UCLA

“Meridional Triangulations and Peripheral Resistances” is a comparative study of three culturally significant magazines active before and during the Second World War: Jean Ballard’s Les Cahiers du Sud (1914–1966), Roger Caillois’s Lettres françaises (1941–1945, 1947), and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur (1931–1981.) Each sought to articulate, metabolize, preserve, and resist the social, historical, and cultural upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe and Latin America. The concept “meridional” points to currents of movement that cross borders of all kinds, countering the still-common assumption that Europe occupies a cultural center to which the rest of the world merely reacts.“Meridional Triangulations” also serves as a method: reading the three magazines’ shared contributors and international ethos as a source of connection rather than division, a unity located not in territorial claims but in the meteorological, oceanographic movement the “meridional” describes. The dissertation asks what this triangulated reading reveals about how these publications navigated the period from 1930 to 1947, an era defined by the rise of authoritarian regimes on both sides of the Atlantic, and how their aesthetic and political commitments were both reinforced and strained by an ambition to engage a world existing within, and potentially beyond, the nation-state. While all three magazines published contributors considered dangerous by the authorities of their moment, the two “peripheral” publications, Les Cahiers du Sud and Sur, register an acute awareness of nationalism’s threat not only to culture but to physical mobility and the rights of self-determination inherited from eighteenth-century revolutionary thought. Lettres françaises, by contrast, presented itself as a voice in exile charged with preserving French literary culture under occupation. Though Caillois may have understood his magazine as uniquely positioned against European nationalism’s excesses, its perspective remained narrower than it claimed, reluctant to treat Paris as anything other than a metonym for a national framework that continues to complicate the promise of the international spirit. This project thus addresses literal and literary boundaries alike, aiming to deepen our understanding of resistance, movement, and the generative potential of the liminal spaces between established categories of thought.