FrançaisConference : National literary fields and European space
The internationality of a parisian nationalist : paul Bourget between Paris, London and Rome
Author/s : Blaise Wilfert Portal
My part in this collective workshop about the location of cultural productions, between, locality, nationality and transnationality, will consist a study, from a new point of view, of a politically doomed and esthetically backward but historically fascinating novelist, Paul Bourget. This réactionnaire, who believed that the France Academy, the House of the Lords, the Prussian High Command and the Vatical were the four pillars of true Europe, was one of the most proeminent figures fo french « nationalism », who theorized the national and cultural importance of being rooted, and professed a harsh contempt for debilitating cosmopolitanism. But he was also, at the same time, an Europe-wide success novelist, a landmark of modernism for nietzsche, a paragon for the society transatlanctic novel, from Henry James to Gabriele d'Annunzio, an Italy passionate traveler, a member of the european Hhigh life, a regular chronicler of the british governing classes. And he was also a typical parisian novelist, painter of the parisian leisure and government classes. I would like, in this paper, to articulate those outwardly paradoxes, that cast doubt over the usual theory of cultural territoriality, opposing cultural protectionists and free-traders, universality and locality, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, national significance and international success, when historians deal with the imperial societies. Contextualising Paul Bourget's trajectory, his use of local, national and international scopes in his literary activity, I would like to test a modelisation of the cultural international sphere around 1900, that would be able to explain the tight linking of local, national and international dimensions of literary life in the era of national imperialism.
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Meetings
« ESSE » Network
January 9th-10th, 2009 - Intellectual space in Europe (19th-21st c.)
Dir. G. Sapiro, F. Schultheis, V. Dubois
Publications & activities
[24.12.2008] - Publications
TRANSEO is a transnational and interdisciplinary journal on the production and the use of culture, literature and science TRANSEO was created by the graduate students who participated in the summer sch [...]
On Bourdieu, Education and Society, By Derek Robbins
[27.9.2006] - Publications
The Bardwell Press is pleased to announce the publication of a major contribution to Bourdieu studies [...]
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