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Abstract

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde and a melancholic, past-oriented traditionalism deserves to be re-examined. This essay aims to complicate this binarism by highlighting a moment within the history of modernism when an enthusiasm regarding the future fused with a melancholy regarding the past. Both Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia were deeply committed to the avant-garde discourse of the new, yet a number of their works in the years after 1912 harbour an ambivalence that compels us to rethink the simple divide between modernism and anti-modernism and suggest that some of the central figures of modernism were simultaneously bound to the sentiment of nostalgia.

Keywords

anti-modernism Dadaism Thierry de Duve Marcel Duchamp Hans Robert Jauss Paul de Man modernism

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References

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Modernist Melancholy

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