellectual independence that foreshadows the surprisingly radical positions Mauriac will adopt in later years, during the Spanish Civil War, the Occupation, and the Algerian War, a radicalism derived in part, arguably, from his increasingly confident sense of his place in the French cultural order. In sum, this collection allows us to appreciate how Mauriac became interesting almost despite himself, and in defiance of the conservative predispositions that informed his initial interventions in the fields of literature, culture, and politics.

Color moves: art & fashion by Sonia Delaunay

Painter, textile and stage designer and co-conspirator (with her husband Robert Delaunay) of the Orphist movement, Sonia is a heroine of early modernist art and design. Known primarily as an abstract painter and colorist, applied her talents and theories to all areas of visual expression, including graphics, interiors, theater and film, fashion and textiles. A characteristic of Delaunay's work is a vivid sense of movement and rhythm through careful color combination. Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay focuses not only on her art but also her avant-garde fashion designs for her Atelier Simultane in Paris during the 1920s, as well as textiles she designed for the Metz & Co department store in Amsterdam in the 1930s. The book features essays by experts Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti, Matilda McQuaid and Petra Timmer, accompanied by more than 300 paintings, drawings, designs, textiles, garments and photographs. Born Sarah Ilinitchna Stern, in the Ukraine, Sonia (1885-1979) was raised in St. Petersburg, in Russia. After a brief period of study in Germany, she moved to Paris in 1905, and began painting in the Fauve style of Matisse and Derain. In 1909 she met Robert Delaunay, and together they devised a brighter version of Cubism that their friend, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, termed Orphism. Also among their friends was the poet Blaise Cendrars, and one of Delaunay's best-known works is her 1913 accordion-fold artist's book collaboration with Cendrars, La prose du Transsiberien. In addition to her prolific 75-year painting career, she created brilliant textiles and fashion works for nearly three decades.

On an Enigmatic Text by Pierre Bourdieu

A largely unknown commentary by Pierre Bourdieu on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire allows us to explore the non-theoretical, and even non-theorized, aspects of the relationship between the sociologist and literature. The present article begins by analysing Bourdieu's 1995 text as an example of close reading or explication de texte emerging, as it were, from a ‘scholastic unconscious’ dating from the 1950s. The article then proceeds to look at other ways in which Bourdieu has had recourse to literary references in his work (as a repertoire of techniques, as rhetorical elements for an argument from authority, as an equivalent or approach to sociological analysis, as ethical models or invocations). The article argues that, over and beyond his sociological objectification of literature, Bourdieu entertained a range of other relations to literature. These cannot be subsumed under a single theoretical system, but emerge at different times and with different, sometimes apparently ‘anachronistic’, effects.

Making Digital Poetry: Writing with and through Spaces

This article extends work on notions of space developed by media and poetry theorists. It particularly analyzes how contemporary technologies re-define the writing space of digital poetry making by investigating the configuration of this space in the writing of the digital poem. First, I acknowledge the permanent engagement of poetry with its writing spaces. In this respect, I delineate how the transition from oral to print and then to new media culture configure diverse forms of poetry which emerge in and with diverse writing spaces. In oral culture, for instance, poetry is created in an oral space that is the space in which the word is uttered and transmitted. Because the oral poet writes directly to the minds of the audience, the space of poetry writing becomes the space between the poet and his audience. With print culture, poetry is tied to page as a writing space. This space records the spoken words on the page in the form of script that becomes a poem only when readers encounter it. In new media culture, poetry relies on the use of various computer media in the composition, generation, or presentation of the text. The making of digital poetry integrates the zeros and the ones of the digital writing space. As a result, the writing space in which the poem is made manifest fosters a particular perception vis-à-vis the act of writing. Then, I bring up specific works from the early 1900s poetic experiments and the concrete poetry tradition. In this sense, I cite the French and Italian influential poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Filippo Marinetti who raised awareness on the significance of space in the meaning making of their works. My study dedicates more space to the concrete poets’ manifestos from the sixties who theorized the conceptual use of space in their poetries. I specifically analyze how in Eugen Gomringer’s Silence space carries semantic meaning and is endowed with a dual function: it is a container and a contained element which brings words together and holds them. Based upon these theoretical considerations, I frame my understanding vis-à-vis the configuration of space in digital poetry. This article proposes the concept of ›trans-medial‹ space by re-fashioning Bolter’s ›topographic writing.‹ In 1991 new media theorist David Jay Bolter traces the changing technologies of writing and associates the emergence of hypertext with the ›topographic‹ quality of digital writing: the mathematical arrangement of verbal ideas in visual spaces. My concept examines how digital poetry exists, emerges, and is experienced only within a digital space and how it conveys a perception of the writing space as multiple and changeable. This concept also provides a significant paradigm for thinking about the space(s) engaged in the making of digital poetry, insofar as I consider the spaces of the computer screen, source code, and code execution. I explicitly address questions regarding the configuration of space in digital poetry and the interspatial relationship between screen and source code spaces. This digital writing space is made of multiple spaces of encoding and decoding which interconnect with one another and give birth to an in-between space . The primary space is the source code where the poet installs the code which contains the script of the poem. This code has a meaningful existence only when it is encountered, received, and reconceived by the reader. Hence, there is also the screen space where the code becomes work only through the reader’s access. Both spaces are transformative in the sense that they are physically in a morphing state: screen space evolves out of source code space. In this way, this digital writing space is a ›trans-medial‹ space: it forms itself as it self-transforms. My close reading of Brian Kim Stefans’s digital poem, The Dreamlife of Letters , considers the dialectics between the spaces of the poem in its print, index, and onscreen performance versions and, therefore, epitomizes the significance of trans-medial space. The fact that the present technologies of writing call for the trans-medial quality of writing opens up new venues for the reading of the digital works by re-fashioning the concept of the writing space of our digitized world. Moreover, this ›trans-medial‹ approach to space expands the lines of continuity between poetry from oral culture, traditional print, and the present forms of digital expression. Such a perspective also reinforces the theoretical understanding of the close connections between literature and modern media.

War Damage: Four Poets of the First World War

At the British Library, the term ‘war damage’ is used to describe holdings that were lost or destroyed as a result of bombing raids during the Second World War. In this article, my aim is to consider this term both literally and metaphorically: what are the implications of such damage for our understanding of literary works which themselves engage with the theme of the damage inflicted by war? My examples are chosen from the large body of literature to have emerged from the experience of the FirstWorld War, and thus the historical process charted here involves the impact of one war upon literary works produced in the context of an earlier one. It is not the least of history’s ironies that these works were written, in most instances, with the intention of alerting readers to the horror of war and the damage it entails. Four poets of the First World War –Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and David Bomberg –mark different points within a range of complex reactions to the conflict. Their work also has something to say about special collections in libraries and archives, if indirectly or laterally. With the exception of David Bomberg, whose reputation as a visual artist far outweighs his reputation as a poet, each of the above writers has been frequently reprinted and anthologized. It is fair to say that the framing of those republications has positioned Owen as almost exclusively a war poet, while Apollinaire is viewed as a poet who also wrote war poetry. Thomas is different again, generally being seen as having written work that bears on the war but almost always in a very specific sense, which is to say obliquely. Perhaps only one of his poems addresses the war directly, and the shock of its public tone within Thomas’ œuvre confirms its status as an exception to the rule. The poem in question opens:

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (review)

Reviewed by: Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories Linda Simon (bio) Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. 416 pp. ISBN 978-0520270022, $45.00. Gertrude Stein’s reputation as a modernist comes as much from her prescience as a collector as from her literary experiments. At the center of a flourishing Parisian art community before and between the two world wars, Stein counted among her friends and collaborators some of the most famous artists of her time: Picasso and Matisse, most notably, and scores more that included [End Page 826] Juan Gris, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sir Francis Rose, and Pavel Tchelitchew. In 1970, New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition, Four Americans in Paris, which drew from her collections and those of her brothers, Michael and Leo, and sister-in-law, Sarah. Now, more than forty years later, Stein’s connections to art once again have been celebrated, this time (May to September 2011) in San Francisco, by two major exhibitions: The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, a companion show, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Drawing upon sources from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and archives at Yale, the University of Texas, and the University of California, Seeing Gertrude Stein assembled more than two hundred portraits, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, drawings, and memorabilia to create a wide-ranging exploration of Stein’s visual world. Co-curators Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford, and Tirza True Latimer, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at California College of the Arts, organized the exhibition into five over-lapping and intersecting stories that form the sections of this beautifully produced catalogue. Each section contains illuminating essays, thirty in all, by Corn or Latimer, who write that their “initial goal was to animate Stein’s visual archive, to make it tell some new stories” (7). That goal is amply fulfilled; the stories cohere into more than a pictorial biography to reveal Stein’s intellectual and aesthetic interest in perception, and her ongoing reinvention of her personal environment and public image. Drawing upon the most recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies, and bringing a fresh critical perspective from their disciplines of art history and visual studies, Corn and Latimer offer a vibrant, insightful consideration of Stein’s identity as a writer, woman, and arbiter of the arts. The first section, “Picturing Gertrude,” depicts portraits of Stein in paint, bronze, and photographs from the time she sat as a girl for her uncle David Bachrach, founder of a prestigious Baltimore photography studio, until her death in 1946. Included are Picasso’s indelible 1906 painting; Alvin Langdon Coburn’s famous gum platinum print of a mountainous young Stein, taken in 1913; a group photograph of Stein and her embryology class from 1897; and many portraits—by Jo Davidson, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Carl Van Vechten—that no doubt will be familiar to readers of Stein biographies. Corn draws our attention to the feminized image of Stein—sensuous, dressed in flowing robes, with smooth, flawless skin—created by such artists as photographer Henri Manuel and sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. That image changed dramatically after 1926, when Stein cut her hair and adopted distinctly masculine [End Page 827] dress, giving artists “license to theatricalize her maleness and make portraits of a man-woman rather than, as earlier, of a woman who did not act like one” (53). With Toklas portrayed in “heels, hyper-feminized dresses, and flamboyant hats,” the two women, Corn asserts, “conspicuously fashioned themselves as husband and wife” (51). Certainly they played out those gender roles in their homes, where Toklas took charge of decorating, cooking, gardening, and shopping. “Domestic Stein” gives us a glimpse of the Stein-Toklas household, including some candid photographs with friends and a regal-looking Basket. The two women kept albums of snapshots, many taken by Stein, who was not interested in photographs as an art form, but rather as visual evidence of friendships and experiences. There was no lack of...

Borges réécrit Apollinaire, ou la genèse d’une appropriation

It is well known that one of the ways in which Borges appropriates foreign literature (European as well as American) is by translating it, which means that he rewrites it in an irreverential way : Alan Pauls has argued that translation can be considered as the central component of Borges’s work (Helft and Pauls 2000, p. 210). Researchers such as Efraín Kristal (2002), Patricia Willson (2004) or Sergio Waisman (2005) have portrayed Borges as someone who performed his translations according to the major principles underlying his own literary project, and who was very much aware of the important role recreation and transgression were fulfilling in the cultural field. This interpretation has clear affinities with Borges’s views on authorship and originality, two concepts he challenged. My paper will deal with the translation made by Borges of “Le Matelot d’Amsterdam,” an original story by Guillaume Apollinaire (L’Hérésiarque et Cie, 1910). I will focus on the traces left by the source text in Borges’s own story “Emma Zunz” (El Aleph, 1949). This example, briefly mentioned in Efraín Kristal’s study (2002, pp. 111-113), offers the opportunity to determine to what extent Borges’s translation activity, in both a theoretical and a practical sense, has been the point of departure for newness. Though without doubt Borges was convinced that translation plays a role that goes beyond the mere transposition from one language system into another, we also should warn against what is becoming a commonplace in literary criticism, against which some researchers (Marietta Gargatagli, for instance) have already reacted. By defining the aims at the origin of the translation strategy in one particular case, I hope to clarify the relationship between Borges and Western literature.

Perceiving Text and Image in Apollinaire's Calligrammes

Literary scholars have recently become increasingly interested in the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms involved in reading, and have incorporated scientific research in this area into their critical approaches to texts. This article argues that such an approach is particularly appropriate when authors explicitly engage with the way in which their texts are visually taken in and processed. This is the case with Guillaume Apollinaire, whose calligrammes are informed by a theory of visual-verbal simultaneity stipulating that the reader should be simultaneously aware of both textual and pictorial aspects of the poem. Experimental research in the psychology of reading and picture perception is used to assess this theory of simultaneity, and specifically to challenge Michel Foucault's claim that reading and viewing are mutually exclusive processes. The article concludes by considering further applications of psychological research to word and image studies.

New "Lyrical Sentience" of Guillaume Apollinaire and "Lyrical Truth" of Louis Delluc

The article is devoted to the period of forming of the first wave of French Avant-guard (Film Impressionism). It considers the influence of Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century, on the theoretical conception of Louis Delluc, an outstanding film critic and director. Particularly, the closeness of Appolinaire's "lyrical sentience" and Delluc's "lyrical truth" is analyzed.

In the Beginning Was the Image, before the Beginning Was the Avant-Garde ...

By virtue of its position-avant, in a montage of texts- should the preface not aspire to be an artifice worthy of being dubbed avant- garde (by the voice of the reader)? threat rather than an invitation, an attempt to soften up an entrenched enemy, a plan for the murder of the watchmen-avant- garde, garder, regarder ... where to begin? PREFACE: Preface for a Proposal for an Avant- Garde film. Title: A GIRL, a TREE, the FALL. Titles: Handwritten (not in copperplate style), white on black. Dedication: To Jean- Lucifer Godard and Guillaume Apollinaire. Epigraph: Handwritten in smudged crimson blood- spattered red ink over black- and- white still from the film Le Petit Soldat: Il faut imaginer les victimes heureuse [It is necessary to imagine the victims happy]. Sound track over titles: Blonde ... by Guesh Patti. Image 1 The liminal of the forest, a huge pine tree, reverse- silhouetted in light, towering above the canopy, the edge of darkness below. mythic image. Posed on the threshold between order and adventure. On a crucifix of bleached tree boughs, one painted in lush gold leaf, rests an ea gle's nest; as neatly woven as a Pathan girl's veil. male voice intones: Is this the tree of life, or tree of death? Music: Electronic Wind, from the sound track of the film Fire in the Water. Image 2 lovely young girl, long blond hair (Rus sian peasant style), in jeans and arctic coat, with climbing spikes on her boots and a rope around her waist and the tree, starts her climb from the base of the tree ... dissolve ... she arrives at the huge nest. Taking out a multicoloured rope from her rucksack, she ties it to the golden bough and flings it into space, where it falls uncoiling in slow motion like a molecule of DNA, creating life. Music: Pink Floyd, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, from Wish You Were Here. Image 3 Several pairs of hands tying planks of wood, steel hammers, bags of nails, ropes, buckets, cartons of food, plastic containers of water; fastening them to the rope before it is hauled above by the girl. Music: Miles Davis, Ascenseur pour l' echafaud. Image 4 white- headed ea gle circling in the sky above the nest. Music: Stockhausen, Light. Image 5 panoramic view from the nest. The margin of the arctic, the once treeclad tundra now an industrial wasteland; scattered as far as the eye can see [with] the splintered remains of a million felled trees. Huts. Machines. Diggers. TV news cameramen. Music: Sibelius: Finlandia. Image 6 The tree house is complete. Under her makeshift roof, the girl sleeps. At peace with herself. Music: Kraftwerk: Trans- Europe Express. Images 7- 70 (As we can easily imagine the rest of the REAL, unfolding narrative, we do not need to see it.) Instead we imagine with the girl; we enter into and witness her dreams of how it might have been if she had full control of the images created of this consummate per for mance of hers, living in her nest for three months or so- the film she would have made of the joy she had known in life and nature, and the misery now, of the death of the tree of life. Over this long montage of sensual images, a desolate sound track: a man's voice describing the impossibility of making a film that will change anything. That time cannot be reversed. The tree once cut down, has gone. Avant or apres ... we live and die on the pivot word: Time. Music: Verdi's Requiem. Image 7 The body of the girl lying on the ground next to the bole [trunk] of the tree, where she has fallen. Slow pan toward the machine that will cut down the tree, next to the ambulance, blue light circling. Music: Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. Image 8 The ea gle circling in the sky above the canopy of the few remaining trees of the ancient forest. …

““Circe”” and Surrealism: Joyce and the Avant-Garde

Writing the "Circe" episode of Ulysses in Paris, Joyce expressed interest in the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, for which Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term "surrealist." Les Mamelles' husband's birth of 40,050 children in a single day is paralleled not only in Bloom's instantaneous production of eight metallic children but also in the episode's unceasing generative energy. If the massive production of children in Les Mamelles is purposive, the production of "Circe" is out of control, embodying both the pleasures and the dangers of industrial capitalism, an endless production of commodities that seems to offer change but generates instead a phantasmagoria. Reading "Circe" and Les Mamelles alongside Walter Benjamin's understanding of the effects of the capitalist city—explored in the Arcades Project in Paris while Joyce was finishing Ulysses there—allows us to see how "Circe" moves beyond the limits of Surrealism and offers another way of conceiving of the avant-garde.

Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne (review)

Reviewed by: Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne Katharina Hagena (bio) Das Neue Sehen: Carola Giedion-Welcker und die Sprache der Moderne, by Iris Bruderer-Oswald. Berne: Benteli Verlag, 2007. 462 pp. $51.53. What bliss for a biographer—Joyceans especially will be able to empathize—to decide to write about a person’s life and then have the children of that person offer for examination boxes of letters and documents that have never been read, let alone published before. What a feast! This, or something like it, must have happened to Iris Bruderer-Oswald. Her book on the renowned art critic—and friend of Joyce’s—Carola Giedion-Welcker, published in 2007, was fed by many rich sources, and it grew strong: four hundred pages of text and sixty more including footnotes, a bibliography, and an appendix. Bruderer-Oswald’s biography deals with Giedion-Welcker’s life as well as her work. In fact, both are inseparably intertwined, as Giedion-Welcker seemed wont to befriend the artists she admired and about whom she wrote. She was interested in their works as well as their lives and curious about what and in what way they thought. She drew her inspiration not only from their works but also from the conversations she had with them. If necessary, she supported and helped them. The German-born Giedion-Welcker and her Swiss husband, the famous architect Siegfried Giedion, were a very hospitable couple who led something like a twentieth-century salon. All the avant-garde artists of modern Europe seem to have gathered in their Swiss house in the Doldertal in Zurich, especially during the Third Reich, when many of them were shunned or even persecuted by the Nazis. Gidieon-Welcker knew them all: Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, Alfred Jarry, Paul Eluard, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Walter Gropius. Bruderer-Oswald tackles every book and every essay Gidieon-Welcker ever wrote; she illustrates Giedion-Welcker’s theses, theories, and thoughts by discussing letters written to or by this dedicated art critic. In her letters, Giedion-Welcker expresses her passion for art and her enthusiasm for new ways of seeing, writing, sculpturing, painting, and constructing. Her language is vivid and strong. She loves little details; for example, we learn that on one of her visits to Brancusi’s house, the sculptor cooked her a dish “with white, soft cheese” (204). She mixes expressions from her hometown Cologne with Swiss German constructions—and she generously ignores German rules of punctuation—which, of course, immediately reminds us of Ulysses and thus brings us to her very special relationship with Joyce, his family, and his writings. We hear about their first encounter in 1928, when Sylvia Beach [End Page 394] introduced them and Joyce asked the art historian to come for tea to his house in Rue Grenelle. I cannot help feeling a little distressed about this first encounter: Joyce exercising Irish charm and courtesy on a complete stranger, and she taking it in a very Germanic way, losing no time on rituals of politeness, and visiting him promptly that very afternoon. But they did become very close friends, so all must have gone well, and I should rid myself of my bourgeois qualms. There are a number of well-known and also some unknown anecdotes about Joyce in Zurich and in Paris included in the book. For example, after a merry evening in the “Seerose,” Joyce laid himself flat on his back on top of Giedion-Welcker’s car and was driven home while watching the stars. This biography includes a lengthy chapter on Giedion-Welcker’s relationship with Joyce and his work. It is remarkable how soon she realized that Ulysses was a monumental piece of art and how certain she was about this. She was a pioneer in what by now has become an industry. As an art historian, Giedion-Welcker recognized at once Joyce’s new way of seeing and creating reality and wrote about it, too. In an article for the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, she sees Ulysses as part of the avant-garde: time, space, simultaneity, dynamics—all the key...

Picasso and the allure of language

Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso had close friendships with writers and an abiding interest in the written word. This groundbreaking book, which draws on the collections of Yale University, traces the relationship that Picasso had with literature and writing in his life and work. Beginning with the artist's early associations with such writers as Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy, the book continues until the postwar period, by which time Picasso had become a worldwide celebrity. Distinguished authorities in art and literature explore the theme of Picasso and language from historical, linguistic, and visual perspectives and contextualize Picasso's work within a rich literary framework. Presenting fascinating archival materials and written in an accessible style, Picasso and the Allure of Language is essential reading for anyone interested in this great artist and the history of modernism.

‘Say it with Georges Auric’: Film Music and theesprit nouveau

AbstractAlthough he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire'sesprit nouveauhe was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 filmA Nous, la Liberté!Although the music was composed after theesprit nouveaumovement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

The livre d'artiste in Twentieth-Century France

A recent exhibition at the British Library, Breaking the Rules (2007-08), explored early-twentieth-century avant-garde journals and books as a space of experimentation and subversion. The exhibition highlighted the creation of a new aesthetics juxtaposing visual and verbal elements, from Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes and Futurist poem-paintings to Dada and constructivist journals, surrealist book objects and livres d'artistes. The term livre d'artiste will be used here to designate various forms of the twentieth-century book in France as a collaboration between poets and painters or texts and images. Given the multiple origin of the livre d'artiste, critical studies are situated at the intersection of several disciplines: the history and technique of the book, art history and criticism, literary studies and semiotics. Three key issues dominate critical debate on the livre d'artiste, relating to its definition (limits and legibility) and historical development (from the livre illustre to the livre objet); its production (the material book); and its interpretation (relations between words and imagtes).

Modernist Melancholy

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde and a melancholic, past-oriented traditionalism deserves to be re-examined. This essay aims to complicate this binarism by highlighting a moment within the history of modernism when an enthusiasm regarding the future fused with a melancholy regarding the past. Both Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia were deeply committed to the avant-garde discourse of the new, yet a number of their works in the years after 1912 harbour an ambivalence that compels us to rethink the simple divide between modernism and anti-modernism and suggest that some of the central figures of modernism were simultaneously bound to the sentiment of nostalgia.

A Cubism reader: documents and criticism, 1906-1914

With radical formal innovations that scandalized the European art world, cubism revolutionized modern art and opened the path toward pure abstraction. Documenting the heady first years of this profoundly influential movement, A Cubism Reader presents the most comprehensive collection of cubist primary sources ever compiled for English-language publication.This definitive anthology covers the historical genesis of cubism from 1906 to 1914, with documents that range from manifestos and poetry to exhibition prefaces and reviews to articles that address the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to the movement. Most of the texts Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten have selected are from French sources, but their inclusion of carefully culled German, English, Czech, Italian, and Spanish documents speaks to the international reach of cubist art and ideas. Equally wide-ranging are the writers represented - a group that includes Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Andre Salmon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, and many others.These diverse selections - unabridged and freshly translated - represent a departure from the traditional view of cubism as shaped almost exclusively by Picasso and Braque. Augmented by Antliff and Leighten's insightful commentary on each entry, as well as many of the articles' original illustrations, A Cubism Reader ultimately broadens the established history of the movement by examining its monumental contributions from a variety of contemporary perspectives.

1913: The Cradle of Modernism by Jean-Michel Rabaté

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1101 Leibniz, Jean Baptiste Rene Robinet, Bichat, and SirWilliam Lawrence, among others. In the second part Koelb approaches theways inwhich a dead past can affect the living present by examining Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Keats's Endymion (1817), Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and Gautiers Spirite (1865). In Part m of his analysis Koelb focuses on 'the interaction ofmatter and spirit as a process of incarnation inwhich bodies take on the character of texts and texts the characters of bodies' (p. 12). Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810), Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and various tales by Poe are offered as evidence of the demonic underside of a resurrection of the fleshand a death thatbrings one into life' (p. 145). Koelb's engaging thesis argues for an original connection between theApostle Paul and 'theRomantic century, but itisat times tenuous and even overstated.With regard to an age of revolution, one also questions the veracity ofKoelb's claim that 'thepolitical history of the time [...] had primarily indirect effectson thematters re levant' tohis enquiry (p. xi). However, in a study that admits topresenting a 'sample' that is 'not meant tobe exhaustive but rather illustrative' (ibid.), his selective analysis suggests an interesting currentwithin Romantic thought, prose, and poetry. University of Warwick Brian Haman 1913' The Cradle ofModernism. By Jean-Michel Rabate. Oxford: Blackwell. 2007. viii+246 pp. ?50 (pbk ?19.99). ISBN 978-1-4051-5117-7 (pbk 978 1-4051-6192-3). 1913 takes itsplace in a series of studies thatdissect cultural modernism by taking one year for an analytic snapshot. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Harrison's 1910: The Emancipation ofDissonance, Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, and Marc Manganaro's Culture, 1922. As Rabate notes, his own chosen annus mirahilis has had its fair share of attention, with books by Frederic Morton and Virginia Cowles, and the weighty three-volume collection of essays edited by Liliane Brion-Guerry {VAnnee 1913: lesformes esthetiques de Vceuvred'art a la veille de lapremiere guerre mondiale). But Rabate's principal model is inmany ways Marjorie Perloff's magisterial The FuturistMoment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and theLanguage ofRupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), which takes the avant-garde preoccupation with techniques of'simultaneity as a spur to itsown presentation of themultiple currents converging in the vortex of avant-guerre European modernism. Like Perloff, Rabate wears his formidable scholarship lightly,and the pleasure to be gained from reading 1913 derives from the admirable fluencywith which different and sometimes unexpected strands of this protean cultural moment arewoven together. Of the many writers discussed here, it is perhaps Fernando Pessoa who best exemplifies in this pivotal year 'the difficult birth ofmodernism' (p. 204) as he looks for 'ways to combine his new-found ventriloquism with movements likeneo classicism, late Romanticism, Whitmanian lyricism, paganism, and modernism' 1102 Reviews (p. 155). In 1913 history ison the turn and itsactors are caught looking both back ward and forward, as thatmelange of tendencies indicates. Modernism emerges here as a volatile swirl of traditional and modern pieties in a world that finds itself'increasingly interconnected' (p. 11) but that also sees cosmopolitan values yielding increasingly to aggressive forms of nationalism. The year 1913 may mark 'the inception of ourmodern period of globalization' (p. 1), but it witnesses too the persistence ofRomantic fascinations, most damagingly in themystique ofwar and violence (as Rabate notes, artists such as Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska went towar because theywanted to?'All three could have easily avoided the draft, for reasons of nationality [...] or distance' (p. 208)). This 'emergentmodernism' made its own contribution to the belligerence of 1913, then?'the modern spirit appears as vivisective', Rabate accurately observes (p. 141)?and for that reason ithas undoubtedly brought us 'bad luck', as 1913 an nounces at the outset. Indeed, the curious fusion of the atavistic and thedefinitively new that underlies this early modernism and that is so distinctively announced in Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (premiered that year) fostered occultism and superstition at the very same time as itmystified the technologies of...

Apollinaire's “Zone,” Catholicism, and the Paradox of French Modernity

AbstractSince at least the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, modernity in France has been understood primarily in terms of a rupture with Catholicism. Through a close reading of the poem “Zone,” this article shows how Guillaume Apollinaire's poetics challenges the conventional notion of modernity-as-rupture by exposing Catholicism's persistent residuality into the modern era. Instead of breaking with France's Catholic past, Apollinaire's modernism poetically displaces it, thereby holding in suspension both modernity's desire for rupture and the object with which it seeks to break.