The Search for a Story. George Lukàcs' "Narrate or Describe?" and the Parisian Cityscape

• Autores: Caroline Igra
• Localización: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, ISSN 0044-2992, Vol. 73, Nº. 1, 2010, págs. 99-114
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Theorist Georg Lukàcs's division of mid 19th-century literature into two categories provides a perfect setting for the examination of depictions of the Parisian cityscape at that time. At a time of daily changes in both the city and its population, depictions of this cityscape proliferated, resulting in an oeuvre that was neither entirely view painting nor depiction of everyday life. Lukàcs's theory dividing literature into a narrative category and a descriptive one, published in his 1936 writing Narrate or Describe? offers an alternative framework to understand the original conception of this oeuvre. Lukàcs's method was to assess the effect of the author's immediate surroundings on his personal experience and also its consequent exploration within his literary output. Applying this framework to the organization of contemporary cityscape oeuvre reveals the artist's original intention—whether to merely record or to express individual experience—and, more importantly, the very varied character of his oeuvre, thereby enhancing our understanding of Post-Commune life in Paris.