Paris Bride
Subtitle: A Modernist Life
Publisher: punctum books
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Brooklyn, NY
Number of pages: 358
ISBN-13: 9781950192649
Subjects: Biography & True Stories
Description: "In July 1905, in Paris, a young 
Anglo-French woman called Marie Wheeler became the bride of a Swiss 
émigré, Johannes Schad. Immediately after the wedding, Marie and 
Johannes moved to London. And there they lived for nineteen years. In 
1924, however, something happened to change their lives, and Marie, in 
many respects, simply disappeared.
Paris Bride is an exploration of 
the lost life of Marie Schad, of whom little is known beyond a few legal
 papers, a number of letters, some photographs, the diaries of a friend,
 and her obituary. With so little else known of Marie’s life, this book 
seeks to read her back into existence by drawing on a host of 
contemporaneous texts — largely modernist texts, by Virginia Woolf, 
Franz Kafka, the Paris Surrealists, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, 
Katherine Mansfield, and Walter Benjamin. All of the selected authors 
are connected with Marie through some coincidence of time, place, or 
theme.
In an attempt to do justice to Marie’s in-visibility, or to her un-life, Paris Bride
 takes as its guide Wilde’s declaration that “the true function of 
criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is not.” In other 
words, this book seeks to evade the positivist or realist assumptions of
 conventional literary criticism, and instead pursue a post-critical 
method with its sources and texts. Paris Bride is not confined 
to academic discourse but instead draws on a range of literary genres 
and devices that are more in sympathy with the non-realist character of 
modernism itself — devices such as fragmentation, flânerie, textual 
collage, stream of consciousness, imagism, perspectivism, dream-text, 
the absurd, etc. Ultimately, Paris Bride is a modernistic experiment in life-writing."
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