Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

by Steven (Author), UNGAR (Author), Andrew (Author), Dudley (Author)

Synopsis

The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this straight story clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented. In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative poetics of culture to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film-technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Celine), artists (Renoir, Dali), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises. Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 464
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 01 Apr 2008

ISBN 10: 0674027167
ISBN 13: 9780674027169
Book Overview: Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar's Popular Front Paris is an interdisciplinary study of culture in 1930s France, especially at the time of the Popular Front. Through the study of film, literature, and other media (such as journals, both learned and popular, photography and radio), the authors define and study a 'poetics of culture', a culture which they see primarily characterized by the move from culture to politics under the pressure of national and international developments. The project of the book is ambitious and original. -- Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris Andrew and Ungar have written a bold and wonderful book on the moment in France in the mid-1930s when the dream of freedom became flesh as new culture and new politics. With the Popular Front at the center of interest, it is at the same time a work on cultural politics and political culture of the years between World War I and II in France. It is the best such study that I know. -- Herman Lebovics, author of Bringing the Empire Back Home and of True France This is a substantial piece of work on a key period in modern French, and indeed European, history - key not only in political terms, with the vicissitudes of the Left and the rise of Fascism, but culturally, with the rise of new media of mass communication such as the illustrated press and the sound cinema. -- Keith Reader, author of Robert Bresson The history of the 20th century is so intertwined with the history of film it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. This magnificent evocation of the French 1930s - so exciting politically and culturally - is memory stained with images, film as the very body of historical time: the popular front, surrealism, the colonies, the press, the chanson, the scandals, the quarrels of great writers from Gide to Celine. From all this, concentrated in stills from Bunuel or Renoir, our leave taking, with Levi-Strauss on the boat to the New World after the fall of Paris, is a sad one: the authors having demonstrated how energizing this seething decade can still be for us today. They help in the vital task of rescuing the Thirties everywhere. -- Fredric Jameson, author of A Singular Modernity

Media Reviews
Andrew and Ungar have written a diverse, disparate, protean book that is well worth heeding... A judicious and often elegant original work of broad scope and great ambition. - Eugen Weber, Modernism/modernity No one committed to cultural history can ignore this book and its powerful and persuasive methodology. This is interdisciplinary work at its very best. - N. R. Fitch, Choice Andrew and Ungar's book... is rich, complex, and frequently rewarding... This is a valuable and fascinating book, particularly in its insightful readings of a broad array of films of the 1930s. - Thomas Kselman, American Historical Review
Author Bio
Dudley Andrew is Professor of Film Studies and of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Steven Ungar is Professor of French and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the author of Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire.