Cultural modernity and Atlantic perspectives: Estanislao Del Campo’s Fausto (1866) and its French contemporaries

Abstract

This article presents an Atlantic perspective on the origins of cultural modernism in the mid-nineteenth century, through a consideration of the Argentine Estanislao del Campo's poem Fausto and its links and parallels with French culture. The article considers in particular the role of "fresh seeing," "absorption," and reflexive self-awareness of the medium on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic perspective calls significantly into question the model of distinct, plural, polycentric modernisms, but equally is at odds with the assertion of transnational commonalities across modernisms. In consequence, the internationalization or transnationalization of cultural modernity in the Atlantic space shatters the generic intellectual patterns that underlie the very theorization of international modernism itself.