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

1896年，两位牛津考古学家在埃及的奥克西林库斯城发现了一堆纸莎草纸，其中包括抒情诗人萨福遗失的诗歌碎片。他们的发现，以及以这些发现为基础的出版物和讲座，抓住了公众的想象力，渗透到流行小说、音乐厅歌曲、报纸报道和《泰晤士报》的“每周书”中。其他著名的考古发现——比如阿瑟·埃文斯在20世纪初在克诺索斯（阿里阿德涅神话迷宫的所在地）的发掘——继续将古代世界的碎片材料带到当代公众的视线中。国外发现的残缺遗骸反映了国内博物馆学的发展。博物馆陈列的根本变化——越来越多的古代艺术和手工艺品的消费场所超出了大旅游和它的继任者——通过从古希腊的主要经典雕塑中移除旧的新古典主义修复，包括大英博物馆的埃尔金大理石雕，强调了碎片化。正如里尔克在卢浮宫的一具残缺的躯干上所写的那样：碎片可以如此明亮，以至于它有“改变你的生活”的力量。在当代艺术和文学作品中也发现了与这些发展惊人的相似之处。19世纪末至20世纪中期发生的文学和视觉艺术革命，从根本上（几乎到了陈词滥调的地步）标志着一种激进的碎片化趋势：半成品的雕像，仿佛被时间的蹂躏破坏了；很少或根本没有叙事意义的诗歌，在书页上的文字似乎被删去了一部分；小说似乎是由弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫所说的现代经验的“碎片、残片和碎片”组成的。然而，这些趋势并不是在前卫现代性的真空中产生的。现代主义被称为“现代主义”，以反映其新颖性，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，实际上，在很大程度上是由对古代残缺遗迹的惊人转向所塑造的。这个项目的出发点是一个重要的认识，即在一些最激进的文学和视觉碎片实验发生的时期，也见证了一系列范式转变的发展，在碎片中发现和传播古典古代。它将考古学、博物馆学、文献学和碑文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文学和视觉美学及其遗产的综合影响的综合图景。“碎片现代主义”跨越了学科和制度的界限，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。在这样做的过程中，它旨在从根本上改变我们能够讲述的古典片段的接受故事。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种功能，而现代主义对古典碎片的接受以及古典主义者对它们的传播所产生的地震式转变，我们想象古代继续塑造当代艺术、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.