Erik S. Roraback – “The Anti-Modern James, Balzac and Barthes”
A book chapter by Erik S. Roraback, “The Anti-Modern James, Balzac and Barthes” as Chapter Fourteen, pp. 155–66, in Reading Henry James in the Twenty-First Century: Heritage and Transmission, eds. Dennis Tredy, Annick Duperray and Adrian Harding.
This text focuses on Henry James’s, on Honoré de Balzac’s, and on Roland Barthes’s contributions to an anti-modern sensibility. This is demonstrated both in the light of Antoine Compagnon’s work on the antimodern in Les Antimodernes de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (2005) and in its own discrete claims and terms, especially with regard to questions of experience, of entertainment culture and of the institution of a more general cultural sensibility; the article extends Compagnon’s idea that to be antimodern is to be anticapitalist. In this study, to be antimodern is to be a true modern, because it denotes that one has fidelity to what is most valuable in our ongoing cultural modernity that dates back to the rude energies of the seventeenth century.
About the book: To commemorate the recent centennial of Henry James’s death and to help readers understand the depth and scope of the author’s influence both today and during the previous century, thirty leading Jamesian scholars from twelve different countries and five continents were asked to explore ways in which the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘transmission’ currently come into play when reading James. The resulting chapters of this volume are divided into three main sections, each focusing on different ways in which James’s legacy is being re-evaluated today—from his influence on key authors, playwrights and film-makers over the past century (Part One), to new discoveries regarding European authors and artists who influenced James (Part Two), to recent approaches more radically re-evaluating James for the twenty-first century, including contemporary poetics, political and sociological dimensions, cognitive science, and queer studies (Part Three). This collection will be of great interest to scholars and general readers of James, and is a useful guide to tracing the writer’s ever-elusive ‘figure in the carpet’ and understanding the power of his continued impact today.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1-5275-7008-8
ISBN13: 978-1-5275-7008-5
Release Date: 15th June 2021
Pages: 430