Elisa Grilli will defend her thesis on
Journals in networks and Renaissance (France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Catalonia, 1890–1909),
under the direction of Evangelia Stead,
before a jury composed of:
– Guy Ducrey (Litt. Comparée, Un. De Strasbourg, rapporteur),
– Anne-Rachel Hermetet (Litt. Comparée, Un. d’Angers, rapporteur),
– Jean-Louis Haquette (Litt. Comparée, Un. de Reims, examiner),
– Jean-Yves Mollier (History of books and publishing, UVSQ, PR emeritus, examiner),
– Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Digital Humanities, Un. of Geneva, examiner).
The defense is public.
It will be held on May 10, from 12:30 p.m. at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d’Ulm, Berthier room (room 207), 2nd floor, left wing.
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Summary of the thesis:
Our thesis is in line with research on journal networks and the interest of reticular analysis to understand these media objects between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in order to draw a typology. It is a question of thinking about the double dimension of the network, both human and textual/iconographic. Our corpus of about fifteen journals allows us to envisage such networks from North to South of Europe, and declines the journal object in five linguistic and cultural areas (French, Italian, English, Spanish and Catalan).
These periodicals, which have long been called “small” reviews, or “young people’s” reviews, have often been considered to be on the fringes of the literary, media and political field, while many bridges exist with the world of the press and that they have been able to find compromises with the law of the market. Through an approach that is in line with modernist studies, we explore both the economy and the ecosystem of the journal.
This work, supplemented by a reticular analysis, serves to show that what characterizes networks is established on a local, national, but also international, or rather transnational, scale, in dynamics that make it possible to question the relationships between centers and peripheries. The elasticity of human and textual networks, as well as the plasticity and hybridity of these journals then offer original and ingenious literary, artistic and editorial experiments that go beyond both geopolitical and generic borders. We show how the adoption of this new media object that is the “literary and artistic review” allows these margins and these actors the emergence and circulation of new movements inscribed in the aesthetics of modernism, under the sign of a Renaissance and avant-garde.
Summary of the thesis :
The following research focuses on transnational networks of writers, artists, editors and publishers associated with late 19th and early 20th century “literary and artistic magazine”, from Great Britain to Spain and Catalonia, from France to Italy. We have chosen fifteen periodicals to represent these five cultural areas. Traditionally overlooked or treated as marginal, “little” or “young” by the literary, cultural, and political theorists, the study of these media-objects is conducted in order to better understand not only the human network behind their production but also the textual and iconographic discourses and networks circulating through such (short lived but) vibrant publications.
Such literary and artistic magazines participate in literary communication, at the intersection of hybrid editorial experimentations. We pay attention to their hybrid materiality, their economy, and their ecosystem. Deemed “peripheral” publications, these magazines actually presented themselves as original editorial experiments that offered innovative and hybrid spaces for renewal by reaching beyond not only political, but also linguistic borders and cultural conceptions of form, including the mainstream press. It shows how they were able to play off the artistic and mediatic complementarity offered by the articulation of the different national and transnational scales.
The methodology deployed facilitates analysis of how transnational literary networks spread and functioned across Northern and Southern European countries while emphasizing the under-theorized role such periodicals played in the promotion of an avant-gardist “Renaissance,” thereby making important contributions to the new aesthetic movement of Modernism.
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