{"title":"Open Your Ears, Paris Dada! Where Is Your Music Coming From?","authors":"P. Dayan","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0376","url":null,"abstract":"The historical record tells us that music of many kinds was played at Paris Dada events. There was piano music from the contemporary high art tradition; there was jazz; and there was also ‘anti-music’, later described (not entirely credibly) by its composer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. None of this music finds an audible echo in the Paris Dada manifestos of Tristan Tzara. Music is central to his discourse on Dada; but it is music as incarnated, out of time, by the physical musical instrument, not music as it was played in live performance and received by an audience in real time. The reason is the Dada refusal to see art as anything that can be defined, or as the communication of a message sent by a human agent. The instrument, as a physical object, cannot, in Dada, be seen through to the art or the artist beyond. This is in many ways a logically untenable position, because we never cease to believe that the music we hear is something more than the instrument on which it is played. Lies have to be told in order for Dada to occupy that untenable position. But Tzara assumes those lies, and the necessity for them; and so do I.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43310167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Winged Things: Insects and Birds as Flying Messengers in Céline Arnauld's Poetry","authors":"Ruth Hemus","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0379","url":null,"abstract":"The metropolis and the machine are the epitome of modernity in the avant-garde but in the interstices of the cityscape the natural world persists. In the disrupted Dada poems of Céline Arnauld, from the 1920s through to the 1940s, collisions between the man-made and natural environment produce sparks of lyrical beauty and of anxiety. The skyline is punctuated both by aeroplanes and birds; the roar of trains and buzz of insects clash in soundscapes. From wasps to doves, Arnauld’s winged things frequent and transcend the anthropocentric environment. Unbound by man-made borders, they range across temporal and spatial environments, the real and imaginary. This essay considers how Arnauld used her flying messengers to negotiate complex experiences and ecologies of modernity. Albeit mapped to temporal moments in the twentieth century, it emerges that her points of enquiry and tensions – from migration to war, freedom to precarity – are startlingly relevant one hundred years later.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47993841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Attention Seeking: Tristan Tzara's Art Critical Prose Poetry","authors":"Kathryn Brown","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0380","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Tristan Tzara's innovative art critical writing of the 1940s and shows how the poet's engagement with European avant-garde painting developed ideas that shaped Paris Dada during the 1920s. Focusing on essays about Joan Miró and Paul Klee, it is argued that Tzara employed an unorthodox language for writing about art and promoted a distinctive style of art critical prose poetry. His approach to art criticism is shown to raise specific issues about attention by problematizing how audiences might have regard to words, sounds, and pictures simultaneously. Taking his cue from the distinctive ontologies he finds in works by Miró and Klee, Tzara uses language to perform with painting rather than conveying ideas about it. In a distinctive linguistic performance that borders on music, Tzara's art critical prose poems are seen to mobilize elements of language and visual art in non-hierarchical, undirected ways, thereby prompting a complex phenomenological exercise in attention. Cet article examine les essais critiques sur l'art que Tristan Tzara a écrit pendant les années quarante et montre comment l'engagement du poète avec la peinture d'avant-garde européenne lui a fourni l'occasion de développer des idées qui ont façonné les débuts de Paris Dada. En se concentrant sur des essais sur Joan Miró et Paul Klee, il est soutenu que Tzara a créé un langage peu orthodoxe pour écrire sur l'art et a promu un style distinctif de poésie en prose critique. Cette façon d'aborder la peinture soulève des questions spécifiques sur l'attention en problématisant la manière dont le lecteur pourrait considérer simultanément les mots, les sons et les images. S'inspirant des ontologies distinctives qu'il trouve dans les œuvres de Miró et de Klee, Tzara utilise le langage pour jouer avec la peinture plutôt que de transmettre des idées à son sujet. Dans une performance linguistique distinctive qui frôle la musique, les poèmes en prose critique de Tzara mobilisent des éléments du langage et de l'art visuel de manière non hiérarchique et non dirigée, provoquant ainsi un exercice phénoménologique complexe de l'attention.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47269277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0382","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":"160 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pulling It Out of a Hat: Picabia, Lanson and Man Ray's Cover for Littérature","authors":"Elizabeth M. Legge","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0378","url":null,"abstract":"The magician’s top hat, standardized handwriting, calligraphic flourish and ink blot of Man Ray’s cover for the new series of Littérature in 1922 open questions of style in both fashion and writing. The cover’s emblem-like visual components resonate not only with questions of style and cultural sophistication in such magazines as Monsieur and La Gazette du bon ton, but also with contemporary Dada squabbles with Cubism, and with a Paris Dada bugbear” Gustave Lanson’s magisterial text, Histoire de la littérature française (1894). In his 1924 Manifeste André Breton deftly capitalized on Lansonism in order to turn it against its own premises and devices. Finally, Man Ray’s emblem points to questions at the time of authenticity, authority and falsity.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48459466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decidedly For and Against the Future: Dada and Other Arts for Life","authors":"Stephen Forcer","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0381","url":null,"abstract":"There is an obvious premier degré contradiction in commemorating Dada centenaries. The movement was famously against permanence and yet Dada has become enshrined in popular culture, exhibitions, catalogues, and indeed academic research. To paraphrase a Dada slogan, perhaps the true Dada researcher should be against research into Dada. But let us not be too fetishistic or precious about Dada. To borrow from Delia Ungureanu’s magisterial comparative study of surrealism, where is Dada in the 21st-century, and what does it mean to understand that question not so much in terms of conscious practice (such as contemporary performance art) but in relation to the pan-human, pan-historical phenomena cherished by Dadaists and which can be forgotten in the rush to eulogise Dada nihilism, such as ethics and peace, radical humanism, socio-political engagement, and the question of how to live well with oneself and with others? The world is on fire, and Dada is both dead and all around us.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43881527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing the Paradox in the Theatre of Tristan Tzara","authors":"Erica O'Neill","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0377","url":null,"abstract":"Co-founder of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara, wrote and produced three stage plays during the Paris Dada period (1920–1923). This article discusses Tzara's third play, The Gas Heart (1921) to show his unique application of theatricality. The text of The Gas Heart is interrupted in Act III by a dance presented as a typographical illustration. While event programmes substantiate the performance of the dance during presentations of the play (1921 and 1923) it remains unknown how the diagram informed the action of the dance. I argue that Tzara's dance exemplifies the paradox central to Tzara's creative programme. Applying Samuel Weber's definition of theatricality, this paper explores The Gas Heart dance as an expression of ‘singular duplicity’ (Weber, 2004), but one that opens ways for performing the paradox in the theatre of Tristan Tzara.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Obéir pour se libérer: stratégies d’héroïsation dans le film Indigènes de Rachid Bouchareb","authors":"D. Franco","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2023.0369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2023.0369","url":null,"abstract":"This article re-examines the common understanding of heroism in Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 film Days of Glory ( Indigènes). It challenges the premise that the four Maghrebian infantrymen at the centre of the picture are in fact fighting in the French ranks in order to primarily serve mainland France. Stylistic, rhetoric and filmic analyses of the film will show that, instead, enrolling in the French army provides the Arab soldiers with an opportunity to – paradoxically – assert their identity as free subjects. The result of this approach is twofold: while inscribing the protagonists of Days of Glory in the classical heroic tradition, where obedience and self-government are often complementary, it also expounds the director’s militant desire to define the North African immigrant as both France’s historical ally and an autonomous subject.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42020271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}