European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine

Harding, J.

Abstract

Modernism is synonymous with cosmopolitanism. In their groundbreaking 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.” 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 attention 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.

Citation

Harding, J. (2015). European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine. Modernism/modernity, 22(4), 811-820. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2015.0063

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 14, 2015
• Publication Date: Nov 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jan 14, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 24, 2017
• Journal: Modernism/modernity
• Print ISSN: 1080-6601
• Electronic ISSN: 1071-6068
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 811-820
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2015.0063
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1394731
• Publisher URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v022/22.4.harding.pdf