Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

The authors highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers, artists, and other intellectuals to respond to the crises of the decade.----In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux and Celine), artists (Renoir and Dali), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont and Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.