Last week I mentioned that my paper on Auden at the RAWW conference dealt with the genre of the diplomatic sonnet. This fits in a larger project that I have been working on, in which I am examining how literary intellectuals have responded to actual international threats and tensions. One of the case studies that has occupied me deals with the fin-de-siècle journal Cosmopolis. Although certain works published in this journal would have a lasting impact on twentieth-century literature (in particular, 'Un coup de dés' by Mallarmé), the principles behind its design have escaped critical attention.

In an article that was published earlier this year, I posit that Cosmopolis anticipated a form of modernism that Walter Benjamin would later conceptualise in his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). The interplay between Benjamin’s two essays suggests that translation allows one to reach a nonviolent resolution of conflict through language: a translation’s mediation between an original work and pure language presents a nonviolent form of coexistence. 

​This week I attended a conference on Romanticism in the Age of World Wars at the University of Leuven, which featured among many excellent panels three superb keynote speakers. You can find more information (including the booklet) on the conference's website.

Paul K. Saint-Amour gave a fascinating talk on the ways in which the discovery of archeological remains in the trenches of the Somme inspired a new kind of poetics that revolves around the ways in which words, too, are fossilised.

The Drop
​ Credit: Imperial War Museum

In my own contribution, I explored how W. H. Auden creatively engages with the form and ideological assumptions of the diplomatic sonnet in In Time of War, the third part of Auden’s and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War (1939), in which they describe their 1938 journey to the front of the Sino-Japanese War. This book also includes photographs that Auden took during his stay, which creates a dialogue between word and image that further complicates Auden’s criticism of the contemporary diplomatic system.