The Future of Culture: Polemic and Counter-Discourse in Writers' Debates in the Inter-War Years

In this paper we investigate the controversies among the writers and intellectuals who attended the symposium "The Future of Culture" organized in 1933 in Madrid by the League of Nations (the second out of eight symposiums organized by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation between 1932 and 1938). Our investigations are based on the conference proceedings published by the League of Nations in 1933. In this paper we identify how the discours polemique can be structured in an institutional framework where the verbal violence is out of place: we explore a few different strategies of construction of the contre-discours adopted by the participants to the symposium, and more specifically we analyse the speeches given by the French writer Jules Romains and the Romanian art historian Georges Opresco, whose similar views provoke different reactions among their colleagues.