Uttal

Americanism, Popular Culture and the Primitive: Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Madame D'Ora (1904)

“…Like Jensen, Mu¨ller held out special praise for Theodore Roosevelt, whose 'exceptionally resistant nervous system,' muscular physique and inexhaustible, 'active energy' made him the embodiment of a vitalistic Americanism, which Mu¨ller opposed to the exhaustion of Asian and European cultures (1912, pp.50-53). 15 As much as anything else, Madame D'Ora -which Jensen began writing already in 1897 16 -is really about this juxtaposition of fin de sie`cle exhaustion and the new Americanist vitality, and more centrally about the question of who will survive in this brave new world of technology, speed and primitive energy. Jensen's novel is full of the sorts of thrilling technological advances so often connected with the rise of nervous exhaustion in modernity, and which Jensen examines in his essays on the new world: sky-scrapers, elevators, trains, cars, x-ray machines, cinemas, etc.…”