Tradition and / or modernity: Literary and cultural perspectives (1660 – 1940)

conference programme

Location: Faculty Club Huyze Heyendaal, Geert Grooteplein-Noord 9 6525 EZ Nijmegen, telephone (024) 361 12 82

All sessions will take place in the Beelkamer, unless otherwise indicated.

Thursday, May 26

09.30 – 10.00 WelcomeProf. dr. Alicia C. Montoya

10.00 – 11.00 Key-note 1: Quelques réflexions sur les usages du mot 'tradition'Prof. dr. Véronique Gély (Université Paris-Sorbonne)Chair : Prof. dr. Maarten De Pourcq

11.00 – 13.00 Session 1: Ancients versus ModernsSession chair: Prof. dr. Maarten De Pourcq

Confronting tradition and traditions of confrontation: Reprising the Quarrel of the Ancients and ModernsDr. Helena Taylor (University of Exeter)

‘Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques’ : The poetics of André ChénierMaria Klimova, MA (Radboud University)

Modernity without the Enlightenment, or: how to rethink the history of the 18th centuryJordy Geerlings, MA (Radboud University)

The national manifestation of Modernism: Russian symbolismProf. dr. Olga Pchelina (Volga State University of Technology)

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.30 Session 2: Modernity between art and politicsSession Chair: t.b.a.

Towards a just and equitable society: Modernity and virtue in 18th-century ItalyDr. Giulia Delogu (Università Ca’Foscari di Venezia)

The modern genius: Between art and politicsYoel Mitrani, MA (Sciences Po, Paris)

The state of letters: Conceptualizing the status quo in the Göttingen Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften and the Encyclopédie méthodiqueFloris Solleveld, MA (Radboud University)

15.30 – 16.00 Tea / coffee

16.00 – 17.30 Session 3: Modernity in the visual arts Session chair: dr. Dennis Kersten

The art and criticism of hysteria: Modernity as polemics and violence in the fin-de-siècle art pressProf. dr. Juliet Simpson (Coventry University)

Modernity and national identity: The Case of Clarice Zander’s 1933 exhibition of British contemporary artVictoria Souliman, MA (Université Paris 7 – University of Sydney)

17.30 – 18.30 Key-note 2: Catholic Enlightenment and Tridentine Reform: A Quest for Continuity Prof. dr. Ulrich Lehner (Marquette University)Chair: Jordy Geerlings, MA

19.00 – 21.30 Conference dinner for speakers, Restaurant ‘Beau’ (Driehuizerweg 285, Nijmegen).

Friday, May 27

9.00 – 10.00 Key-note 3: The Aesthetic Taboo: Race, Anthropology and Modernity’s PrimitiveProf. dr. David Lloyd (UC Riverside)Chair: dr. Marguérite Corporaal

10.00 – 11.30 Parallel session 4: Tradition, modernity, and the region (Titus Brandsma kamer)Session chair: dr. Helleke van den Braber

Between two worlds: Tradition and modernity in the Irish local colour tale of the 1890sDr. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University)

Time-frames of tragedy: Temporalities, modernisation, and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the seaSeán Hewitt, MA (University of Liverpool)

‘When the Irish were cave-men’: Contestations of Nativist Discourse and Rural Modernity in Post-Independence Irish DramaRuud van den Beuken, MA (Radboud University)

10:00-11:30 Parallel session 4: Temporalities of modernity(Robert Regoutkamer)Session chair: t.b.a.

The counter-revolutionary construction of modernity: Groen’s eighteenth centuryDr. Matthijs Lok (University of Amsterdam)

The present of modernity: Timelines and mediation in John Stuart MillDr. Marco de Waard (Amsterdam University College)

Fit for modernity: Organization and representation of women’s sport, 1900-1940Dr. Marjet Derks (Radboud University)

11.30 – 13.00 Parallel session 5: Tradition, modernity, and Irish nationalism(Titus Brandsma kamer)Session chair: Chris Cusack, MA

Tradition and modernity in Ireland’s quest for independenceProf. dr. Timothy J. White (Xavier University)

Culture of orifice: Tradition / modernity and rural Ireland in John McGahern’s That they may face the rising sunYen-Chi Wu, MA (University College Cork)

Modernising Tradition – Gerald Griffin and Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn Dr. Marc Corcoran-Kelly (NUI Galway)

11:30 – 13:00 Parallel session 5: Modernity and cultural identities (Robert Regoutkamer)Session chair: dr. Maaike Koffeman

Modernity challenged in the colony. Representations of Angkor in French travel literature (1900-1939) Dr. Emmanuelle Radar (Radboud University)

Outsiders as insiders: ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Jewish’ modernity projects as ‘European’Dr. Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (City College of New York)

13.30 – 14.30 Lunch

14.30 – 15.30 Session 6: Literary and cultural modernismsSession chair: t.b.a.

Rome 1900: The salon of Ersilia Catenai-Lovatelli as a carrefour of tradition and modernityDr. Floris Meens (Radboud University)

The ambivalences of modernity: The case of Alfred DöblinProf. dr. David Midgley (Cambridge University)

15.30 – 16.00 Tea / coffee

16.00 – 17.00 Key-note 4: The ethics of unbelief in modernist fiction Dr. Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary London)Chair: dr. Mathijs Sanders

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW), the International Office of Radboud University, and the Departments of Cultural Studies, English, Romance Languages, and History, in making this conference possible.

ABSTRACTSThursday, May 26

Confronting Tradition and Traditions of Confrontation: Reprising the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns

Helena Taylor (University of Exeter)

The late seventeenth-century French Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and, to a lesser degree, its English counterpart, ‘The Battle of the Books’, are considered by some critics and historians as heralding ‘modernity’. Of all the literary quarrels that rocked the early modern period, this Quarrel has emerged as a super and supra-Quarrel, a paradigm for debates about national culture, the canon and the value of literature. It has been afforded a privileged place in literary history; and this, in part, because it has been reprised in subsequent articulations of modernity and its confrontation with tradition. For instance, Saint-Beuve deployed the arguments of its opposing figureheads, Boileau and Perrault, in his own polemical discourse. This strategic deployment is no less evident in the historical analysis of the Quarrel itself, in which the position taken by the critic is also an intervention in contemporary debates. Joan Dejean uses a pro-Modern vision of the seventeenth-century Quarrel to make a case for the changes to the canon being proposed at the end of the twentieth century; Larry Norman conflates a defence of the Ancients with a defence of antiquity itself, in part as a response to the cuts faced by classics departments.

This paper will explore the place of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns in later debates, particularly of nineteenth-century France. It will suggest that, as recent studies on seventeenth-century Paris have shown, it was in fact much more complex and localized than its universalizing reception implies. The retrospective understanding of the Quarrel thus performs a presentism of which Perrault would have been proud, as its inheritors project their own ideologies onto it. Seen in this light, its determined reception is all the more striking: does the confrontation between tradition and modernity require a tradition?

Sur des pensers nouveaux faire des vers antiques’ : The poetics of André Chénier

Maria Klimova (Radboud University)

André Chénier (1762-1794) is one the most intriguing French poets of the 18th century. Born and raised in the Grecophile environment of Galata (near Istanbul), he came to France, where he showed himself a lyrical poet with a strong neoclassical disposition, probably influenced by Winckelmann’s antiquarianism. Captured by the ideals of the French Revolution, Chénier joined the Feuillants-party, but wrote vehement satires against Robespierre, as he became disappointed in the Terreur. In 1794, he was arrested and executed, three days before Robespierre himself was guillotined. During his lifetime only two of his lyrical poems were published. It was only posthumously that the edition of his work in 1819 revealed Chénier to the public and he was admired and followed by the 19th-century Romantic writers (Chateaubriand, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve) and the poets of the Parnasse contemporain (Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, Sully Prudhomme). The Age of Enlightenment was focused on the ideas of progress of humanity; poetry, according to Voltaire, was in crisis. André Chénier forms a sort of exception: in his poetry he made an attempt of combining the ideas of fascinating intellectual, technical progress and geographic discoveries with a poetical form that would be worthy of Ancient authors. Being more influenced by the specific poetics of the Hellenistic poets and Horace than Aristotle, André Chénier applies parts of neoclassical doctrines in his own unique manner. The ideas of combining Antiquity and Modernity, the theory of imitation in particular, were expressed by the French poet in his metapoetical poem L’Invention, written in the form of a didactic epic. In this poem he explains by example and illustration the poetical principle of his “imitation inventrice” as expressed in the poem’s final verses: “Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques”. Studying the poems L’Invention, Épître sur ses ouvrages, La République des lettres, the paper will examine Chénier’s “imitation inventrice” expressed and / or implied in his poetry.

Modernity without the Enlightenment, or: how to rethink the history of the 18th century

Jordy Geerlings (Radboud University)

There is a great split in contemporary thinking about the Enlightenment. For some, it remains a triumphal story of how the central ideas of modernity were forged. Those who belong to this camp stress the 18th century’s sense of being an entirely new civilization superior to anything that had come before it, while also referring to the rise of a secular scientific worldview, the utopia of a perfect society, and so on. This story has brought a remarkable amount of clarity, but has also seduced many into adopting the Enlightenment as the west’s greatest triumph, or its greatest disaster. For others, the scholarship on the Enlightenment represents a gigantic case of conceptual overstretch, as the number of ‘Enlightenments’ has multiplied beyond all control. The Parisian philosophes who traditionally defined the Enlightenment have been joined by a German Aufklärung, a Radical Enlightenment, a Pietist Enlightenment, a Catholic Enlightenment, and the list continues to grow. This has led to a sense of crisis: the story of the Enlightenment has become so complex that it no longer has any explanatory power. This paper will therefore consider the latest contributions to the ongoing debate about how to define the Enlightenment and its place in the overarching story of modernity. The purpose of this is to illuminate recent attempts to move away from entrenched positions that have marked the debate thus far, and find new stories and metaphors with which to capture the transformations of the eighteenth century. In dialogue with John Robertson and Rienk Vermij, the paper will explore the possibilities of writing the history of the 18th century without the Enlightenment.

The national manifestation of Modernism: Russian SymbolismOlga Pchelina (Volga State University of Technology)

Describing the period of Russian Religious Renaissance (around the turn of the twentieth century) Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev called the theme of the religious symbolism as the main subject of Russian culture, put special emphasis on its specific character – the mystical atmosphere, religious anxiety and religious quest – and called Dmitry Merezhkovsky a “literary source” of this process.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865 – 1941) is an iconic figure of the Russian religious Renaissance, a symbolist, poet, novelist, writer, translator, literary сritiс, religious philosopher, thinker who played an important role among Russian intelligentsia and émigrés. Merezhkovsky began his career as a symbolist, representing the first wave of St. Petersburg Symbolist school. His article “On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature” was the first manifesto of Russian Symbolism, a significant landmark of Russian Modernism and the year of 1892 was the time of the foundation of national Russian Symbolism. In Russia Symbolism was called Decadence or Modernism and was contrasted with Traditional Art. On the one hand Russian Symbolism was a literary movement, on the other hand – it developed philosophical, cultural, religious ideas and claimed to perform ideological functions in the social and cultural life of Russia. Russian Symbolism which steeped in the Eastern Orthodoxy was unique and original and had little in common with the European style of the same name. For Russian Symbolism, it was characteristic to reflect religious mysticism, apocalyptic premonitions, eschatology, theurgy. Creativity was interpreted as the creation of “new existence”. Russian Symbolism claimed to create a new philosophy of culture, a new universal outlook. Russian Symbolists raised the questions of the social role of the artist, personalistic creativity and art in general. Merezhkovsky interpreted Symbolism on a large scale, understood it as “the world revolution in culture, which will return art to religion”. According to him, Symbolism should pass beyond art and become the integral part of social life. In this sense, the contribution of Merezhkovsky in the development of Symbolism acquires special importance.

Towards a Just and Equitable Society: Mapping Virtue in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Giulia Delogu (Università Ca’ Foscari)

During the eighteenth century virtue was a widespread concept, which figured pre-eminently in different discourses. The term virtue - derived directly from the Latin one virtus - rooted both in the classical pagan tradition and in Augustine’s Christian interpretation. Virtue did not have a univocal and precise meaning: it meant as much mortification and sacrifice as moderation and pleasure. It was intended as Christian saints’ self-denial, but also as republican disinterested love of country, as Aristotle’s mediocritas (namely the ability to govern oneself), or as Epicure’s satisfaction of human pleasures. These four different narratives, through their modern reinterpretations, were still vital at the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, they soon appeared inadequate to answer the needs of ‘modern’ societies. The Italian debate on virtue started exactly from the will of overcoming the long-standing division between Christian and pagan virtue and of redefining the concept in accord with ‘modernity’. Italian intellectuals faced the following questions: is it possible a ‘modern’, commercial and virtuous society? What is to be considered virtuous in a ‘modern’ society? The answers they gave show a significant semantic evolution of the term virtue, which, through commerce and legislation, goes from morality to politics. The debate on virtue, in fact, intertwined with those on regulated devotion, happiness commerce, natural law, and human rights. The purpose of this paper is to show how the Italian reflection (from Doria and Muratori to Filangieri, Alfieri, Grimaldi, and Pagano, passing through Vico, F. Galiani, Genovesi, P. Verri and Beccaria) transformed virtue into a novel concept which was no longer the severe sacrifice of classical republicanism or the rigid asceticism of Christians, but the basis for a more just and equitable society which would ultimately led to (a very earthly) happiness.

The Modern Genius: Between Art and PoliticsYoel Mitrani (Sciences Po Paris)

In the mid 18th century one finds a substantial raise in the popularity of the concept of genius in England and continental Europe. 18th century discussions revolving genius are often regarded as the birth place of a "modern" conception of genius. What was the cause for this rise? How, and in what context, was it used and in what way – if at all – was it different from genius of older epochs in European history? In short, what makes the 18th century genius modern? These are the main questions the paper aims to address. In earlier attempts to explain this heave, contemporary research focused mainly on genius in relation to the arts and the realm of aesthetics. The amass interest in the concept in the 18th century is often understood to be a result of the then changing perceptions of art and the artist: a shift of emphasis from imitative works-of-art which "mirror" nature to the man-of-genius who creates original and expressive art works. The modern genius is therefore frequently depicted in contrast to the neo-classical artist: as opposed to the rational rule abiding artist, genius was perceived as a man of emotions and imagination, whose irrationality was praised for creating unique and self-sufficient works of art with their own intrinsic value. The 19th century Romantic genius is repeatedly seen as the epitome of that change. My claim is different. I argue that the increasing interest in the genius in the 18th century cannot be explained in full by concentrating on the debates in the art world, such as the querelle des Anciens et des modernes or the decline of neoclassicism. I also hold that the dichotomy between imitation and originality was over-emphasized by scholars and thus the expressive and subjective character of genius and its artistic products were wrongly perceived as its main characteristic.

18th century usage of the concept of genius (which started in England) grew out of transformations in broader aspects of human activities, in science and in politics, as much as in the arts. Genius was used in order to fill a gap which was caused by modernity: it was used by 18th century natural philosophers, political essayists and art critics in order to describe human uniqueness and exceptionality at a time when early ideas of egalitarian societies and modern empirical science were taking shape and becoming more prevalent. The quest to define, analyze and theorize on the cause for difference and superiority between individuals, by using modern methods and vocabulary, gave rise to the modern meaning of genius.

The State of Letters: Conceptualizing the status quo in the Göttingen Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften and the

Encyclopédie MéthodiqueFloris Solleveld (Radboud University)

In 1801, Göttingen philosopher Friedrich Bouterwek set out to revitalize German literature with his Geschichte der Poesie und Schöne Redekünste. Writing in a genre that was more bibliography than history, he looked for counterexamples to the declining French taste, especially in his volumes on Spain, Portugal, and Italy, where he sought to capture the true spirit of Romantik in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Eighteen years later, on the final page of his 11th

volume, he complains that the generation of the Schlegel brothers mocks him as a dusty old compiler.

Bouterwek’s massive work was part of the even larger Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften seit der Wiederherstellung derselben, a megaproject that occupied many of the leading scholars of Göttingen from 1797-1820. As a bibliographical-historical overview of all the arts and sciences, it is at once the high point and the virtual end point of historia literaria, a genre first outlined by Francis Bacon that dominated 18th century scholarly production. The Göttingen Geschichte, running to ca. 100 volumes, presents the state of learning in an age of transition, between what we now call ‘modern’ and ‘early modern’.

Modernity is not itself a core concept in the Göttingen Geschichte; but all volumes are built upon a concept of progress in the arts and sciences from the Renaissance (Wiederherstellung) to the present, and several – particularly those on literature and historiography – present strong agendas for the future. The authors are at once perfectioning a quintessentially early modern genre of letters and breaking away from the bibliographic format.

There is a similar agenda to the even larger Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782-1832, ca. 200 volumes), the unfinished successor to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. As a lexicon, it is less historical than the Geschichte. But it grapples with the same problems

of defining the status quo and providing an overview of the expanding and increasingly compartmentalized state of learning. Some articles originate as programmatic texts, such as Lacretelle on science sociale and Chamfort on académiciens; one volume gathers the proceedings of the National Convention. Both the Geschichte and the Encyclopédie Méthodique are documents of the birth of modern science; but they are also dead ends in an earlier encyclopaedic tradition.

The Art and Criticism of Hysteria: Modernity as Polemics and Violence in the Fin-de-Siècle Art Press

Juliet Simpson (Coventry University)

In his preface to his 1889 Certains, J.-K Huysmans witheringly denounced the ‘lâcheté’ of the modern art critic in his call for a new criticism of the artist-critic ‘rageur’. In a parallel polemical gesture, Hermann Bahr in his 1891 ‘The Overthrow of Naturalism’, was to rage against the forces of artistic conservatism and naturalism, calling for ‘a sovereign nervousness’ of art and criticism, communicating, for Bahr, a nervous strident modernity ‘in the tyrannical organization of its own world’. The raging critic was not new. Yet what both examples highlight – albeit addressed to their distinct cultural worlds of fin-de-siècle Paris and Vienna – is the emergence of a distinctive modernity of critical posture and press platforms to extend it, Such platforms, as Bahr intimates, emerge to promote totalizing ambitions to capture and articulate a more urgently contemporary turn towards an art and criticism, refined and hysterical; ultra-civilized and savage by turn. My paper investigates the implications of these ideas in the context of an exponential modernizing of art communications via the spread of fin-de-siècle ‘petit-revues’, as ‘espaces de lancement’ for artists and critics to extend their avant-garde practices and communicate these via polemical cultural encounters. But my particular concern is with two related issues, neither sufficiently explored in recent fin-de-siècle or modernist scholarship. First, is appearance of an aggressively polemical art-critical ‘voice’ and style, emerging from, but developing a performative dandyism of decadent ‘petit-revues’ into an art-political posture. Second, is the expansion of this idea, not via Symbolist

spirituality or synthesis, but in terms of an alternative artistic and political ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, harnessing within it ostensibly anti-modern concerns with the ‘primitive’, violent and demotic. The paper’s focus is on Huysmans’s group of Certains articles on Puvis, Degas and Rops first published in La Revue indépendante. Discussion takes these as particularly salient examples of the suggestive ways in which Huysmans gives new cultural currency to the figure of the regressive ‘anti-modern’, modern artist/writer, here appropriating from newer discourses in the period’s psychopathologies of nervous disorders, including hysteria, to develop decadent treatments of these artists. As is argued, this not only constructs his artists as Symbolist, but, in the context of a polemical ideological turn in La Revue indépendante, promotes, or as in Puvis’s case, maligns them in terms of a critical voice that plays on a suggestive aesthetic and political borderline between the image of an ultra-refined ‘modernity’ and its savage, even violent other face: a direction of travel more explicit in the art polemics of Maurice Barrès, Laurent Tailhade and Bahr. If in 1889, irony and scepticism keep the darker messages of Huysmans’s artist-critic ‘rageur’ in check, the paper’s final part explores the potency of this posture working from within a polarising Symbolist art press of the early 1890s, in the art-political gambits of Jarry and Lormel in L’Art littéraire and in Barrès interventions, that promote their innovations in terms their new nervous, ‘primitive’ and demotic modernity. The conclusions consider the extent to which such examples lay bare and intensify a significant counter-cultural dynamics that does not easily fit within established ‘modernist’ art histories and genealogies. Operating alongside Symbolist ambitions towards synthesis in practice and press, is the emergence of a hysterical discourse of art and ‘voice’ as a flashpoint around which some of the period’s most virulent cultural tensions were exposed and prolonged as ‘modern’.

Modernity and National Identity: The case of Clarice Zander’s 1933 Exhibition of British Contemporary Art

Victoria Souliman (Université Paris Diderot)

The development of modernism in England is a problematic topic in art history. It has even been argued that British artists of the early twentieth century never effectively engaged with modernism, as their art was aesthetically conservative. Others have addressed the debate that occurred during the years between the World Wars, by opposing London’s Bloomsbury formalist conception of art to the functionalist approach, using this distinction to define how the British perceived modern art. During this watershed period, Britain signed the Treaty of Versailles, recognising her dominions as autonomous nations, thereby witnessing a fundamental decline in her imperial power. However, she maintained strong cultural bonds with the dominions, promoting her modern literary and artistic achievements particularly in the 1930s. The instance of the Empire Art Loan Collection Society established in 1932 shows that, on artistic grounds, the role of international exhibitions was particularly decisive as a means of cultural imperialism. Scholars such as Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller have extensively discussed the significance of the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in the circulation of modernism and its impact in Australia. However focusing on the case study of the Exhibition of British Contemporary Art organised by Clarice Zander and held in Melbourne and Sydney in 1933, my paper proposes a different take on these travelling exhibitions. The aim of my paper is to demonstrate how Zander’s 1933 exhibition of British art can be construed not only as a vehicle for disseminating a British concept of Modernism in Australia, but also as a primary means of defining modernism in an English context. This paper particularly addresses British modernism's ties to tradition, imperialism and national identity in art.

The case of Greek modernism: the issue of Ellinikotita (Greekness) as seen through modern Greek sculpture

Klairi Angelou (University of Bristol)

This paper will examine how Modernism was developed in Greece and more specifically by discussing its connection to the notion of

Ellinikotita (Greekness) as a procedure towards a national and international identity.Modern Greek culture – with special reference to sculpture – will be examined under the lens of centre and periphery – with Greek art seen as periphery (or – paradoxically – occupying both the centre and the periphery because of the centrality of the Greek canon to Western visual culture). I aim to bring to light the different notions Modernism acquired in the periphery, where local cultural idiosyncrasies gave it a new dynamic. Therefore, I will elucidate the specific historical and socio-cultural context in which Modernism not only was developed, but also challenged in Greece. The notion of Ellinikotita entails a complex matrix of ideas and through time different notions have been attributed to it, resulting in different aspects of visual culture being employed in order to address these different versions of Ellinikotita. It was during the Interwar period however when the Greek artists for the first time decided to redefine themselves by looking back at their own – national - tradition, rather than fulfil the expectations projected on them by foreign scholars, who mostly associated them with the ancient Greek past. In Greek scholarship this debate on Ellinikotita has been discussed as a polarised response to foreign influences, as a dilemma of choosing between the East and the West; the former going hand-in-hand with tradition and the latter choosing to be influenced by contemporary European movements.

I aim to show that the issue of Ellinikotita and its connection to European modernism is much more complicated than this binary scheme. In order to achieve that, the practice of Bella Raftopoulou (1906-1992) will be given as an indicative example; her work will be examined not only as response to the central/ European movements, but will be placed within the context of the periphery’s own experience of history.

Friday, May 27

The Aesthetic Taboo: Race, Anthropology and Modernity’s Primitive

David Lloyd (University of California Riverside)

This paper concerns the fate of the aesthetic, in the transition from its first major formulations in the late German Enlightenment, from Kant to Hegel, to its reconsideration within that tradition by its two major and symptomatic critical thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Its premise is that the aesthetic, despite its denomination, is not merely a philosophy of art, but moreover an historically situatable regulative discourse in two associated domains: anthropology and politics, in so far as the aesthetic as an anthropology determines the very possibility of the political. Aesthetics belongs in a constellation or a cluster of discourses—race, law, aesthetics, politics, and political economy—that taken together determine the space of the human for modernity. In its initial articulation, aesthetics was explicitly an anthropology, where anthropology concerned the determination of a universal form of the human. From Kant to Hegel, the aesthetic becomes the discourse on the formation of Man and of Man as fundamentally both alienated and as such self-producing.

But the question arises as to what happens to the anthropological dimension of the aesthetic (and therefore to it as a regulative discourse of the human) when what is termed the “anthropological” no longer refers to the general form of the human that is at once the ground and end of Philosophy, taken in its broad Kantian definition (the “humanities” or liberal arts and sciences), but refers rather to the objects and procedures of a distinct disciplinary formation that emerges in the 1860s as the study of “primitive culture” (E.B. Tylor) or “the primitive mind” (Franz Boas)?

It has long been known that the Frankfurt School’s critical theory engaged in the effort to synthesize methodologically Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxism. What has not been observed is the extent to which Freud’s writings on primitive culture, and on its survival in contemporary civilization (especially in the metapsychological writings of the 1920s, like Group Psychology and Ego Analysis or Civilization and its Discontents) saturate the aesthetic thought of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. To a remarkable extent, we can trace the resonances of Freud’s thinking through a complex or constellation of topoi in their work: myth, magic, compulsion or the “spell” in Adorno’s language, and, in particular aura as Benjamin theorizes that concept in terms drawn almost verbatim

from Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Adorno’s work from Dialectic of Enlightenment to Aesthetic Theory is no less saturated than Benjamin’s with references to Totem and Taboo—and more generally a range of anthropological works on primitive thought and magic.

Neither thinker ever manages to escape the ideal historical schema of aesthetics, which is the serial transition from a state of necessity, to a state of domination, to an ideal state of freedom. Insofar as the state of necessity is that which defines the savage as pathological subject, this remains not contingently but immanently a racial schema. Both Adorno and Benjamin remain on the side of the threshold that both enlightenment and the dialectic establish, that threshold which divides the savage into the latent or proto-human and the outcast, the being discarded to the realm of mere affectability.

From another perspective, however, magic emerges in Aesthetic Theory less as the positive practice of the primitive than as the negation of representation. It partakes of that dimension of the artwork that is the ineluctable materiality in it that resists formalization, that sensuous remnant that withstands rationalization. This “pathological” moment restores to the aesthetic its foundations in pleasure and pain and would then be the moment where the artwork—like the subaltern—appears as the performance of the violence of the pathological, that is, as the moment of the system whose very insistence demands the destruction of the law and the possible inauguration of an other conception of life in common, predicated on the pains and pleasures of the suffering, desiring, necessitous subject.

Between Two Worlds: Tradition and Modernity in the Irish Local Colour Tale of the Long 1890s

Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University)

Local colour fiction, a genre that was very popular in Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth century, often stages the “clash between the modern and pre- or anti-modern” (Donovan 2010, 11).

This juxtaposition between regional tradition, which local colour literature often sought to crystallize in an era of progress, and modernity, is also a key theme in the short stories of Irish authors such as Katharine Tynan, Jane Barlow and George Moore. In their stories, written during the Celtic Revival, a period in which the Western regions of Ireland, the setting of their tales, came to be seen as the foundation of an authentic, national Irish identity (Foster 1993; Castle 2001), the polarization between tradition and modernity is often highly politicized.

These writers’ narratives often translate the conflict between tradition and modernity into encounters between the native and the transnational, in the form of (returned) emigrants, travellers and the colonial English ‘Other’. This paper will explore the tensions between the traditional and the modern in these stories from Barlow’s Irish Idylls (1892), Tynan’s A Cluster of Nuts (1894) and Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903), as a convergence of the regional and the transnational that finds its expression through specific “narrative templates” (Wertsch 2008, 9) . As this paper will demonstrate, these stories display an ambivalence between an elegiac sense of a disappearing world on the one hand and an endorsement of longstanding rural community cultures on the other.

The Time-Frames of Tragedy: Temporalities, Modernisation, and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

Seán Hewitt (University of Liverpool)

During his visits to the Aran Islands in the years 1898-1902, J.M. Synge became intensely aware of the processes of systematic modernisation at play along the western seaboard. The Congested Districts Board’s work to improve infrastructure and the growing necessity of partaking in mainland economics meant that life on the islands was a strange mix of the ‘primitive’ and the modernising, heightening the awareness of ‘the lived experience of…uneven temporalities’ (Cleary, 2007) and of time as spatialized. In Synge’s one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea (1904), his only play set on the islands, different time-scales, determined by an opposition between

commerce and ‘nature’, give structure to both form and plot. David Lloyd has suggested that post-Famine Irish writers were often alive to ‘the coevality of different relations to time normatively distributed on the axis of tradition and modernity’ (2008). This paper will explore the use of competing temporalities and degrees of modernity in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, using other one-act plays from the early Irish Revival, including those of Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats and James Cousins, in order to show that Synge’s unique approach to modernisation is reflected in a modernisation of the one-act form, which is brought under strain through a treatment of warring temporalities. Far from being a play in which Synge shows an awareness of modernity which he ‘consciously denied’ (Leder, 1990), Riders to the Sea is structured by an intense and conscious awareness of the fracturing of time on an axis created by systematic modernisation.

“When the Irish were cave-men”: Nativist Discourse and Rural Modernity in Christine Longford’s Mr. Jiggins of Jigginstown

(1933)Ruud van den Beuken (Radboud University)

In 1929, when the future Gate Theatre directors Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir were trying to raise the funds that would enable them to acquire a playhouse of their own, the two actors published a markedly nationalistic manifesto, in which they claimed that “[d]uring the five years previous to this year 1929, Ireland may be said to have progressed with greater rapidity than in her whole history”. Naturally, they felt that their own Dublin Gate Theatre Studio, whose performances were taking place at the Abbey’s Peacock Theatre annexe, had lately provided an important impetus to this cultural evolution, and so it was not in the least due to the Gate’s existence that Dublin was “re-establishing herself upon a much sounder basis than before, as one of the capitals of Europe – a capital which, like other capitals, should represent not only the culture and development of its country but should be the point of contact between that country and

other countries, the medium of international understanding”. Dublin’s cultural growth, then, obliged her to live up to the indisputable fact of Eurocentric modernity that “[i]n every great city in Europe, the theatre is of immense importance, not merely as a place of amusement, but as the living medium through which the dramatist, the actor, the producer, the designer and the musician, all of whom are representatives, consciously or unconsciously, of the life of their nation, may find expression”.

Edwards and MacLiammóir’s claim might be said to hinge on an implicit conflation: supposedly, “the life of the nation” was to find its proper manifestation in a distinctively urban, if not metropolitan setting. This paper will explore the ways in which the concomitant tensions between urban and rural Irishness can be interpreted in light of Gregory Castle’s argument that many attempts at consolidating an overarching Irish cultural identity were fostered by Anglo-Irish writers who sought to “monopolize[...] modernism by translating political dispossession into cultural production”. Following Terry Eagleton’s conceptualisation of the innately conflicted nature of Irish modernity, Castle argues that the Celtic Revival, with its programmatic celebration of Celtic mythology and Irish traditions, was the prime manifestation of the fact that “Irish modernism emerged in the estranging contact of modernity with a tradition or archaic culture”. Wielding “discursive power over the Catholic-Irish whose lives and folkways are the subject of a redemptive anthropological discourse over which they have little or no control”, Protestant Ascendancy writers attempted to redress the deterioration of their class supremacy by artificially providing Ireland with a “modernist aesthetic of cultural redemption”, a return to the historical womb that negated the onslaught of modernity and established the semblance of natural harmony. In this paper, however, I will discuss Christine Longford’s Mr. Jiggins of Jigginstown (1933), an original Gate play by a Protestant Anglo-Irish writer, which undermines such nativist discourse and, in fact, ridicules the upper class’s pretensions in “going native”.

The counter-revolutionary construction of modernity: Groen’s eighteenth century

Matthijs Lok (University of Amsterdam)

In my lecture I explore the role of the enemies of the Enlightenment in the construction of the concept of modernity. I will examine the idea of the ‘eighteenth century’ in the treatise Ongeloof en Revolutie(Unbelief and Revolution) (1847) by the Dutch protestant statesman Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876) as a case study. In this work, which describes and laments the rise of unbelief in eighteenth century Europe, Groen paradoxically creates the idea of an homogenous and atheistic eighteenth century. In my lecture I draw parallels between the Dutch protestant and French catholic conceptualization of the enlightened and ‘modern’ eighteenth century.

The Present of Modernity: Timeliness and Mediation in John Stuart Mill

Marco de Waard (Amsterdam University College / ASCA)

How did 19th -century critical thinkers, working in the Enlightenment tradition of ‘critique’ as first articulated by Kant, conceptualise their relationship with the present? How did they fashion the contemporary into a distinctly modern experience – and how did they constitute contemporaneity as such as a privileged object of social and historical reflection? Established accounts of modernity often present the modalities of temporal awareness and historical experience which characterised the 19th and 20th centuries in terms of a dramatic reconfiguration of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. According to this two-pronged narrative, 19th -century progressive liberal thought included historicisms which were firmly linear and future-oriented, while modernist thought from ca. 1914 onwards was marked by reaction against such beliefs and by a concomitant sense of the historic process as crisis-ridden and contingent. Walter Benjamin often does duty within this narrative as the quintessential watershed figure – his thinking about history and time cast as a kind of temporal marker in its own right, as when he is

glossed as saying that ‘progress lifts consciousness out of time and space, treating past, present, and their relations as given’ (Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History, pp. 161-2). Dialoguing with recent theorisations of presentism, time, and contemporary experience, however – by Giorgio Agamben, Marc Augé, and François Hartog, among others – this paper proposes that, far from rendering the present ‘empty’ and ‘homogeneous,’ progressivist thought historically speaking has been able to engender its own modalities of attentiveness for the here and now, casting the present as liberating or emancipatory in potential. Taking as its case study a number of essays on history and culture by liberal thinker John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the paper looks at presentism ‘before’ the ‘end of progress,’ arguing that Victorian progressivism thickened the present in ways that brought complex notions of individual and collective agency to bear on contemporary experience. Specifically, the paper develops its argument in reference to Mill’s reflections on questions of intellectual mediation and transmission in the print public sphere, including: (1.) the question of transmission itself (of culture, tradition, authority, or ideas) as a form of defining and shaping the contemporary; (2.) that of tradition as the creation of relations across historical moments, or, put differently, of contemporaneity as involving the curated co-presence of tradition in time; (3.) that of the timing or timeliness of the publication of one’s opinions, seen in terms of the problematic moment of infusion by which ideas and convictions enter the current of social and historical experience, e.g., through liberal forms of print, argument, and debate. The present of 19th -century modernity, it emerges from this corpus of texts, was thickly imbued with a sense of individual and collective agency and choice, but also marked by crisis and contingency and haunted by the spectre of historical depletion.

Fit for modernity: Organization and representation of women’s sport, 1900-1940

Marjet Derks (Radboud University)

From the turn of the century onwards, sport and fitness clubs became a new social movement and identity marker throughout Europe and the United States. Both individuals (male and female) and social groups

organized themselves on this denominator and appropriated sport as a lifestyle that represented ‘the new’: vitality, resilience, progress and being part of modern international culture. To a large extent, this identity was constructed in opposition to 19th century culture which became increasingly and pejoratively labeled as ‘traditional’.

With Great Britain, the US and Germany as the forerunners of this international physical movement, the Netherlands were somewhat lagging behind. But contrary to the prevailing Grand Narrative of early 20th century Dutch traditionalism and conservatism (predominantly embodied by confessional pillarization), effects of international cultural transfers of sport and fitness as modern ideals can also be discerned. It can be argued, as is my point in this paper, that in the first decades of the 20th century a distinct sport and movement surfaced in the Netherlands, too. Sport and physical fitness were appropriated by clubs and organizations of various ideological backgrounds as new ideals, challenging existing class, religion and gender boundaries.

However, discourses on the fit and healthy body also created new hierarchies between the fit and unfit, which became social metaphors as well. Criticism on these social Darwinist aspects of sport and fitness, however, tended to be refuted by labeling them as traditional and anti-modern.

Tradition and Modernity in Ireland’s Quest for IndependenceTimothy J. White (Xavier University)

Ireland’s quest for sovereignty illustrates the complex relationship between tradition and modernity. Sovereignty itself is a modern concept emerging from the Peace of Westphalia that brought states into existence and which inevitable led political loyalties to be based on secularized states. As the Irish attempted to achieve this modern goal, they sought to use it to recreate an idyllic pre-modern conception of their society. The Celtic Revival played a major part in creating the cultural changes in society that made not only the quest for home rule emerge but later justify the use of violence for republicans who sought complete autonomy and sovereignty from Britain. The Irish needed to rediscover if not reinvent their Celtic and Gaelic origins in order to achieve the modern aspiration of self-governance in at least a

nominally secularized state. Because of the rebirth of religious observance and devotion in the same period and in many ways linked to the emergence of a modern sense of Irish nationalism to a powerful institutional Church. Thus, while typically modernity is seen in a secular context, independent Ireland did not really seek modernity nor did it initially seek to separate Church and State in the same way as other republics that emerged from monarchies or from colonization. This paper will explore the elements of a traditional world that were important and critical elements to Ireland’s efforts to achieve political independence.

Culture of Orifice: Tradition/Modernity and Rural Ireland in John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun

Yen-Chi Wu (University College Cork)

This paper treats Irish oral space as embodying a postcolonial temporality that defies modern logic. It shows how the rural writings by Irish authors, especially John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), complicate the dichotomizing tradition/modernity figure in Irish culture. Owing to Ireland’s postcolonial history, tradition/modernity entails a clustered ideas in opposition: Irish nationalism/rural/oral verses British colonialism/urban/literary, a set of binaries that often proves to be problematic. As David Lloyd points out in Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000 (2011), the Irish orifice, characteristic of both lack and excess, embodies an oral space that defies modernity’s disciplining force on time and space. Lloyd has argued in his previous works that state-oriented nationalism is embedded in modernity as much as colonialism. That is, both Irish nationalism and British colonialism depend on a smooth narrative of modernity that emphasizes on progress and prosperity. The unruly Irish oral space, therefore, has to be tamed in either narrative. This paper will first demonstrate the romanticization of Irish orifice in nationalist narrative in the early twentieth century through J. M. Synge’s travelogue Aran Islands and Connemara (1907) and Tomás O’Crohan’s autobiography The Islandman (1929), both texts are associated with the Irish cultural nationalist movements and the Gaelic League. In their endeavours to present an idealized and untainted Gaelic culture, Irish

nationalist movements tend to discipline the Irish orifice. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on John McGahern’s last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun, which sheds the influences of nationalist narrative. Featuring a returned immigrant, a man of letters, as its narrative focus in a lakeside community, the novel presents a nuanced look at the oral residues in Irish culture that mark the rural civilization at once traditional and modern, oral and literary.

Modernising Tradition– Gerald Griffin and Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn

Marc Corcoran-Kelly (NUI Galway)

John Cronin’s ‘Gerald Griffin and 'The Collegians': A Reconsideration’ was an early attempt to reclaim the importance of Gerald Griffin’s work to nineteenth-century Irish culture. To date Griffin’s The Collegians: A Tale of Garryowen (1829) is less well known than the works it inspired such as Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn and Julius Benedict's libretto, The Lily of Killarney. Cronin asserts that Griffin’s complex treatment of morality within The Collegians is not only overlooked but important to Irish literature. This paper argues that Griffin’s portrayal of Irish character in The Collegians generates complex transnational contexts connected to locality and morality that succeeding generations, including Young Ireland and Fenianism, struggled to champion and incorporate within its political newspapers. Griffin’s treatment of Irish identity was not nationalist in the mode of The Freeman’s Journal and The Nation. Yet the hybridity of Irish culture, whether through British or European elements, is present in Hardress Cregan and Myles na Coppaleen, as Griffin set about revealing some of the blurred lines of a transnational Irish identity.Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn did not repeat complexity of the transnational dimension of character that backboned Griffin’s work. The Colleen Bawn’s reception in America and Britain, and the different medium of theatre, resulted in a more heightened and long-lasting response and status for Boucicault. Specifically, the literary aesthetic of Griffin inspired generations of authors but Griffin’s standing in the Irish canon does not reflect his audacious attempt to challenge the parameters of how Irish identity was portrayed.

Nevertheless, The Collegians was a key influence on one of the major transnational-plays of the nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn or The Brides of Garryowen (1860). Notably, the transition of Griffin’s themes and characters through Boucicault’s reinvention of The Collegians has served to blur Griffin’s complicated transnational characters. Pointedly, there are a multitude of complex and uneven contexts for the different aesthetic requirements and politics attached to Griffin’s and Boucicault’s depiction of Irish identity and their reception.

Modernity challenged in the colony. Representations of

Angkor (archeological site, Cambodia) in French travel literature (1900-1939)

Emmanuelle Radar (Radboud University)

Cette communication propose d’interroger la modernité dans le cadre spécifique du colonialisme français et à partir des représentations des ruines khmères d’Angkor (Cambodge). Le contexte spécifique nous permettra d’évaluer si et comment, le contact avec la colonie réelle et la confrontation aux ruines pose des limites au concept de la ‘modernité’, argument central et justificatif de la colonisation. L’hypothèse est que le contact de la colonie et la visite aux lieux archéologiques déclenchent des réflexions sur la ‘modernité’ qui mettent en question le concept même.

L’idée de modernité a forgé l’identité de l’Europe colonisatrice, à partir de sa mission civilisatrice, et établi les bases de ses relations avec les non-Européens. Elle s’affirme par opposition à l’Asie présentée comme obsolète, tournée vers le passé, paralysée par ses traditions, incapable de se moderniser sans l’aide des nations civilisatrices. Cette relation d’opposition et d’inéluctable hiérarchie entre colonisé-colonisateur (Said, Orientalisme) est pourtant en même temps paradoxale et ambivalente (Bhabha, Les Lieux de la culture) puisque la modernité du colonisateur semble être conditionnée par la modernisation de la colonie et du colonisé ; une modernisation qui s’illustre par la construction de ponts, d’écoles, d’hôpitaux, de villes, de villes, etc., … et, dans le cas de l’Indochine française, par la protection des ruines archéologiques d’Angkor.

Cependant, cette configuration mentale du monde, cette opposition ‘moderne-traditionnel’, est mise à mal par la réalité coloniale, comme le soulignent bien des écrivains qui manient l’irone et le doute lorsqu’ils s’arrêtent devant les ruines d’Angkor. En analysant certains textes d’écrivains de l’Indochine française, colonisateurs, colonisés et voyageurs confondus, nous voulons montrer que la réflexion ruinistique dans le cadre colonial questionne l’opposition modernité-tradition et met à mal le concept même de ‘modernité’.

Outsiders as Insiders: ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Jewish’ Modernity Projects as ‘European’

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (City College of New York)

This paper seeks to put into dialogue two seemingly minority discourses around modernity: on the one hand, that of Caribbean modernity and on the other, that of Jewish modernity. Despite their long history of contributing to the European modernity project at all levels – economically, politically, and intellectually, the concept of European modernity has not sufficiently theorized the paradoxical relationship that these two intellectual spheres share in their considerations of “national self-definitions,” especially as they are related to Europe. The goal of the paper is then to show that despite the identity politics that define our disciplines, ideas disrespect such silos. In other words, the dissemination of ideas, regardless of identity politics is such that “multiple modernities” are constantly in dialogue with each other so as to inform what we often think of as a “European modernity” or “one modernity.” More crucially, the very identity politics that allow us to posit one or multiple Caribbean modernities, one or multiple Jewish modernities, especially as they concern a European geo-political space, dangerously nourish exclusionary discussions that in fact, against the the spirit of enlightenment intellectualisms, exclude and curtail the cosmopolitanisms that are a goal of modernity projects. In Caribbean scholarship, the work notably around the Haitian revolution from authors such as Susan Buck-Morss, Jean Casimir, Laurent Dubois, or Nick Nesbitt consider the importance of Haitian

thought in fortifying not only liberation thought in the Americas, but also in deliberating self-determination in Europe. In a seemingly ‘other’ context, as Aamir R. Mufti has argued, Jewish thought has played a quintessential role in shaping both European-based modernity projects as much as it has influenced aspirations for liberatory forms of governance outside of Europe. Other voices in Jewish studies such as Shmuel Feiner, Steven M. Lowenstein, and Yuri Slezkine, in considering the secularization of Jewish thought, suggest that Jewish modernities are as European as they are Jewish.

Calvary or Catastrophe? French Catholicism and the Great WarArabella Hobbs (University of Pennsylvania)

The Great War, which killed ten million people and wounded thirty-six million others, was, we are often told, catastrophic. However, faced with this instance of massive bloodletting, those who affirmed a “moral order” fundamentally rooted in a triune God whose presence is proclaimed in and through the Gospel, had little difficulty in justifying this hecatomb. Instead of bemoaning the war as evidence of Nietzsche’s famous dictum that God was dead, they saw the war as a real-life Calvary in which God’s presence was writ large. Some fifty years earlier, registering discontent with the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of positivism, a group of French Catholic intellectuals had turned their gaze away from fin-de-siècle decadence towards Catholicism’s rendering of mortality and suffering. Chief amongst their proclamations was the necessity of anguish to fully experience God’s grace. The Great War, with its unprecedented devastation, was to provide ample suffering for their interpretation of Catholicism to be transformed, quite literally, into flesh and blood. However, after the pain came the belief in regeneration, renewal and the second coming of the Lord, a belief rooted in the hope of the resurrection. The central question of this paper is: How did the French Catholic revivalists manage to make sense of the Great War in their collected works? I argue that the suffering of the cross, never far from their work, offered a paradigmatic model that validated the sacrifice of the slain as testaments to the glory of France, the Catholic Church’s eldest daughter. Key to my argument is a reappraisal of Catholicism that

disregards the critical suspicion associated with it in the twentieth century. As an unlikely beneficiary of the conflict, French Catholicism challenges the widespread understanding of the Great War as the culminating moment of secular modernism, providing both necessary and alternative cultural signposts to the Great War.

‘Rome 1900: the salon of Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli as a carrefour of tradition and modernity’

Floris Meens (Radboud University)

No other European city has been associated with tradition more than Rome. It has been a major point of reference within the discourses on ‘the’ European cultural tradition and on national identities. Rome became known as the Eternal City because of the continued effect of its ancient history and culture, but also because the city was home to the Holy Seat. Since the Pope possessed ecclesiastical and secular power, Catholicism affected Rome’s city life until the late nineteenth century. The Risorgimento, Italy’s long battle for unification (1815-1870) ultimately ended the Church’ control over Rome and resulted in the city’s inauguration as the Italian capital. Within the historiography on modernity and modernism Rome has been interpreted as an exception for a long time. If other European capitals like Vienna, Paris and Berlin all had witnessed the emergence of a flourishing cultural scene at the turn of the 20th century, Rome would have been deprived of such development. Late 19 th and early 20th century conservative forces would have caused modernism to be only a minor event in the Eternal City. Even though this view has recently been challenged by studies such as Diana Alessandrini and Carla Cesaretti’s Roma liberty. Itinerari tra eclettismo e modernismo (1870-1925) (2013), the question if modernism was influential in other parts of Rome’s city life than architecture has received only little attention. This paper aims at a better understanding of Europe’s most traditional city as a place of modernity around 1900. I answer the conference main questions (‘what is modernity, when and how did it begin?’) but at the same time add another: where did modernity begin

and where did it encounter tradition? Analysing the salon of the Roman countess and archaeologist Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli (1840-1925), I argue that Rome’s city life after 1870 was still dominated by conservatism but at the same time showed the emergence of new religious, literary and artistic groups that spread modern(ist) ideas and defended those against the attacks of traditional forces. I thus interpret the salon of Caetani-Lovatelli as an important channel of communication between tradition and modernity.

The Ambivalences of Modernity: the Case of Alfred DöblinDavid Midgley (University of Cambridge)

In a long novel published in 1937-38 (and commonly known by the title Amazonas) Döblin conducted what he referred to at the time as a ‘general reckoning’ with European civilisation. His narrative begins with the first incursions of Europeans into the South American interior in the early 16th century, continues with an expansive account of the history of the Jesuit missions in the 17th and 18th centuries, and concludes with an evocation of some unsavoury aspects of European society in the early 20th century. The work is complex and difficult to interpret, partly because of the allusive way in which Döblin works with intellectual constructions of ‘modernity’ familiar to us from the writings of Max Weber and Søren Kierkegaard in particular, but also because he contrives to present the 20th-century world as a vision of the future from the perspective of the 17th century, in the course of which he makes suggestive connections between social developments since the discovery of the ‘New World’ and the revolution in ideas associated with Copernicus and Galileo. The difficulties that arise from this multi-perspectival presentation of the processes of modernisation, however, make the work a fruitful basis for considering the connections between the various dimensions of ‘modernity’ that are explored in Döblin’s narrative.

In my paper I shall aim to indicate why Döblin is a highly significant figure in 20th-century literary modernism, how his treatment of the conquest of South America is related to the development of literary writing in the period between the World Wars, and how his presentation of key features in the long historical process of

modernisation stands in relation to the questions raised by the conference theme.

The Ethics of Unbelief in Modernist FictionSuzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)

The novel has long been seen a secular form, and the modernist novel as the epitome of that form. But this received view fails to discriminate between fiction in which God is absent, or sublimated into other forms, and that in which unbelief is a marked and contested category — in which, for example, the plot turns on a personal crisis of unbelief, or in which moral questions are framed according to an, often contentious, ethics of unbelief. The authors of the fiction I will explore in this paper are not, for the most part, the most well known of modernist names, but those who have frequently been dismissed as pious moralisers or period talents—G.K. Chesterton, John Rowland, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rose Macaulay and Mary Butts. Even so, I argue, the questions their fiction asks about the sensibility and the ethics of unbelief have relevance beyond their times. As formulated by nineteenth-century Rationalists, the ethics of unbelief states that we should believe only in the believable, that we be forced to unbelief if the evidence points that way. In Chesterton, Warner, Macaulay and Butts, this ethics is turned entirely on its head: how can we aspire to a rigorous and muscular unbelief, they ask, in an age in which unbelief is the consensus, in which unbelief has had its day?