European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine

Modernism is synonymous with cosmopolitanism. In their groundbreaking collection of essays, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argued: “Conspicuous in the age of Modernism is an unprecedented acceleration in the intellectual traffic between nations . . . in this climate, international exchanges and unacknowledged borrowings flourished.” Successive waves of transnational avant-garde movements—symbolism, expressionism, cubism, Futurism, Dada, surrealism, constructivism— swept across Europe. In Extraterritorial (1972), George Steiner directed attention to the polyglot milieu of twentieth-century literature shaped by exile and expatriation, and, following the upheavals occasioned by two world wars, the displacement of millions of refugees. Steiner’s attention to a modern multilingualism as a condition of “extraterritoriality” indicates that concepts like “modernism” may be more culture-bound and stubbornly resistant to translation than we think