Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (review)

Once again, literary and cultural studies are focusing on the encounter between modernity and democracy. With increasing urgency, literary theorists, film scholars and cultural historians are looking at relations between forms of art and the ideals of equality and liberty that began to appear in Europe after 1789. To this field, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar have added an immensely important volume. Their study Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture focuses on the popular entertainment, the mass media, the novels and films, in a word, the art forms of the multitudes that led up to the election of the Popular Front in June 1936. By revivifying the critical practice dubbed “poetics of culture” by Stephen Greenblatt, Andrew and Ungar seek to understand and describe the relation between the “indefinite text” (8) of culture and the social and political relations that constituted 1930s Paris.