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Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 24 January 2017 Version of attached le: Published Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Harding, J. (2015) 'European Avant-Garde coteries and the Modernist Magazine.', Modernism/modernity., 22 (4). pp. 811-820. Further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2015.0063 Publisher's copyright statement: Copyright c 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press. This article rst appeared in Modernism/modernity 22:4 (2015), 811-820. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine Jason Harding Modernism/modernity, Volume 22, Number 4, November 2015, pp. 811-820 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2015.0063 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/605720 Access provided by Durham University (24 Jan 2017 12:36 GMT) Review Essay European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine By Jason Harding, Durham University MODERNISM / modernity The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist VOLUME TWENTY TWO, Magazines: Volume III, Europe 1880–1940. Peter Brooker, NUMBER FOUR, Saschu Bru, Andrew Thacker, Christian Weikop, eds. PP 811–820. © 2015 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxxiv + 1471. JOHNS HOPKINS $250.00 (cloth). UNIVERSITY PRESS Modernism is synonymous with cosmopolitanism. In their ground- breaking collection of essays, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argued: “Conspicuous in the age of Modernism is an unprecedented acceleration in the intellectual traffic between nations . in this climate, international exchanges and unacknowledged borrowings flourished.”1 Successive waves of transnational avant-garde movements—symbolism, expressionism, cubism, Futurism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism— swept across Europe. In Extraterritorial (1972), George Steiner directed attention to the polyglot milieu of twentieth-century literature shaped by exile and expatriation, and, following the upheavals occasioned by two world wars, the displacement of millions of refugees. Steiner’s at- tention to a modern multilingualism as a condition of “extraterritoriality” indicates that concepts like “modernism” may be more culture-bound and stubbornly resistant to translation than we think. Modernist art thrived in cities—in cafés, private clubs, salons, galleries, theaters, libraries, bookshops, publishing houses, and maga- zines—or in the “metropolis,” as it is customary to say in modernist studies, although the term should be used with discrimination (the entire population of Zürich in 1880 would fit into modern-day Wem- bley Stadium). Little magazines were arguably the key institution of modernism constituting the social channels that energized artistic communities and facilitated the dissemination of ideas and styles. The third volume of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, which examines a large selection of twentieth-century European periodicals, recruits two new editors—Saschu Bru and Christian Weikop—to strengthen an approach MODERNISM / modernity 812 to wider comparative angles of intellectual history. This undertaking presented the editors with considerable theoretical and methodological challenges. Volume 1 covered British and Irish magazines and concluded in 1955, embracing the entire run of Scrutiny (which, aside from a brief flirtation with the poetry of Ronald Bottrall, did not champion creative writing). Volume 2 on North American periodicals extended to 1960, taking in its stride the smart middlebrow New Yorker and Esquire magazines. Volume 3 stops abruptly in 1940 and focuses on the historical avant-garde. Brooker’s general introduction confronts Peter Bürger’s over-simplified theorizing of an impassable divide between the political activism of the avant-garde and the bourgeois meliorism of modernism. Brooker seeks to pull the vanguard closer to the modernist mainstream by employing Raymond Williams’s pluralism of “alterna- tive,” “oppositional,” “emergent,” or “residual” cultural formations, turning down the political temperature of pre- and postwar Europe to lukewarm. When Brooker says that “the avant-garde migrated in a rhizomatic movement across national and international borders” (15), one wonders how these non-hierarchical networks intersected with fascism and communism, crucial contexts for the understanding of Italian and Russian Futurism. Several thousand European cultural magazines were published in the period from 1880 to 1940. Faced with an almost impossible task of navigating a clear path through periodicals so dis- similar in form and function, Brooker’s introduction keeps an admirably cool head as he plunges into the labyrinthine “twisted paths” (2) of sixty years of European history (political, socio-cultural, economic, technological). He rejects a “totalizing survey,” adding that “the many magazines discussed here do not add up to one story; indeed they resist the very impulse to search for or enforce a single narrative” (21). This is wise, especially when the narrative to be imposed would be an Anglophone one, inevitably heavily weighted towards American and British scholarship (of the fifty-six chapters here, forty-two were contributed by individuals working in English- speaking institutions). The editors’ selection of some 300 magazines from nineteen European countries does represent a significant shift in focus from the earlier volumes. Only one of The Criterion’s four like-minded European collaborators on an international fiction prize in 1930 is accorded a place in this volume. This decision is evidence of a bias towards the editorial policies and polemics of programmatic, coterie, low-circulation, and short-lived avant-garde magazines, thereby downplaying the significance of the more eclectic and stable postwar critical reviews. Brooker suggests that this volume is “less about determining categories than encouraging a field of grounded analysis” (21), and anyone working in modernist studies must record their gratitude for the herculean editorial labor that has gone into this 1,500-page volume—a gateway to further studies in this field. This review follows the structure of the editorial organization of modernist magazines into eight regional sections, although my engagement with the detail of each section is necessarily selective and partial. I. France Brooker’s introduction to the opening section on France states that Paris was at the “geo- cultural centre” (25) of modernism. Christopher Butler has noted that many accounts of mod- ernism “tend to privilege the relationship between the Anglo-American tradition and France.”2 Could there have been a defamiliarizing advantage in beginning the volume in Berlin or Vienna, Milan or Moscow? The chapters on French journals tend to reinforce rather than interrogate the legend of bohemia that has been depicted by English-speaking writers from George Moore to Ernest Hemingway. Diana Schiau-Botea colorfully evokes Montmartre as a “‘paratopic’ area, where working-class people and poor artists mixed with prostitutes, pimps, drunkards and delinquents” (42). “Paratopy” involves “a difficult negotiation of place and non-place” (42n); in this case, a real place blossoming in the traveler’s imagination. Little magazines were an essential accoutrement for a Parisian fin de siècle dandy. From the countless evanescent petites revues associated with symbolism, Alfred Vallette’s Mercure de France emerges as the most durable (in its heyday, Remy de Gourmont’s essays were a star attrac- tion) and La Revue blanche as not only the most elegant but also the most politically engaged (it was forthright in defense of Captain Dreyfus). Yet neither of these magazines were straightforward review essay advocates for symbolist aesthetics. Alexia Kalantzis’s chapter helpfully characterizes the aspira- 813 tions of Mercure de France as a “high quality disinterested criticism which allowed for a broad cultural cohesion far from the exclusive club of Symbolist ‘little magazines’” (71). On the other hand, La Revue wagnérienne, a rallying ground for symbolists, is not examined in this volume. In the years leading up to the First World War, Paris was the site of notorious attacks on the literary and artistic establishments. Guillaume Apollinaire is a nodal figure in this section. Willard Bohn’s chapter describes Apollinaire’s Les Soirées de Paris as “the most important ‘little magazine’ in Paris” (125) in spite of its struggle to secure readers. Apollinaire’s calligrammatic poetry and his influence as a cultural impresario arguably loom larger in the history of the Eu- ropean avant-garde than in the history of modernism. At the time of his death, Apollinaire
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