Affective realisms: The politics of form in 1930s French literature and cinema

This dissertation returns to the French 1930s in order to revisit the post-war theoretical narratives that assign fixed political valences to formal and aesthetic strategies. It focuses on some key writers, filmmakers, and activists from the 1930s in an attempt to chart the ideological ambiguities and instabilities of the way they imagined revolution and social change in their films and novels. In the works I consider, revolution and social change are conceived of as creative, aesthetic activities, and consequently their creators understand that the way the works influence readers and viewers can play a role in such social change. Instead of offering an invitation to adopt a doctrine or worldview, these novels and films attempt to influence the way the reader or viewer imagines his or her engagement with the world. This desire to influence the reader and viewer leads, in the 1930s, to mixing high and popular forms of culture and borrowing from other artistic media, creating highly stylized forms of illusionistic realism that I call affective realisms. These texts seem to ask what kind of story---whether it be the gangster film, the Western, the adventure novel, or the melodrama---would best represent social problems and new forms of social organization. However, formal and aesthetic choices do not map easily or neatly onto political positions and this fact testifies to the diversity of forms that politically and socially engaged art could take in the ideologically fluid world of the 1930s.;Chapter One looks at the anxiety about action as performance in Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's short story La Comedie de Charleroi and then goes on to consider how Drieu in his later novel Gilles laments the failure of a fascist politics in France through a performance of "decadent" genres like melodrama and the roman policier. Chapter Two analyzes Andre Malraux's conceptions of imaginative heroism and the importance of cinematic montage for the agit-prop dimensions of Malraux's revolutionary novels. Chapter Three argues that the generic tension between Western and roman policier in Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange mirrors the political and ideological ambiguities of the film and the Popular Front. Chapter Four revisits the pre-war cinema of Marcel Came in an attempt to understand the politics of his "realism.".