Modernist Network between the North and the East

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Art historians focusing on British art of fin-de-siècle have analyzed the ways in which the idea of the “North”, merged in artistic representations and scientific discourse of the end of the nineteenth century with the orientalist stereotypes associated with the Orient. Frances Fowle and Marja Lahelma have written in their introduction to collective volume "Conceptualising the North at the Fin de Siècle" about the paradoxical fusion of the representations of the Germanic north with its Celtic and Finnish norths during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. As they argue, “As a cultural concept, the North is related to the notion of ‘Orient’ as it was famously analysed by Edward Said. Yet, while Orientalism establishes a strange and exotic ‘other’ as opposed to what is familiar, the conceptualizations of Celtic and Finnish norths are also modes of self-understanding. Inevitably, these perspectives were created in interaction with an outsider view. It was precisely the encounters with mythologized and stereotypical views of the North developed in Central European contexts that created the need for the kind of self-reflection that is examined here. This in no way indicates that these conceptualizations of the North were less artificial than concepts like the Orient that are more directly connected with issues of power and based on an ‘us-them’ binary relation.” This panel explores the concepts of Orientalism and Borealism entangling Francophone, Czech and Russian contexts, taking into analysis cultural transfer strategies, periodicals and emigration.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Martina Mecco, U libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

Papers

• Between Orientalism and Borealism: French Visions of Belgium and Bohemia in the 1860s - Petra James, U libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

• 'The Light of Slavic Studies Shines Today with Tenfold Power': Slavic Studies in Francophone Periodicals - Martina Mecco, U libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

• Transnational Cultural Ties: Zinaida Shakhovskoy at the Crossroads of Russian Émigré Networks - Elizaveta Berquin, U libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

Discussants

• Veronika Tuckerova, Harvard U

• Lidia Tripiccione, Princeton U