Unanimisme jules romains biography

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French novelist, dramatist, and poet. He was elected to the Académie Française in

The son of a schoolmaster, Romains was born in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, Haute-Loire, and studied science and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He became involved with a group of writers and artists known as the Abbaye, who published his verse collection La Vie unanime (). In this early work Romains expounded his theory of ‘unanimisme’, the concept of a collective consciousness in which the emotions and impressions of the group as a whole take precedence over the psychology of the individual. The concept had been introduced in Romains's first prose work, Le Bourg régénéré (), set in a village community, and reappeared in the novel Mort de quelqu'un (; translated as Death of a Nobody, ), which examines the influence of an insignificant individual on the collective consciousness, and the farcical tale Les Copains ().

Romains began writing for the theatre in with the

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Unanimism

Unanimism (French: Unanimisme) is a movement in French literature begun bygd Jules Romains in the early s, with his first book, La vie unanime, published in ^[1][2] It can be dated to a sudden conception Romains had in October of a 'communal spirit' or joint 'psychic life' in groups of people.^[3] It is based on ideas of collective consciousness and collective emotion, and on crowd behavior, where members of a group do or think something simultaneously. Unanimism is about an artistic merger with these group phenomena, which transcend the consciousness of the individual.^[4] Harry Bergholz writes that "grossly generalizing, one might describe its aim as the art of the psychology of human groups".^[1] Because of this collective emphasis, common themes of unanimist writing include politics and friendship.^[5]

The primary unanimist work fryst vatten Romains's multi-volume cycle of novels Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of

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Unanimism and the crowd

Early modern social lyric

Published in , when Jules Romains was twenty years old, “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings”[1] launches one of his dominant themes: “unanimous,” or, as will be seen, “unanimistic” feelings. He will expand on the theme (theme-assemblage, really) over a lifetime, in poems, novels, plays, essays. To name, today, his articulation of the social and the aesthetic is a bit like trying to name a constellation’s mythological shape. The terms composing the constellation come from various discourses and have distinctly differentiated meanings and references: the crowd, sociality, the social, class, lumpen, group, mass, multitude, people, folk, gathering, audience, community, public, commune.… Connections between them can be made into more than one configuration. To favor one or even two would be to risk missing the fabled synonymy unifying them all. Is that Monoceros the unicorn in the sky there? A shape does emerge out of this heterogene