Fragmentary Modernisms: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, 1896-1950

1896年，两名牛津大学的考古学家在埃及城市Oxyrhynchus发现了大量的纸莎草纸，其中包括抒情诗人Sappho遗失的诗歌片段。他们的发现，以及基于这些发现的出版物和讲座，抓住了公众的想象力，渗透到流行小说和音乐厅歌曲，报纸报道和《纽约时报》的“本周之书”中。其他著名的考古发现--比如亚瑟·埃文斯在20世纪之交在克诺索斯（阿里阿德涅神话迷宫的所在地）的发掘--继续将一系列来自古代世界的零碎材料带到当代公众的注意力中。国外发现的碎片遗迹反映在国内博物馆学的发展中。博物馆陈列的根本变化--在大巡游及其后继者之后，博物馆越来越多地成为古代艺术品和手工艺品的消费场所--强调碎片化，从古希腊雕塑的主要经典作品中删除了旧的新古典主义装饰，包括大英博物馆的埃尔金大理石。就像在卢浮宫的一个受损的躯干上写的那样：碎片可以如此透明，以至于它有能力“改变你的生活”。在当代艺术和文学作品中，可以发现与这些发展惊人的相似之处。19世纪末至20世纪中叶发生的文学和视觉艺术革命从根本上标志着（几乎到了陈词滥调的地步）是由于一种激进的分裂倾向：半成品的雕像，好像被时间的蹂躏折断了;诗歌几乎没有或根本没有叙事意义，文字排列在页面上，好像部分文本被切除了;小说似乎是由弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫所谓的现代经验的“碎片和片断”组成的。然而，这些趋势并不是在前卫现代性的真空中出现的。艺术和文学中的现代主义运动，以其支离破碎的美学为强烈标志，被称为“现代主义”，以反映其新奇，事实上，这个项目的起点是一个重要的认识，即一些最激进的文学和视觉碎片实验发生的时期也见证了一个在发现和传播碎片中的古典文物方面的一系列范式转变的发展。它将考古学，博物馆学，语言学和金石学与现代文学和艺术结合在一起，首次提供了古典学术对现代主义及其遗产的文学和视觉美学的综合影响的综合画面。“碎片现代主义”跨越学科和机构边界，揭示了古典学术（广义上的）与文学和视觉艺术之间的多重影响网络。这样做的目的是从根本上改变我们能够讲述的经典片段的接受故事。碎片化--现代主义美学最普遍的特征--本质上是古典接受的一个功能，而现代主义者对古典碎片的接受以及古典主义者以我们想象的古代方式传播这些碎片所产生的地震式转变，继续塑造当代艺术、学术和博物馆学实践。

In 1896, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a 'torrent' of papyri in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, including fragments of lost poems by the lyric poet Sappho. Their discoveries, and the publications and lectures based on them, gripped the public imagination, infiltrating popular novels and music hall songs, newspaper reports, and the Times 'book of the week'. Other notable archaeological discoveries - such as Arthur Evans' excavations at Knossos (home of Ariadne's mythical labyrinth) at the turn of the twentieth century - continued to bring a stream of fragmentary material from the ancient world to contemporary public notice. Discoveries of fragmentary remains abroad were mirrored in museological developments at home. Radical changes in museum display - increasingly the site of consumption of ancient art and artefacts beyond the Grand Tour and its successors - were emphasising fragmentation by removing the older neoclassical restorations from the staple classics of ancient Greek sculpture, including the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. As Rilke put it, writing on a damaged torso in the Louvre: the fragment can be so lucent that it has the power to 'change your life'. A striking parallel to these developments is found in contemporary artistic and literary production. The revolution in literature and the visual arts which took place between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries was fundamentally marked (almost to the point of cliché) by a tendency to radical fragmentation: statues half-finished as if broken off by the ravages of time; poems with little or no narrative meaning, the words laid out on the page as though parts of the text had been excised; novels seemingly made up of what Virginia Woolf called the 'orts, scraps and fragments' of modern experience. Yet these trends did not arise in a vacuum of avant-garde modernity. Designated by the term 'modernism' to reflect its novelty, the modernist movement in art and literature, so strongly marked by its fragmentary aesthetics, was, in fact, crucially shaped by a striking turn to the fragmentary remains of antiquity.This project takes as its starting point the crucial realisation that the period in which some of the most radical literary and visual experimentations with fragmentation took place also witnessed a series of paradigm-shifting developments in the discovery and dissemination of classical antiquity in fragments. Bringing together archaeology, museology, philology and epigraphy with modern literature and art, it provides the first integrated picture of the combined impact of classical scholarship on the literary and visual aesthetics of modernism and its legacy. 'Fragmentary Modernisms' reaches across disciplinary and institutional borders to bring to light the multiple networks of influence between classical scholarship (broadly conceived) and the literary and visual arts. In doing so, it aims to fundamentally change the story of the reception of the classical fragment that we are able to tell. Fragmentation - the most pervasive characteristic of modernist aesthetics - was essentially a function of classical reception, and the seismic shift the modernist reception of classical fragments and their dissemination by classicists produced in the ways in which we imagine antiquity continues to shape contemporary artistic, scholarly and museological practice.