Robbe-Grillet in America: The Nouveau Roman Meets the Language Textbook

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (3) ◽  
pp. 492-510
Author(s):  
Sara Kippur
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
French Language ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Textbook Author ◽  
American Students ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Publishing

How could American students of intermediate French be the catalysts for a work of avant-garde French literature? This article centers on Le rendez-vous, an intermediate French-language textbook that combined a novel written by the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet with grammatical exercises written by Yvone Lenard, a prominent textbook author and instructor of French in the United States. Focusing on previously unexamined archives of this publication, from its release in America to the publication of Robbe-Grillet's novel in France under the title Djinn, the essay reveals an unknown literary history of transnational collaboration and exchange and places new emphasis on Robbe-Grillet's formative involvement with American higher education during his literary career. Through close reading of manuscript drafts and publishers' papers, the essay demonstrates how the dynamics of global publishing and shifting trends in language pedagogy aligned to condition the production of what would become Robbe-Grillet's most commercially successful novel.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Literary History of the United States

1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 290
Author(s):  
Theodore Hornberger ◽  
Robert E. Spiller ◽  
Willard Thorp ◽  
Thomas H. Johnson ◽  
Henry Seidel Canby ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of

Putting the Experience of the World at the Nation's Command: Music at the Library of Congress, 1800-1917

1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-149
Author(s):  
Gillian B. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
National Library ◽  
American Students ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Between 1800 and 1917 the music section at the Library of Congress grew from a few items in The Gentleman's Magazine to almost a million items. The history of this development provides a unique view of the infant discipline of musicology and the central role that libraries played in its growth in the United States. Between 1800 and 1870 only 500 items were acquired by the music section at the Library of Congress. In 1870 approximately 36,000 copyright deposits (which had been accumulating at several copyright depositories since 1789) enlarged the music section by more than seventy fold. After 1870 the copyright process brought an avalanche of music items into the Library of Congress. In 1901 Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, hired American-born, German-educated Oscar Sonneck to be the second Chief of the Music Division. Together Putnam and Sonneck produced an ambitious acquisitions program, a far-sighted classification, cataloging, and shelving scheme, and an extensive series of publications. They were part of Putnam's strategy to transform the Library of Congress from a legislative into a national library. Sonneck wanted to make American students of music independent of European libraries and to establish the discipline of musicology in the United States. Through easy access to comprehensive and diverse collections Putnam and Sonneck succeeded in making the Library of Congress and its music section a symbol of the free society that it served.

Avant-gardes in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.

Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres

2008 ◽  
Vol 73 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Lena ◽  
Richard A. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Organizational

Questions of symbolic classification have been central to sociology since its earliest days, given the relevance of distinctions for both affiliation and conflict. Music and its genres are no exception, organizing people and songs within a system of symbolic classification. Numerous studies chronicle the history of specific genres of music, but none document recurrent processes of development and change across musics. In this article, we analyze 60 musics in the United States, delineating between 12 social, organizational, and symbolic attributes. We find four distinct genre types—Avant-garde, Scene-based, Industry-based, and Traditionalist. We also find that these genre types combine to form three distinct trajectories. Two-thirds originate in an Avant-garde genre, and the rest originate as a scene or, to our surprise, in an Industry-based genre. We conclude by discussing a number of questions raised by our findings, including the implications for understanding symbolic classification in fields other than music.

The History of Jazz

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Gioia
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Thelonious Monk ◽  
John Coltrane ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charlie Parker

The History of Jazz, 3rd edition, is a comprehensive survey of jazz music from its origins until the current day. The book is designed for general readers and students, as well as those with more specialized interest in jazz and music history. It provides detailed biographical information and an overview of the musical contributions of the key innovators in development of jazz, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and others. The book also traces the evolution of jazz styles and includes in-depth accounts of ragtime, blues, New Orleans jazz, Chicago jazz, swing and big band music, bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion, and other subgenres and developments. The volume also provides a cultural and socioeconomic contextualization of the music, dealing with the broader political and social environment that gave birth to the music and shaped its development—both in the United States and within a global setting.

Some Recent Works on the Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists

Traditio ◽  
1954 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 594-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of

During the past decade there has been a significant shift of emphasis in work on the medieval canonists. The traditional studies on the literary history of canonistic sources and on problems of specifically ecclesiastical jurisprudence continue to flourish, and, indeed, have been stimulated by the plans for a new edition of Gratian's Decretum; but alongside this work, and complementary to it, there has appeared a new trend, a lively interest in the content and influence of canonistic doctrine concerning public law and political theory. This trend, moreover, shows all the international diffusion — and even, perhaps, something of the interplay of national susceptibilities — that its exponents have discerned in the work of the medieval canonists themselves. It is especially interesting that notable contributions have come from England and the United States as well as from the more established centers of canonistic studies.

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