Elisabeth Ladenson

AVANT-PROPOS

hen Virginia Woolf made her famous (and strangely phrased) remark W about human nature changing "on or about December 1910," she was presumably not thinking of the birth of Romanic Review, but the journal's inauguration that year was nonetheless one of the many ways in which the world of 1910 heralded the advent of our own era. Columbia's Philosophy Hall, to pick the most immediate architectural example, was built in 1910, the moment at which the recently founded Morningside Heights campus was assuming something like its current form. The conference organizers chose Albert Robida's "La Sortie de l'opera en l'an 2000" for the poster and pro­ gram because it seemed to perfectly capture the peculiar relationship between the past and its future; a century ago our world was anticipated as one in which the opera would still be a favored pastime among the privileged, its patrons still decked out in Belle Epoque evening dress, but shuttled to and from the spectacle in air taxis (a vision of the future that continued to prevail in mid-twentieth-century fantasies ala Jetsons). 1910 saw the deaths of Mark Twain, Tolstoy, King Edward VII, Florence Nightingale, and the painters Henri Rousseau in France and Winslow Homer in the US; among those born during that year were Django Reinhardt, Jean Genet, Jacques Cousteau, Akira Kurosawa, Julien Gracq, Maurice Papon, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jean Anouilh, Samuel Barber, Mother Teresa, bandleader Artie Shaw, philosopher A.J. Ayer, Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton, Vincente Minnelli, American Communist leader Gus Hall, the architect Eero Saarinen, the cartoonist William Hanna of Hanna-Barbera (creators of The Jetsons). Igor Stravinski's Firebird Suite had its premiere in 1910, as did Gas­ ton Leroux's Fantome de l'opera; that year the Parisian theater, dominated by vaudeville, also had a big hit in Feydeau's On purge bebe. Louis Pergaud won the Goncourt prize with De Goupil aMargot: sic transit gloria mundi. More durable publications in France included Colette's La Vagabonde and Ray­ mond Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique; 1910 also saw the English translation of Bergson's Time and Free Will. Ronald Reagan had not yet been born, however. That event would not take place for another year. More pertinently yet for the world of Romanic, Marcel Proust was still the frivolous dilettante would-be mondain translator of Ruskin and author of the slim and peculiar story collection Les Piaisirs et

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1-2 © The Trustees of Columbia University

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-pdf/101/1-2/5/807879/5ladenson.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 6 ELISABETH LADENSON

les jours. Du cote de chez Swann was three years off, and indeed Proust would not fully become Proust until after the War, when he was formally inducted into the ranks of Great Writers with the Goncourt in 1919 for A l'ombre des jeunes fiUes en fleurs, pointedly chosen over a number of war narratives writ­ ten by veterans. The relations between History and the history of academic French studies over the course of Romanic Review's existence are visible in the conference proceedings that follow. Trauma studies, postcolonialist and feminist studies are some of the broad categories through which, in recent years, history as a discipline and as an object of study have filtered progressively into our field(s). Some of the institutional traumas have left traces that can be discerned in the discussions preserved here. It is our hope that these documents may be of use to the organizers of the bicentennial celebration of Romanic Review as they prepare to examine our place in the larger history of the journal and the discipline.

Columbia University

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-pdf/101/1-2/5/807879/5ladenson.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021