Articles - November 2011

Unanimism and the crowd

Early modern social lyric

Joseph Pennell, drawing of Cambria steel works, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1917. Image from the Library of Congress.

Published in 1905, when Jules Romains was twenty years old, “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings”[1] launches one of his dominant themes: “unanimous,” or, as will be seen, “unanimistic” feelings. He will expand on the theme (theme-assemblage, really) over a lifetime, in poems, novels, plays, essays. To name, today, his articulation of the social and the aesthetic is a bit like trying to name a constellation’s mythological shape. The terms composing the constellation come from various discourses and have distinctly differentiated meanings and references: the crowd, sociality, the social, class, lumpen, group, mass, multitude, people, folk, gathering, audience, community, public, commune.…

Wanderkammer

A walk through texts


(click image or here to be taken to WANDERKAMMER)