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Articles by Christopher Prendergast
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From Arras to Thermidor
in NLR 43, January-February 2007, pp. 147-157
Subjects: Biography and Intellectual History , France , History and Historiography
Christopher Prendergast on Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity. The life, career and death of Robespierre, permeated by tensions between ends and means, terror and virtue; and the polemical furies that have clouded his legacy.
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Also available in Spanish -
Evolution and Literary History
in NLR 34, July-August 2005, pp. 40-62
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
A landmark engagement with Franco Moretti’s triptych of essays, Graphs, Maps, Trees. What forms of logic underpin the use of evolutionary models to lay bare the survival strategies of the detective story, or trace the mutations of a border-hopping stylistic technique? And what political implications follow from basing an account of literary history on the outcome of the market?
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Also available in Spanish and Turkish -
Codeword Modernity
in NLR 24, November-December 2003, pp. 95-111
Subjects: Aesthetics , Social Theory
Reflections on Fredric Jameson’s narratology of modernity, and current attempts to reinstate it as a master category of the time, requiring no suspect prefixes. The political dialectic behind such impulses of restoration, and the artistic practices which prepared them.
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Also available in Spanish -
Modernism's Nightmare?
in NLR 10, July-August 2001, pp. 141-156
Subjects: Aesthetics
In coolly proclaiming itself to be essentially the application of technique to matter, to what further consequences did modern art discover it was committing itself? Christopher Prendergast traces the ‘frightful clockwork of the world-structure’ in the games of Mallarmé, puppets of Flaubert and Kleist, musings of Mann, and the hurdy-gurdy of Cézanne overheard by T. J. Clark.
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Also available in Spanish -
Negotiating World Literature
in NLR 8, March-April 2001, pp. 100-121
Subjects: Literature
Should relations between national literatures be conceived on the model of international competition between states? Christopher Prendergast assesses a bold French attempt to analyse the historical dynamics of the ‘world republic of letters’, from the Renaissance to the present day—with Paris emerging as an unexpectedly durable capital. Were national determinations of literary projects always so predominant, and what of cross-cultural variations in the meaning of literature itself?
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Also available in Spanish -
Utopia
in NLR I/225, September-October 1997, pp. 151-156
Subjects: Social Theory
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