Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin
April - September 2014

Cultural Dynamics of the Modernist Novel

Ioana Vultur's project is focused on the European Modernist novel of the first decades of the 20th century, seen as exemplifying a general process of cultural change and innovation. First, the project will analyze the modern novel as a specific form of modernist art: its temporal dynamics will be compared to that of other forms of art, in order to show that the modernist novel is in fact anti-modern. Ioana Vultur will study the experimental narrative structures and compositional forms invented by the modernist novel, showing how this formal revolution is linked to a new vision of fiction and of its aesthetic function. Finally, building on this analysis, she will study the social and cultural function of the modernist novel, seen as a laboratory exploring the central issues of the socio-political, cultural and psychological transformations having led to contemporary society.

Ioana Vultur has been trained in French and Comparative Literature. She received her PhD from the University Paris IV-Sorbonne with a dissertation entitled Time and Remembrance in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Broch’s The Death of Virgil (under the direction of Antoine Compagnon). The dissertation has been published in 2003 under the title Proust and Broch : the boarders of time, the borders of memory.