ABOUT THIS BOOK

How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today?

The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-garde’s conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere.

The historical avant garde—which encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealism—was self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle Époque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Concepts of the World offers an alternative narrative of globalization, one that integrates the avant-garde’s enthusiasm for, as well as resistance to, the process. Rentzou identifies within the avant-garde a powerful political language that expressed the ambivalence of living and creating in an increasingly globalized world—a language that profoundly shaped the way the world has been conceptualized and is experienced today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

EFFIE RENTZOU is a professor of French literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Littérature malgré elle: Le surréalisme et la tranformation du littéraire (Literature Despite Itself: Surrealism and the Transformation of the Literary) and the coeditor of 1913: The Year of French Modernism.

REVIEWS

“‘The universal,’ ‘internationalism,’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ constitute the eponymous concepts of the world that Effie Rentzou thoroughly investigatesin her 2022 monograph. Grounding close reading of written and visual archives in their historical, political, and even personal contexts, Rentzou convincingly argues that the avant-garde was simultaneously transformed by and transformed those concepts.” —French Forum

“A timely contribution to the current rediscovery and revalorisation of the historic avant-gardes as global movements . . . from poetry to visual art, from print culture to exhibitions, Rentzou’s book is an embarrassment of riches.” —Modern Contemporary France

“In her highly engaging and meticulously researched work, Effie Rentzou deconstructs the relationship between the avant-garde and globalization, recasting it as ambivalent and complex, thereby challenging the longstanding account of modernity’s unhesitant ideological alignment with the forces of globalization . . . This book represents a valuable contribution to avant-garde studies and reminds us that, in our own tumultuous times, it is all the more urgent that we dare to recreate the world.” —French Studies

“Marx famously said that so far philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it. Here is what Effie Rentzou has done for our views of the French historical avant-gardes: in a series of vivid and vibrant close-ups, she demonstrates with verve and accuracy that the highly charged combination of dynamic nomadism and messy internationalism, this very ‘rastaquouère’ modernism, has indeed changed our world for good.” —Jean-Michel Rabaté, coeditor of Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics

“Effie Rentzou roots our contemporary understanding of globalization in the surrealist vision of the world in this groundbreaking study, as a movement founded on universalist principles, based in the reinvention of the concept of the human that originated in Greek antiquity. Her analyses of surrealist print journals show how surrealist deconstruction of Enlightenment notions that emerged from Greek thought led to a reimagining of what a new ‘world community’ might look like, how it could transcend and reconfigure existing borders in politics and the arts.” —Katharine Conley, author of Surrealist Ghostliness

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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