Sans bords : distance et démocratie dans Letters from Iceland de W.H. Auden et Louis MacNeice

Abstract

Letters from Iceland presents itself as a form of distantiation: it relates the burlesque summer adventures of the poets in Iceland, while the ghost of the Spanish War insists to come back on the stage. I focus more particularly on the photographs provided by Auden and MacNeice to illustrate their account, and I argue that those images are in fact part of a more global aesthetic strategy enabling Auden to ‘take a position’ – not sides –regarding what is taking place in Europe. This is an idea partly suggested to me by Georges Didi-Huberman’s Quand les images prennent position (‘When Images Take a Position’), in which he deals with the aesthetics of montage in the Thirties.

Keywords

• travel narrative
• community
• photography
•  (post)modernism
• collage
• distantiation