The Flux and the Fragment: Eleanor Clark's Rome for Wandering Intellectuals

This essay discusses Eleanor Clark’s 1952, Rome and a Villa as a book that, in the immediate postwar years, promoted new interest for Italy in the U.S., successfully reaching out to both intellectual élites and larger reading groups. It shows that, by redirecting modernist narrative techniques and interpretive methodologies from textual to architectural, historical, and cultural analysis, Clark pioneered the transition from literary to cultural criticism. The essay argues that, in examining the deep history of “the idea of Rome,” the author claimed as its unifying force a transhistorical poetic principle revealed in the condensation of classicism and modernism displayed in the city’s architecture and expressed in its language and social life. Clark mobilized that principle to read the city against the grain of the symbolic uses of the Roman ruins in fascist propaganda and in the postwar media-driven industry of transatlantic tourism.