Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
THE DEATH OF GOD
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever shall be born after us—for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous even is still on its way, still travelling—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem aeternam deo. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Extracts.000002.Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
from Being and Time (1924)
ANGST
Anxiety is not only anxiety in the face of something, but, as a state-of-mind, it is also anxiety about something. That which anxiety is profoundly anxious about is not a definite kind of Being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it. Indeed the threat itself is indefinite, and therefore cannot penetrate threateningly to this or that factically concrete potentiality-for-Being. That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself. In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of Others. Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities. Therefore, with that which it is anxious about, anxiety discloses Dasein as Being-possible, and indeed as the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
from “What is Metaphysics?” (1929)
THE METAPHYSICS OF NOTHING
Does there ever occur in human existence a mood of this kind, through which we are brought face to face with Nothing itself?
This may and actually does occur, albeit rather seldom and for moments only, in the key-mood of dread (Angst). By “dread” we do not mean “anxiety” (Aengstlichkeit), which is common enough and is akin to nervousness (Furchtsamkeit)—a mood that comes over us only too easily. Dread differs absolutely from fear (Furcht). We are always afraid of this or that definite thing, which threatens us in this or that definite way. “Fear of” is generally “fear about” something. Since fear has this characteristic limitation—“of” and “about”—the man who is afraid, the nervous man, is always bound by the thing he is afraid of or by the state in which he finds himself. In his efforts to save himself from this “something” he becomes uncertain in relation to other things; in fact, he “loses his bearings” generally.
In dread no such confusion can occur. It would be truer to say that dread is pervaded by a peculiar kind of peace. And although dread is always “dread of,” it is not dread of this or that. The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the “what.” The indefiniteness is brought out in an illustration familiar to everybody.
In dread, as we say, “one feels something uncanny.” What is this “something” (es) and this “one”? We are unable to say what gives “one” that uncanny feeling. “One” just feels it generally (im Ganzen). All things, and we with them, sink into a sort of indifference. But not in the sense that everything turns towards us. This withdrawal of what-is-in-totality, which then crowds round us in dread, this is what oppresses us. There is nothing to hold on to. The only thing that remains and overwhelms us whilst what-is slips away, is this “nothing.”
Dread reveals Nothing.
In dread we are “in suspense” (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not “you” or “I” that has the uncanny feeling, but “one.” In the trepidation of this suspense where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that remains.
Dread strikes us dumb. Because what-is-in-totality slips away and thus forces Nothing to the fore, all affirmation (lit. “Is”-saying: “Ist”-Sagen) fails in the face of it. The fact that when we are caught in the uncanniness of dread we often try to break the empty silence by words spoken at random, only proves the presence of Nothing. We ourselves confirm that dread reveals Nothing—when we have got over our dread. In the lucid vision which supervenes while yet the experience is fresh in our memory we must needs say that what we were afraid of was “actually” (eigentlich: also “authentic”) Nothing. And indeed Nothing itself, Nothing as such, was there.
from Being and Time (1924)
ANGST
Anxiety is not only anxiety in the face of something, but, as a state-of-mind, it is also anxiety about something. That which anxiety is profoundly anxious about is not a definite kind of Being for Dasein or a definite possibility for it. Indeed the threat itself is indefinite, and therefore cannot penetrate threateningly to this or that factically concrete potentiality-for-Being. That which anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the-world itself. In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of Others. Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world. Anxiety individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities. Therefore, with that which it is anxious about, anxiety discloses Dasein as Being-possible, and indeed as the only kind of thing which it can be of its own accord as something individualized in individualization.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
from “What is Metaphysics?” (1929)
THE METAPHYSICS OF NOTHING
Does there ever occur in human existence a mood of this kind, through which we are brought face to face with Nothing itself?
This may and actually does occur, albeit rather seldom and for moments only, in the key-mood of dread (Angst). By “dread” we do not mean “anxiety” (Aengstlichkeit), which is common enough and is akin to nervousness (Furchtsamkeit)—a mood that comes over us only too easily. Dread differs absolutely from fear (Furcht). We are always afraid of this or that definite thing, which threatens us in this or that definite way. “Fear of” is generally “fear about” something. Since fear has this characteristic limitation—“of” and “about”—the man who is afraid, the nervous man, is always bound by the thing he is afraid of or by the state in which he finds himself. In his efforts to save himself from this “something” he becomes uncertain in relation to other things; in fact, he “loses his bearings” generally.
In dread no such confusion can occur. It would be truer to say that dread is pervaded by a peculiar kind of peace. And although dread is always “dread of,” it is not dread of this or that. The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the “what.” The indefiniteness is brought out in an illustration familiar to everybody.
In dread, as we say, “one feels something uncanny.” What is this “something” (es) and this “one”? We are unable to say what gives “one” that uncanny feeling. “One” just feels it generally (im Ganzen). All things, and we with them, sink into a sort of indifference. But not in the sense that everything turns towards us. This withdrawal of what-is-in-totality, which then crowds round us in dread, this is what oppresses us. There is nothing to hold on to. The only thing that remains and overwhelms us whilst what-is slips away, is this “nothing.”
Dread reveals Nothing.
In dread we are “in suspense” (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not “you” or “I” that has the uncanny feeling, but “one.” In the trepidation of this suspense where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that remains.
Dread strikes us dumb. Because what-is-in-totality slips away and thus forces Nothing to the fore, all affirmation (lit. “Is”-saying: “Ist”-Sagen) fails in the face of it. The fact that when we are caught in the uncanniness of dread we often try to break the empty silence by words spoken at random, only proves the presence of Nothing. We ourselves confirm that dread reveals Nothing—when we have got over our dread. In the lucid vision which supervenes while yet the experience is fresh in our memory we must needs say that what we were afraid of was “actually” (eigentlich: also “authentic”) Nothing. And indeed Nothing itself, Nothing as such, was there.
Extracts.000001.The Impersonality of Art
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
from Selected Letters (1857)
THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART
With a reader such as you, Madame, one who is so understanding, frankness is a duty. I therefore answer your questions: Madame Bovary is based on no actual occurrence. It is a totally fictitious story; it contains none of my feelings and no details from my own life. The illusion of truth (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the book’s impersonality. It is one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.
Furthermore, Art must rise above personal emotions and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to endow it with pitiless method, with the exactness of the physical sciences. Still, for me the capital difficulty remains style, form, that indefinable Beauty implicit in the conception and representing, as Plato said, the splendor of Truth.
For a long time, Madame, I led a life like yours. I too spent several years completely alone in the country, hearing in winter no sound but the rustle of the wind in the trees and the cracking of the drift-ice on the Seine under my window. If I have arrived at some understanding of life, it is because I have lived little in the ordinary sense of the word; I have eaten meagerly, but ruminated much; I have seen all kinds of people, and visited various countries. I have traveled on foot and on camel-back. I am acquainted with Parisian speculators and Damascus Jews, with Italian ruffians and Negro mountebanks. I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was lost in the snows of Parnassus—which may be taken symbolically.
Do not complain; I have been here and there in the world and have a thorough knowledge of that Paris you dream of; there is nothing to equal a good book at your fireside, the reading of Hamlet or Faust on a day when your responses are keen. My own dream is to buy a little palace in Venice, on the Grand Canal.
So there, Madame—part of your curiosity is gratified. To complete my portrait and biography, add only this: I am thirty-five, five feet eight, with the shoulders of a stevedore and the nervous irritability of a young lady of fashion. I am a bachelor and a recluse.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from Stephen Hero (1903-4)
THE EPIPHANY
He was passing through Eceles’ St one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.
The Young Lady—(drawling discreetly) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel. . . .
The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . .
The Young Lady—(softly) . . . O . . . but you’re . . . ve . . . ry . . . wick . . . ed. . . .
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance.
—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany—
—What?—
—Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
from Letters (1907)
ARTISTIC OBJECTIVITY
That is why I must be cautious in trying to write about Cézanne, which naturally tempts me greatly now. Not the person (I really ought to see that at last) who takes in pictures from so private an angle is justified in writing about them; one who could quietly confirm them in their existence, without experiencing through them more or other than facts, would surely be fairest to them. But within my own life this unexpected contact, coming and making a place for itself as it did, is full of confirmation and pertinence. Another poor man. And what progress in poverty since Verlaine (if Verlaine wasn’t already a relapse), who under “Mon Testament” wrote: Je ne donne rien aux pauvres parce que je suis un pauvre moi-même, and in almost all of whose work this not-giving was, this embittered displaying of empty hands, for which Cézanne during the last thirty years had no time. When should he have shown his hands? Malicious glances did often find them, whenever he was on his way, and lewdly uncovered their indigence; we, however, are given to know from the pictures only how massive and genuine the work lay in them to the end. This work, which had no preferences any more, no inclinations, no fastidious indulgences; whose smallest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely sensitive conscience and which with such integrity reduced the existent to its color content that it began, beyond color, a new existence, without earlier memories. It is this unlimited objectivity, which declines to interfere in any other sphere, that makes Cézanne’s portraits so outrageous and absurd to people. They apprehend, without realizing, that he was reproducing apples, onions, and oranges with sheer color (which to them may still seem a subordinate device of pictorial practice), but when they come to landscape, they miss interpretation, judgment, superiority, and where portraiture is concerned, why, the rumor of intellectual conception has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, and so successfully that something of the kind is already noticeable even in Sunday photographs of engaged couples and families. And here Cézanne naturally seems to them quite inadequate and not worth discussing at all. He is actually as alone in this salon as he was in life, and even the painters, the young painters, already pass him by more quickly because they see the dealers on his side.
TE Hulme (1883-1917)
from “Romanticism and Classicism” (1914)
ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM
I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the superiority of fancy—not superior generally or absolutely, for that would be obvious nonsense, but superior in the sense that we use the word in empirical ethics—good for something, superior for something. I shall have to prove then two things, first that a classical revival is coming, and, secondly, for its particular purposes, fancy will be superior to imagination.
. . . .
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.
It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like poring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.
I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can’t go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.
I know quite well that when people think of a classical and romantic in verse, the contrast at once comes into their mind between, say, Racine and Shakespeare. I don’t mean this; the dividing line that I intend is here misplaced a little from the true middle. That Racine is on the extreme classical side I agree, but if you call Shakespeare romantic, you are using a different definition to the one I give. You are thinking of the difference between classic and romantic as being merely one between restraint and exuberance. I should say with Nietazsche that there are two kinds of classicism, the static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the classic of motion.
What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.
You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.
In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong.
. . . .
I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster’s which ends with a request I cordially endorse:
End your moan and come away.
The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.
The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.
The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.
In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god.
But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.
There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: ‘But how can you have verse without sentiment?’ You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them. What this positive need is, I shall show later. It follows from the fact that there is another quality, not the emotion produced, which is at the root of excellence in verse. Before I get to this I am concerned with a negative thing, a theoretical point, a prejudice that stands in the way and is really at the bottom of this reluctance to understand classical verse.
It is an objection which ultimately I believe comes from a bad metaphysic of art. You are unable to admit the existence of beauty without the infinite being in some way or another dragged in.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves—flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that ‘approximately.’ He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.
There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Whatever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art without dragging in infinite or serious.
I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
THE AESTHETIC EMOTION
Stephen went on:
—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
—Repeat, said Lynch.
Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.
—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.
—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.
—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?
—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming Carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.
Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.
—O, I did! I did! he cried.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART
Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in a reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.
—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.
TS Eliot (1888-1965)
from “Hamlet” (1920)
THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
NON-OBJECTIVE SCIENCE AND UNCERTAINTY (1927*)
In the nineteenth century nature still appeared as set of laws in space and time in which man and man’s intervention in nature could be ignored in principle, if not in practice.
Matter was thought of in terms of its mass, which remained constant through all changes, and which required forces to move it. Because, from the eighteenth century
onwards, chemical experiments could be classified and explained by the atomic hypothesis of ancient times, it appeared reasonable to take over the view of ancient philosophy that atoms were the real substance the immutable buildingstones of matter. Just as in the philosophy of Democritus, the differences in material qualities were considered to be merely apparent; smell or colour, temperature or viscosity, were not actual qualities of matter but resulted from the interaction of matter and our senses, and had to be explained by the arrangements and movements of atoms, and by the effect of these arrangements on our minds. It is thus that there arose the over-simplified world-view of nineteenth-century materialism: atoms move in space and time as the real and immutable substances, and it is their arrangement and motion that create the colourful phenomena of the world of our senses. . . .
The first, but not yet very dangerous, incursion into this world-view took place in the second half of the last century with the development of the theory of electricity, in which not matter but fields of force were considered to be the real explanation. Interactions between fields of force without any matter to propagate the force were very much more difficult to understand than the materialist picture of atomic physics, and introduced an element of abstraction and a lack of clarity into what appeared otherwise to be so reasonable a world-view. Attempts were not lacking to return once more to the simpler concepts of materialist philosophy by way of the ether, which was supposed to be an elastic medium transmitting these fields of force; yet no such attempt had any real success. Even so, one could take comfort from the fact that changes in the fields of force could still be considered as processes in space and time, and that they could be described objectively, i.e., without any reference to the manner in which they were observed, and thus in accordance with the generally held idealized view of laws of space and time. Furthermore, fields of force, i.e., forces which can only be observed by their effect on atoms, could be considered as produced by atoms, and so as explaining atomic movements in some way. Thus atoms still remained as the actual essence, and between them there was empty space, real only inasmuch as it was a transmitter of fields of force.
In this world-view it did not matter overmuch that after the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the last century, the atoms of chemistry could no longer be considered as the ultimate indivisible building-stones of matter. These were now thought to consist of threekinds of basicunits-the protons, neutrons and electrons of today. The practical consequences of this new knowledge have been the transmutation of elements and the rise of atomic physics, and they have thus become extremely important. Basically, however, nothing has been changed in principle by our acceptance of protons, neutrons and electrons as the smallest building-stones of matter, if we interpret these as the real essence. What is important for the materialistic world-view is simply the possibility that such small building-stones of elementary particles exist and that they may be considered the ultimate objective reality. Thus, the well-constructed world-view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preserved, and thanks to its simplicity it managed to retain its full power of conviction for number of decades.
But in our century it is just in this sphere that fundamental change have taken place in the basis of atomic physics which have made us abandon the world-view of ancient atomic philosophy. It has become clear that the desired objective reality of the elementary particles is too crude an over-simplification of what really happens, and that it must give way to very much more abstract conceptions. For if we wish to form a picture of these elementary particles, we can no longer ignore the physical processes through which we obtain our knowledge of them. While, in observing everyday objects, the physical process involved in making the observation plays a subsidiary role only, in the case of the smallest building particles of matter, every process of observation produces a large disturbance. We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor it is any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively, since the only processes we can refer to as taking place are those which represent the interplay of particles with some other physical system, e.g., a measuring instrument.
Thus, the objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behaviour of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behaviour. The atomic physicist has had to resign himself to the fact that his science is but a link in the infinite chain of man’s argument with nature, and that it cannot simply speak of nature “in itself.” Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life…
When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. The old division of the world into objective processes in space and time and the mind in which these processes are mirrored-in other words, the Cartesian difference between res cogitans and res extensa-is no longer a suitable starting point for our understanding of modern science. Science, we find, is now focused on the network of relationships between man and nature, on the framework which makes us as living beings dependent parts of nature, and which we as human beings have simultaneously made the object of our thoughts and actions. Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. The scientific world-view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word….
The use of the concept of causality for describing the law of cause and effect is of relatively recent origin. In previous philosophies the word causa had a very much more general significance than it has today. Thus scholasticism, following Aristotle, spoke of four kinds of “causes”: the causa formalis which might be considered as the form or the spiritual essence of a thing, the causa mataerialis which referred to the matter of which the thing consisted, the cause finalis or the purpose for which the thing was created, and finally, the causa efficiens. Only the causa efficiens corresponds to what is meant by the word “cause” today.
The transformation of causa into the modern concept of cause have taken place in the course of centuries, in close connection with the changes in man’s conception of reality and with the creation of science at the beginning of the modern age. As material processes became more prominent in man’s conception of reality, the word causa was used increasingly to refer to the particular material event which preceded and had in some way caused, the event to be explained. Thus even Kant, who frequently did what at root amounted to drawing philosophic consequences from the developments in science since Newton’s time, already used the word “causality” in a nineteenth-century sense. When we experience an event we always assume that there was another event preceding it from which the second has followed according to some law. Thus the causality became narrowed down, finally, to refer to our belief that events in nature are uniquely determined, or, in other words, that an exact knowledge of nature or some part of it would suffice, at least in principle, to determine the future. Nowton’s physics was so constructed that the future motion of a system could be calculated from its particular state at a given time. The idea that nature really was like this was perhaps enuncitaed most generally and most lucidly by Laplace when he spoke of a demon, who at a given time, by knowing the position and motion of every atom, would be capable of predicting the entire future of the world. When the word “causality” is interpreted in this very narrow sense, we speak of “determinism, “by which we mean that these are immutable natural laws that uniquely determine the future state of any system from its present state.
Wyndham Lewis
from “Physics of the Not-Self” (1932)
THE ENEMY OF THE STARS
If “truth” is the word we give to that disintegrated not-self principle which every man necessarily must harbour (but which he can be trained quite easily to paralyse), then every altruism can be traced to the activities of this same principle. But from this it must not be supposed that the destruction of this principle in a man cuts him off from “his fellows.” That would be a great mistake. The contrary is, in fact, the case.
The man who has formed the habit of consulting and adhering to the principle of the not-self participates, it is true, in the life of others outside himself far more than does the contrary type of man, he who refrains from making any use at all of this speculative organ. But he is not, for that reason, more like other people. He is less like them. For is he not one in a great many thousand? And to be like other people he certainly should be less them and more himself. Hence his altruism only results in differentiating him, and in leaving him without as it were a “class,” even without a “kind.” For this ultra-human activity is really inhuman: even it frustrates its own purpose by awakening suspicion instead of trust. It is regarded as a breaker down of walls, a dissolvent of nations, factions, and protective freemasonries, a radio-active something in the midst of more conservative aggregations, as naturally it is. It is an enemy principle. It is heartily disliked. Since, again, by its very nature, it awakens love, that is not in its favour either. Love being the thing that is most prized by men, the individual who (in league with the diabolical principle of the not-self) appears to be attempting to obtain it by unlawful means is at once without the pale. By way of the intellect he is necessarily reaching what the force and fraud of brute nature are otherwise combined to obtain (and of which they get very little).
The intellect, or the seat of that forbidden principle of the not-self, is the one thing that every gentleman is sworn, however hard pressed, never to employ. What cannot be obtained by way of self—by that great public road of private fraud—must be forgone. That is understood, universally recognized (by all White Men and pukka “sports”). The intellect is the devil, it could be said. But more than that, there is something indefinably disreputable about it. It is not “clean.” It cannot be described confidently. It is irreparably un-pukka. It is, in the last analysis, the enemy of all the constellations and universes.
We have one life, and we have one individuality. It is a ration, as it were. It is an “obligation” (so people say sometimes about “art”) to devote all our energies to that one self, and not to poach. We were not born twenty men, but one. It is our duty “to remain in our class.” Equally it is our duty to remain in our self—our one and only. But if we must go outside our self—if we are so wrong-headed—then at least it is our “bounden duty” to see that we do not, at least, despoil ourselves for others. We must go outside in order to take, not in order to give. But it is far more dignified to remain closeted with one’s inalienable physical possessions—like a sedate hen upon its eggs—from the cradle to the grave. Oh, yes: that certainly is so.
from Selected Letters (1857)
THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART
With a reader such as you, Madame, one who is so understanding, frankness is a duty. I therefore answer your questions: Madame Bovary is based on no actual occurrence. It is a totally fictitious story; it contains none of my feelings and no details from my own life. The illusion of truth (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the book’s impersonality. It is one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.
Furthermore, Art must rise above personal emotions and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to endow it with pitiless method, with the exactness of the physical sciences. Still, for me the capital difficulty remains style, form, that indefinable Beauty implicit in the conception and representing, as Plato said, the splendor of Truth.
For a long time, Madame, I led a life like yours. I too spent several years completely alone in the country, hearing in winter no sound but the rustle of the wind in the trees and the cracking of the drift-ice on the Seine under my window. If I have arrived at some understanding of life, it is because I have lived little in the ordinary sense of the word; I have eaten meagerly, but ruminated much; I have seen all kinds of people, and visited various countries. I have traveled on foot and on camel-back. I am acquainted with Parisian speculators and Damascus Jews, with Italian ruffians and Negro mountebanks. I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was lost in the snows of Parnassus—which may be taken symbolically.
Do not complain; I have been here and there in the world and have a thorough knowledge of that Paris you dream of; there is nothing to equal a good book at your fireside, the reading of Hamlet or Faust on a day when your responses are keen. My own dream is to buy a little palace in Venice, on the Grand Canal.
So there, Madame—part of your curiosity is gratified. To complete my portrait and biography, add only this: I am thirty-five, five feet eight, with the shoulders of a stevedore and the nervous irritability of a young lady of fashion. I am a bachelor and a recluse.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from Stephen Hero (1903-4)
THE EPIPHANY
He was passing through Eceles’ St one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.
The Young Lady—(drawling discreetly) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel. . . .
The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . .
The Young Lady—(softly) . . . O . . . but you’re . . . ve . . . ry . . . wick . . . ed. . . .
This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance.
—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany—
—What?—
—Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
from Letters (1907)
ARTISTIC OBJECTIVITY
That is why I must be cautious in trying to write about Cézanne, which naturally tempts me greatly now. Not the person (I really ought to see that at last) who takes in pictures from so private an angle is justified in writing about them; one who could quietly confirm them in their existence, without experiencing through them more or other than facts, would surely be fairest to them. But within my own life this unexpected contact, coming and making a place for itself as it did, is full of confirmation and pertinence. Another poor man. And what progress in poverty since Verlaine (if Verlaine wasn’t already a relapse), who under “Mon Testament” wrote: Je ne donne rien aux pauvres parce que je suis un pauvre moi-même, and in almost all of whose work this not-giving was, this embittered displaying of empty hands, for which Cézanne during the last thirty years had no time. When should he have shown his hands? Malicious glances did often find them, whenever he was on his way, and lewdly uncovered their indigence; we, however, are given to know from the pictures only how massive and genuine the work lay in them to the end. This work, which had no preferences any more, no inclinations, no fastidious indulgences; whose smallest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely sensitive conscience and which with such integrity reduced the existent to its color content that it began, beyond color, a new existence, without earlier memories. It is this unlimited objectivity, which declines to interfere in any other sphere, that makes Cézanne’s portraits so outrageous and absurd to people. They apprehend, without realizing, that he was reproducing apples, onions, and oranges with sheer color (which to them may still seem a subordinate device of pictorial practice), but when they come to landscape, they miss interpretation, judgment, superiority, and where portraiture is concerned, why, the rumor of intellectual conception has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, and so successfully that something of the kind is already noticeable even in Sunday photographs of engaged couples and families. And here Cézanne naturally seems to them quite inadequate and not worth discussing at all. He is actually as alone in this salon as he was in life, and even the painters, the young painters, already pass him by more quickly because they see the dealers on his side.
TE Hulme (1883-1917)
from “Romanticism and Classicism” (1914)
ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM
I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the superiority of fancy—not superior generally or absolutely, for that would be obvious nonsense, but superior in the sense that we use the word in empirical ethics—good for something, superior for something. I shall have to prove then two things, first that a classical revival is coming, and, secondly, for its particular purposes, fancy will be superior to imagination.
. . . .
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.
It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like poring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.
I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can’t go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.
I know quite well that when people think of a classical and romantic in verse, the contrast at once comes into their mind between, say, Racine and Shakespeare. I don’t mean this; the dividing line that I intend is here misplaced a little from the true middle. That Racine is on the extreme classical side I agree, but if you call Shakespeare romantic, you are using a different definition to the one I give. You are thinking of the difference between classic and romantic as being merely one between restraint and exuberance. I should say with Nietazsche that there are two kinds of classicism, the static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the classic of motion.
What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.
You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.
In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong.
. . . .
I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster’s which ends with a request I cordially endorse:
End your moan and come away.
The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.
The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.
The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.
In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god.
But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.
There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: ‘But how can you have verse without sentiment?’ You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them. What this positive need is, I shall show later. It follows from the fact that there is another quality, not the emotion produced, which is at the root of excellence in verse. Before I get to this I am concerned with a negative thing, a theoretical point, a prejudice that stands in the way and is really at the bottom of this reluctance to understand classical verse.
It is an objection which ultimately I believe comes from a bad metaphysic of art. You are unable to admit the existence of beauty without the infinite being in some way or another dragged in.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves—flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that ‘approximately.’ He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.
There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Whatever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art without dragging in infinite or serious.
I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
THE AESTHETIC EMOTION
Stephen went on:
—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
—Repeat, said Lynch.
Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.
—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.
—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.
—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?
—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming Carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.
Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.
—O, I did! I did! he cried.
James Joyce (1882-1941)
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART
Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in a reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.
—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.
TS Eliot (1888-1965)
from “Hamlet” (1920)
THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
NON-OBJECTIVE SCIENCE AND UNCERTAINTY (1927*)
In the nineteenth century nature still appeared as set of laws in space and time in which man and man’s intervention in nature could be ignored in principle, if not in practice.
Matter was thought of in terms of its mass, which remained constant through all changes, and which required forces to move it. Because, from the eighteenth century
onwards, chemical experiments could be classified and explained by the atomic hypothesis of ancient times, it appeared reasonable to take over the view of ancient philosophy that atoms were the real substance the immutable buildingstones of matter. Just as in the philosophy of Democritus, the differences in material qualities were considered to be merely apparent; smell or colour, temperature or viscosity, were not actual qualities of matter but resulted from the interaction of matter and our senses, and had to be explained by the arrangements and movements of atoms, and by the effect of these arrangements on our minds. It is thus that there arose the over-simplified world-view of nineteenth-century materialism: atoms move in space and time as the real and immutable substances, and it is their arrangement and motion that create the colourful phenomena of the world of our senses. . . .
The first, but not yet very dangerous, incursion into this world-view took place in the second half of the last century with the development of the theory of electricity, in which not matter but fields of force were considered to be the real explanation. Interactions between fields of force without any matter to propagate the force were very much more difficult to understand than the materialist picture of atomic physics, and introduced an element of abstraction and a lack of clarity into what appeared otherwise to be so reasonable a world-view. Attempts were not lacking to return once more to the simpler concepts of materialist philosophy by way of the ether, which was supposed to be an elastic medium transmitting these fields of force; yet no such attempt had any real success. Even so, one could take comfort from the fact that changes in the fields of force could still be considered as processes in space and time, and that they could be described objectively, i.e., without any reference to the manner in which they were observed, and thus in accordance with the generally held idealized view of laws of space and time. Furthermore, fields of force, i.e., forces which can only be observed by their effect on atoms, could be considered as produced by atoms, and so as explaining atomic movements in some way. Thus atoms still remained as the actual essence, and between them there was empty space, real only inasmuch as it was a transmitter of fields of force.
In this world-view it did not matter overmuch that after the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the last century, the atoms of chemistry could no longer be considered as the ultimate indivisible building-stones of matter. These were now thought to consist of threekinds of basicunits-the protons, neutrons and electrons of today. The practical consequences of this new knowledge have been the transmutation of elements and the rise of atomic physics, and they have thus become extremely important. Basically, however, nothing has been changed in principle by our acceptance of protons, neutrons and electrons as the smallest building-stones of matter, if we interpret these as the real essence. What is important for the materialistic world-view is simply the possibility that such small building-stones of elementary particles exist and that they may be considered the ultimate objective reality. Thus, the well-constructed world-view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preserved, and thanks to its simplicity it managed to retain its full power of conviction for number of decades.
But in our century it is just in this sphere that fundamental change have taken place in the basis of atomic physics which have made us abandon the world-view of ancient atomic philosophy. It has become clear that the desired objective reality of the elementary particles is too crude an over-simplification of what really happens, and that it must give way to very much more abstract conceptions. For if we wish to form a picture of these elementary particles, we can no longer ignore the physical processes through which we obtain our knowledge of them. While, in observing everyday objects, the physical process involved in making the observation plays a subsidiary role only, in the case of the smallest building particles of matter, every process of observation produces a large disturbance. We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor it is any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively, since the only processes we can refer to as taking place are those which represent the interplay of particles with some other physical system, e.g., a measuring instrument.
Thus, the objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behaviour of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behaviour. The atomic physicist has had to resign himself to the fact that his science is but a link in the infinite chain of man’s argument with nature, and that it cannot simply speak of nature “in itself.” Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life…
When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. The old division of the world into objective processes in space and time and the mind in which these processes are mirrored-in other words, the Cartesian difference between res cogitans and res extensa-is no longer a suitable starting point for our understanding of modern science. Science, we find, is now focused on the network of relationships between man and nature, on the framework which makes us as living beings dependent parts of nature, and which we as human beings have simultaneously made the object of our thoughts and actions. Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. The scientific world-view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word….
The use of the concept of causality for describing the law of cause and effect is of relatively recent origin. In previous philosophies the word causa had a very much more general significance than it has today. Thus scholasticism, following Aristotle, spoke of four kinds of “causes”: the causa formalis which might be considered as the form or the spiritual essence of a thing, the causa mataerialis which referred to the matter of which the thing consisted, the cause finalis or the purpose for which the thing was created, and finally, the causa efficiens. Only the causa efficiens corresponds to what is meant by the word “cause” today.
The transformation of causa into the modern concept of cause have taken place in the course of centuries, in close connection with the changes in man’s conception of reality and with the creation of science at the beginning of the modern age. As material processes became more prominent in man’s conception of reality, the word causa was used increasingly to refer to the particular material event which preceded and had in some way caused, the event to be explained. Thus even Kant, who frequently did what at root amounted to drawing philosophic consequences from the developments in science since Newton’s time, already used the word “causality” in a nineteenth-century sense. When we experience an event we always assume that there was another event preceding it from which the second has followed according to some law. Thus the causality became narrowed down, finally, to refer to our belief that events in nature are uniquely determined, or, in other words, that an exact knowledge of nature or some part of it would suffice, at least in principle, to determine the future. Nowton’s physics was so constructed that the future motion of a system could be calculated from its particular state at a given time. The idea that nature really was like this was perhaps enuncitaed most generally and most lucidly by Laplace when he spoke of a demon, who at a given time, by knowing the position and motion of every atom, would be capable of predicting the entire future of the world. When the word “causality” is interpreted in this very narrow sense, we speak of “determinism, “by which we mean that these are immutable natural laws that uniquely determine the future state of any system from its present state.
Wyndham Lewis
from “Physics of the Not-Self” (1932)
THE ENEMY OF THE STARS
If “truth” is the word we give to that disintegrated not-self principle which every man necessarily must harbour (but which he can be trained quite easily to paralyse), then every altruism can be traced to the activities of this same principle. But from this it must not be supposed that the destruction of this principle in a man cuts him off from “his fellows.” That would be a great mistake. The contrary is, in fact, the case.
The man who has formed the habit of consulting and adhering to the principle of the not-self participates, it is true, in the life of others outside himself far more than does the contrary type of man, he who refrains from making any use at all of this speculative organ. But he is not, for that reason, more like other people. He is less like them. For is he not one in a great many thousand? And to be like other people he certainly should be less them and more himself. Hence his altruism only results in differentiating him, and in leaving him without as it were a “class,” even without a “kind.” For this ultra-human activity is really inhuman: even it frustrates its own purpose by awakening suspicion instead of trust. It is regarded as a breaker down of walls, a dissolvent of nations, factions, and protective freemasonries, a radio-active something in the midst of more conservative aggregations, as naturally it is. It is an enemy principle. It is heartily disliked. Since, again, by its very nature, it awakens love, that is not in its favour either. Love being the thing that is most prized by men, the individual who (in league with the diabolical principle of the not-self) appears to be attempting to obtain it by unlawful means is at once without the pale. By way of the intellect he is necessarily reaching what the force and fraud of brute nature are otherwise combined to obtain (and of which they get very little).
The intellect, or the seat of that forbidden principle of the not-self, is the one thing that every gentleman is sworn, however hard pressed, never to employ. What cannot be obtained by way of self—by that great public road of private fraud—must be forgone. That is understood, universally recognized (by all White Men and pukka “sports”). The intellect is the devil, it could be said. But more than that, there is something indefinably disreputable about it. It is not “clean.” It cannot be described confidently. It is irreparably un-pukka. It is, in the last analysis, the enemy of all the constellations and universes.
We have one life, and we have one individuality. It is a ration, as it were. It is an “obligation” (so people say sometimes about “art”) to devote all our energies to that one self, and not to poach. We were not born twenty men, but one. It is our duty “to remain in our class.” Equally it is our duty to remain in our self—our one and only. But if we must go outside our self—if we are so wrong-headed—then at least it is our “bounden duty” to see that we do not, at least, despoil ourselves for others. We must go outside in order to take, not in order to give. But it is far more dignified to remain closeted with one’s inalienable physical possessions—like a sedate hen upon its eggs—from the cradle to the grave. Oh, yes: that certainly is so.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Questions on Modernist Poetry
Questions on Modernism
Rajiv C Krishnan
These are questions that I have set for the LIT110 Modernist Poetry course over the many years that I have been teaching it. I have also included questions arising from MPhil and PhD courses that I have taught on the same subject: they are usually marked with an asterisk. Most questions have emerged from small research projects undertaken by students as part of their course completion requirements. You can use these questions in several ways. You can use some of them as a key to read difficult poems, authors or issues. You can use them to see the kind of work that gets done on this course, the major engagements, themes and issues that were discussed and pondered upon by my students and me during the course. You can use them also as points of departure for your own work, or as a model for the kind of research problems you might want to set up for yourself to explore and resolve. This compendium of questions functions as a database of the student engagements that have defined and sustained the LIT110 course. In the coming years, your own questions will figure here too! Use it whichever way you like! And of course, you are welcome to ignore it too! There are no risks involved!
If you find it hard understanding what the questions are asking you to think about, don’t panic. Stay tuned, and things will sort themselves out as the course gets under way. They are meant to stimulate thought, not necessarily to proffer or elicit definite, determinate answers. So the best thing to do with a difficult question is to take it to a fellow course mate and talk it over. Senior students who have done the course in the past are usually more than willing to help you: they are an invisible but tangible part of how this course does its work. And there is always the possibility of a tutorial session with Rajiv if you need it.
1 The Modernist text is post-Romantic in its problematization of the figure of the author, in the difficult and enhanced role that it assigns to its reader, and in its self-reflexive relationship to itself. Discuss.
2 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.
3 In effecting the move from the passive and impressionist literalism of Imagism to the active and interventionist expressivity of Vorticism, the influence of the works and ideas of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was paramount for Pound.
4 In Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden, the conjunction of her Imagist concreteness of presentation, her Hellenic themes, and the skewed vision of landscapes submerged under the sea create a strangely distant but powerful sense of psychological drama in which the personal and the impersonal speak with the same voice.
5 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s abstractionist language, while laying emphasis on representation as constituting a distinct order of reality, also enables ordinary objects to appear in dispensations that are inaccessible to naming.
6 The poems that William Carlos Williams wrote around the time of the First World War show a critical assimilation of the principles of Imagism as well as a growing awareness of the ongoing revolution in the visual arts.
7 Marianne Moore’s very Modernist search for a balance between the natural and the willed, the imaginary and the real comes home in her animals, which provide subjects as well as models for her art in the way they nest desire within design and the graceful within the practical.
8 The development of Ezra Pound’s poetics may be described as directed by the quest for a self-certifying representational practice: his discovery of Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character was serendipitous; but his acceptance of it as his ars poetica was disastrously uncritical.
9 Pound’s first Canto stages a struggle for attention that is depicted as the domination of the past by a resolute and creative present. Discuss.
10 In their themes as well as in their aesthetic values, the poems of William Carlos Williams derive from his engagement with the artistic avant-garde of New York.
11 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.
12 Ezra Pound’s appeal to origins and beginnings in the first Canto foregrounds his conviction that the Modernist project of cultural rejuvenation cannot be accomplished without taking lessons and advice from the past.
13 Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium poems constantly evoke the possibility of a repetition that does not seek to avoid difference: the task of bearing reference is therefore able to celebrate the freedom of the imagination.
14 “[Marianne] Moore’s world is both its opaque, substantial, unrepeatable self and a natural resource for allegories of poetry. Characteristically, her poems are at the same time descriptions of reality and representations of imaginative activity.” (Bonnie Costello). Discuss.
15 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 volume Spring and All is an intrinsic part of his attempt to defend and legitimize the role of the imagination in Modernist art and poetry.
16 “The unpractised reader, picking up H.D.’s Sea-Garden and reading it casually, might suppose it was all about flowers and rocks and waves and Greek myths, when it is really about the soul . . . .” (John Gould Fletcher).
17 In “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sounds a warning against succumbing to the lure of practices that culminate in man’s subjugation of nature: the functioning of the artistic imagination is not inconsistent with the exercise, experience and bestowal of freedom.
18 The Modernist problematization of representation is haunted by the fear of ekphrasis: in consequence, the Modernist text is self-reflexive, but pines for semiotic transparency, and desires, but falls short of openness.
19 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s language revisits objects from everyday life, but transforms the occasion into a subtle and radical celebration of the female subject and body.
20 In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein’s objects inhabit a world in which identity is superseded by difference, objects by representations, and attention by distraction. Discuss.
21 The poems of William Carlos Williams explicitly as well as implicitly declare allegiance to a concreteness of experience that is prior to the intervention of thought and interpretation, and thereby reverse and invert the dominant and Platonist epistemology of the West.
22 Williams’s poetry favours objects untouched by ideas and poetic practices that resist tradition: but within these very stances lie implicit but significant moral choices and commitments. Discuss.
23 In Spring and All (1923) Williams turns the topos of spring into an opportunity for launching an aggressive critique of the Modernism represented by Pound and Eliot: to unpack the differences between Williams and Eliot is to recognize two very different strains of Modernism, one more or less democratic and the other more or less aristocratic. Discuss.
24 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ early work Spring and All (1923) signals a disruptiveness that is iconoclastic: but it nevertheless promises and demands new beginnings for the artistic imagination.
25 In the Harmonium poems, Wallace Stevens oscillates between rapt fascination for a world that is accessible through sensation and is hospitable to the imagination, and canny fear of its anarchic and inviolable independence from human needs and purposes.
26 Marianne Moore’s poems find in the natural world a serendipitous combination of rigours and freedoms that determines as well as describes an art that is both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation.
27 The Futurist aesthetic demands a radically performative immediacy of presentation that pulls art in the direction of abstraction while making it welcome the products, processes and obsessions of modernity.
28 It is characteristic of Marianne Moore’s poetic practice that in describing the tropical landscape of her seaside town in “The Steeple-Jack,” her nouns and colours take on a tropic dimension that is nevertheless insistently concrete.
29 *Examine the thesis that the Modernist experimentation with form displays a paradoxical tendency to remember wholes while presenting fragments, to interrupt freedom with the nostalgia for method, to find inscribed in representation a history of representation, and to attribute normative historical value to individual enterprise and experience, and that it proceeds from an ekphrastic fear, which is the fear of literalism and the fear of loss, both of memory and of meaning.
30 *Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos represents the culmination of his incarnatory aesthetics. Its unique significance lies in the fact that it dovetails the religious, aesthetic and economic dimensions of his work within a problematic of representation for which the mystery of the Eucharist functions both as a definitive metaphor and as a luminous detail. Discuss.
31 *Modernism, despite its stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in its preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in its valorization of the individual self as the authentic and liberating source of originary experiences. Discuss.
32 *The influence of abstract art on Wallace Stevens’s work was not limited to the influence of specific works, artists or movements on specific poems: it enabled him to reconceptualize the relationship between art and aesthetics, between the artist and the work of art, and between the viewer/reader and the task of interpretation. The result was an art that attempted not to borrow concreteness from extra-linguistic experience, and an aesthetic that privileged a radically performative and self-reflexive mode of presentation. Discuss.
33 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?
34 Modernism depletes the world not of objects but of representations of objects; Postmodernism exhausts the avenues not of representations but of objects of consciousness. Discuss.
35 Objects in the poetry of Rilke are the enviable shadows of experiences that challenge
art into transcendence.
36 Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘thing-poems’ (Ding-Gedichte) inaugurated a very important and paradoxical preoccupation of the Modernists when they found in physical objects models both of what may be possessed and of what transcends the possessor-possessed dialectic. In his poems we watch things become poems and poems become things. Discuss.
37 Ashbery’s poems exploit the pathos of a world that is only ever experienced and accessible to consciousness through words and as words. Discuss.
38 Theodor Adorno’s account, in Aesthetic Theory, of the relationship between art and society seeks to free art from all forms of tutelage without freeing it from social responsibility. Discuss.
39 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?
40 Modernism’s break with the mimetic impulse in Western art is fraught with ideological consequences that reverberate in typical Postmodern stances. Discuss.
41 The characteristic features of Modernism self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.
42 Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic method ascribes to details and particulars a luminosity that stops short of narrative, but nevertheless implies narrative: thus, sensuous affect and elements of form become metonymic indices of order, coherence and meaning. But this methodology is flawed by its inability to account for historical difference, referential opacity and conflicts in interpretation. Discuss.
43 Through their use of Greek and Egyptian myths in describing emotions, and their presentation of known objects and landscapes as transformed underwater growths and seascapes, HD’s poems exhibit an ambivalence towards the real world that seeks altered modes of human agency. Discuss.
44 In demanding from their readers a competence and commitment that had to be proved through encounter with radically terminal forms of reference and representation, Modernist poems in effect created the (reader-) subjects for whom they might then become objects as well as models of attention and agency. Discuss.
45 Modernism presents a wide range of responses to the protocols of attention and interpretation that transform immediate concrete sensation into secondary intellectual abstraction: Pound’s poetics, hinging as it does, on the possibility of a transparent continuity between experience and expression, ‘inverts’ Platonism without exploring the possibility of an alternative epistemology of difference and distraction. Discuss.
46 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.
47 Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus reserve for art a plenitude of being that becomes an ontological substitute for a spiritual life. As a giving, art gives life back to itself in the uncertainty and the wonder of the gift that it itself is. Discuss.
48 Eliot, despite his stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in his preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in his valorisation of the individual self—albeit embedded in and transforming tradition—as the authentic and liberating source of authentic experience. Discuss.
49 In Eliot’s poetry, form reflects content: his tropes thematize alienation, while his treatment of anomie takes the form of metonymic images and presentations. The result is a poetics of adequacy and a politics of conformity. Discuss.
50 By describing natural processes and objects under the aspect of artifice, Marianne Moore introduces a tension between art and life that creates contexts for discovering the apparently self-certifying foundations of thought and experience. However, this cross between the mechanistic and the imaginative privileges being and identity, and fails adequately to account for process and difference. Discuss.
51 In ‘modernizing’ his verse under the influence of Ezra Pound, Yeats was in effect changing its content and imagery without changing its formal emphases and routines: reactionary Modernism took the cue and often incorporated the revolutionary form of the new art without addressing its substantive concerns, thus reifying change and making it an end in itself. Discuss.
52 Eliot’s theory of artistic objectivity and impersonality transfers agency from the human subject to the aesthetic object, and thereby privileges tradition as the ultimate arbitrator in human life. Time, change and difference are domesticated and rendered subservient to memory, form and identity. Discuss.
53 Gertrude Stein’s writings function within an intransitive mode of discourse that discovers modernity as difference and discontinuity rather than as the persistence of identity and coherence. This is what distinguishes her work so starkly from that of the male Modernists. Discuss.
54 Aesthetic self-reflexivity in Stevens is an outcome of his notion of a fully autonomous and therefore free and freeing art. Discuss.
55 In its valorisation of particulars and concrete images, in its problematization of
metaphor, and in its reversal of Platonism, radical Modernism seems set upon overcoming metaphysics. But more often than not, it ends up arguing a case for a more ‘natural’ (and therefore binding) metaphysics—one rooted in unique but normative particulars and ‘facts.’ Discuss.
56 Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons attempts the difficult (perhaps impossible) task of affirming existence as radically removed from memory and resemblance. The result is a poetics that prefers process to product, becoming to being, means to ends, and openings to closures. Discuss.
57 The Modernist poets hold back from metaphor—taken as implying an explicit metaphysics—only to succumb to a metonymic presentational strategy that activates the desire and the search for implicit metaphysical wholes. Discuss.
58 The characteristic features of avant-garde Modernist poetry and art movements self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.
59 Modernist poetry, by its valorization of difference, raises questions about being and knowing that find clear echoes in the work of Heidegger. Explore the ways in which this connection can be established in the themes and preoccupations that engage the work of Wallace Stevens.
60 Repetition in Stevens’s Harmonium functions both as an instance of difference and autonomy and as a reminder of structure and belonging. Discuss.
61 Stevens’s poems find in music the idea of an imaginatively self-sufficient and truly abstract art because it can dispense with the mimetic imperative completely: music therefore represents the peril that they must avoid in order to keep being poems, as well as the model that they must follow in order to keep being imaginative. Discuss.
62 In his 1923 volume Spring and All, William Carlos Williams takes up the challenge of encountering modernity without rendering the artistic imagination subservient to the past as Eliot and Pound had done. Discuss.
63 In tone as well as in values, Marianne Moore’s poems work out a ‘middle path’ that avoids the extremes of gaudy ornament and bland generalization. Explore the ways in which the figure of the Buddha and Buddhism may have influenced this move.
64 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.
65 Stevens’s poems are an elegiac reminder of the essential unknowability of the world to which our senses refer us: the employment of the imagination is therefore duty as well as destiny. The one philosopher who haunts the Harmonium poems and whose words sometimes directly appear in them is Kant. Discuss.
66 Modernist poems raise ontological issues only to reduce them to problems of epistemology and representation. Discuss.
67 Marianne Moore’s poems find in art modes of being and knowing, giving and having, that can be both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation. Discuss.
68 Modernist poems negotiate a distance between poet and society that grants the poet an autonomous and therefore critical social value. Discuss.
69 Explicate the Modernist notion of impersonality in art as it evolves from Yeats’s theory of the mask to Eliot’s doctrine of the dialectic of tradition and the individual talent.
70 In what ways does Stein’s artistic practice in Tender Buttons constitute a critique of Western metaphysics?
71 Write a critical evaluation of the influence of the ideas of the New York avant-garde artistic scene upon Williams’s Spring and All.
72 Stevens was too Romantic to be a Modernist and too Modernist to be a Romantic. Explore this thesis through a reading of the Harmonium poems.
73 The Modernist valorisation of concreteness in poetry is a consequence of the desire to achieve radical particularity of reference and presentational immediacy. Discuss.
74 Eliot’s enunciation of his theory of impersonality unfolds through stages that make submission to the authority of orthodoxy and tradition seem desirable, necessary and even inevitable. Discuss.
75 By frustrating the attempts of its reader to derive determinate meanings, Stein’s Tender Buttons forces her to discover and generate complex networks of reference and suggestion within the text that seem to dispense with the need for any permanent or global centre. Discuss.
76 What traces of the influence of William James do you find in the artistic practices that Stein employs in Tender Buttons?
77 The difficulties that Modernist texts offer their readers in effect transform the relationship between the reader, the author and the text in ways that demand active readers but also curtail freedom of interpretation. Discuss.
78 The experience of the First World War had important effects upon the Modernist use and understanding of poetic forms (like the epic, the heroic poem, the lyric and the pastoral), as also upon its thematizations (of love, the seasons, women, and the individual). Discuss.
79 The crisis of representation in Modernism is the artistic counterpart of a crisis of subjectivity. Discuss.
80 What points of similarity do you find between Heidegger’s philosophical project and the concerns and artistic practices of the Modernist poets that you have studied?
81 What parallels do you find between the techniques of psychoanalysis developed by Freud and the new kinds of texts and reading strategies generated by the Modernists?
82 Write a critical account of the ways in which scientific developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transform the world that the Modernists write about or represent.
83 What connections do you find between the ideas explored by Heidegger in Being and Time and the themes and concerns addressed in the poems you have studied?
84 In what ways is it possible to characterize Modernism as a response to the global phenomenon of modernity?
85 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.
86 In what ways do Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism differ in their conceptions of their readers and viewers?
87 How did the development of abstract art in the Modernist era affect the writing, presentation and reading of poetry?
88 In attempting to go beyond the given and accept the aleatory and contingent moment of human experience, Dadaism and Surrealism were able to raise fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of art as a social institution. Discuss.
89 The self-referential turn in Modernist art had a profound influence upon the structure and conception of William Carlos Williams's poems. Discuss.
90 Colour functions in Marianne Moore's poems not just as a secondary attribute of objects, but often as the very conduct of being and existential expression. Discuss.
91 Starting with the work of his own father, modern art had a deep and abiding influence upon the poems of WB Yeats. Discuss.
92 The antithesis between tradition and modernity provides much of the power and thematic urgency of Yeats's poems. Discuss.
93 It is when Yeats begins directly to address the politics and conflicts of his times that his poetry gains its resolute modernity. Discuss.
94 Music is the primary and most favoured metaphor for characterisations of the imagination and its productions in Stevens's Harmonium. It is for these poems the model of an abstract art, which is independent of the need to achieve external reference, but is itself the object as well as sign of its own self-reference. Discuss.
95 In Harmonium, Stevens tries out various lyric voices and stances, exploring the possibility of writing within an aesthetic of abstraction. Discuss.
96 In his early poems, Pound explores an aesthetic of transcendence and embodiment that draw eclectically upon several mystical traditions of contemplation. Discuss.
97 Gertrude Stein's use of negatives in Tender Buttons is part of a pervasive critique of patriarchy that is implicit in the work as a whole. Discuss.
98 Stein's experiments in Tender Buttons serve, through disruptions, to foreground the most basic assumptions upon which acts of representation and communication in general are premised. Discuss.
99 In Modernism's emphasis upon the autonomy of art and the autotelic nature of artistic production, we encounter an attempt to counter the commodification of art that regimes of mass production made inevitable in the age of modernity. Discuss.
100 The urban locale supplies both the problems as well as models for the new and experimental forms that inform Modernist works. Discuss.
101 The crisis of authority in Modernism reflects, parallels and responds to the crisis in imperium that is in turn a consequence of the legitimation crises sponsored by modernity. Discuss.
102 Through his study of Eastern thought, Eliot was not only able to work into his poems a critical perspective on the decadence and spiritual bankruptcy of Western civilization, but also to indicate the ways in which regeneration might become possible. Discuss.
103 In an age criss-crossed by doom and despair, Buddhism provided a corrective perspective, generating the possibility of moral values and aesthetic perspectives that survive the onslaughts of nihilism and solipsism. Discuss.
104 Repetition functions as the guarantee as well as the paradoxical defeat of individuality, conferring as well as withdrawing agency: consequently, the Modernist text is forced self-reflexively to remember and represent the history of representation while engaged in ‘making it new.’ Discuss.
105 The despair of Eliot’s The Waste Land is the despair of a tottering patriarchy, face to face with the history of its own violence, and stoutly resisting its self-destruction through reactionary projects of renewal and regeneration. Discuss.
106 The Modernist body, like its textual counterpart, in trying to come to terms with its own materiality, its subservience to metaphysical regimes for its experience of wholeness, and its essential fragmentariness, is forced to generate models of self-sufficiency that militate against traditional, social certifications of being. Discuss.
107 In defending the human subject against its reduction to mere sensory residue of sensory experiences, the Romantics valorised human subjectivity, only to discover in its represented objects nothing much more than reflections of itself. How do the Modernists respond to this dilemma?
108 The Modernist use of the fragment continues and extends Romantic anxieties about the status of human identity, which is experienced as embedded in history: history as a narrative of revolutions and ruptures therefore makes disjunction and fragmentation the fate, not merely of Modernist art and literature, but also of the human subject. Discuss.
109 In science, the Modernists found models of method, economy and focus, and Modernist poetics is consequently never too far from scientific allusion and example. Discuss.
110 In themes as well as technique, Eliot’s work takes the developments in the visual arts, particularly Cubism, to their literary extremes. Discuss.
111 Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden is an attempt to reconcile the revelation—made possible by the emerging practices and theoretical insights of psychoanalysis—of the psyche as operating through a sediment of personal as well as public symbols and archetypes, and the Imagist injunction to achieve an unmediated, direct representation of objects. Discuss.
112 Underlying the iconoclastic energies that animate the experimentalism of William Carlos Williams’s 1923 volume Spring and All is a creative engagement with the works and ideas of the Dadaists. Discuss.
113 Dramatized in the difficult relationships that obtain between the fragments that comprise the Modernist work is a panorama of human relationships, viewed under the optic of an inexorable and unrelenting modernity. Discuss.
114 Metaphors of blindness—and sensory deprivation generally—often serve to indicate the breakdown in understanding that may be said to characterize life in the era of instrumental reason. Discuss.
115 The move towards objectivity in Modernism is also a move from the singular, homogeneous and unified interiority of the subject to a multiplicitous, heterogeneous and fragmented external world, and the devices of fragmentation and multiple perspectives can then be understood as comprising the objective moment of Modernism. The experience of the world as discordant and multiple therefore reverberates in the reader’s experience of encountering the polysemous Modernist text.
116 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.
117 Though Pound’s poetics often advocate the classical notion of the impersonal author, Pound’s poetry itself resists the subordination of individual human agency and creativity to the demands of the forces of tradition and history. Discuss.
118 The anti-realist modes of representation used by avant-garde artists like Gertrude Stein and Picasso not only aim at a more accurate and objective representation of the world, but also try to produce objects that resist traditional ways of seeing and understanding. Discuss.
119 The Modernist street is a metaphor for the fate of subjectivity in the age of mass production: the privacy of consciousness is forced into a threatening public space through the experience of being analyzed into and reduced to its constituent fragments, and of being evacuated of individuality through the experience of anomie, manic terror and alienation. Discuss.
120 Modernism oscillates between acquiescing to the forces of a combative, Darwinian version of linear progress that rejects the possibility of returns, and proposing a cyclical model of existence that affirms the possibility of new and pristine beginnings. Discuss.
121 Despite their stylistic dissimilarities, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are all equally concerned with exploring the interface between the scientific-encyclopaedic way of dealing with objects and representation on the one hand, and a subjective, idiosyncratic, and creative approach on the other. Discuss.
122 The Modernist emphasis on sound rather than meaning is an indication of its desire for a self-certifying, autotelic status for art. Discuss
123 Eliot’s adoption of Christian eschatological time in his later works conflicts with his use of Bergson’s concept of real duration. Discuss.
124 William Carlos Williams’s poem on the red wheelbarrow sets out to function from within an aesthetic of particularity and concreteness, but finally points to the inevitability of metaphysical generalizations.
125 Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar” is a cautionary parable of what happens to art when it succumbs to the lures of commodification.
126 Gertrude Stein’s poem “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass” is less about seeing or representing a carafe than about seeing and representation themselves.
127 Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an expression of and a response to the inauthentic and hollow ways in which human beings relate to each other, to art, and to the world of objects in the modern world.
Rajiv C Krishnan
These are questions that I have set for the LIT110 Modernist Poetry course over the many years that I have been teaching it. I have also included questions arising from MPhil and PhD courses that I have taught on the same subject: they are usually marked with an asterisk. Most questions have emerged from small research projects undertaken by students as part of their course completion requirements. You can use these questions in several ways. You can use some of them as a key to read difficult poems, authors or issues. You can use them to see the kind of work that gets done on this course, the major engagements, themes and issues that were discussed and pondered upon by my students and me during the course. You can use them also as points of departure for your own work, or as a model for the kind of research problems you might want to set up for yourself to explore and resolve. This compendium of questions functions as a database of the student engagements that have defined and sustained the LIT110 course. In the coming years, your own questions will figure here too! Use it whichever way you like! And of course, you are welcome to ignore it too! There are no risks involved!
If you find it hard understanding what the questions are asking you to think about, don’t panic. Stay tuned, and things will sort themselves out as the course gets under way. They are meant to stimulate thought, not necessarily to proffer or elicit definite, determinate answers. So the best thing to do with a difficult question is to take it to a fellow course mate and talk it over. Senior students who have done the course in the past are usually more than willing to help you: they are an invisible but tangible part of how this course does its work. And there is always the possibility of a tutorial session with Rajiv if you need it.
1 The Modernist text is post-Romantic in its problematization of the figure of the author, in the difficult and enhanced role that it assigns to its reader, and in its self-reflexive relationship to itself. Discuss.
2 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.
3 In effecting the move from the passive and impressionist literalism of Imagism to the active and interventionist expressivity of Vorticism, the influence of the works and ideas of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was paramount for Pound.
4 In Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden, the conjunction of her Imagist concreteness of presentation, her Hellenic themes, and the skewed vision of landscapes submerged under the sea create a strangely distant but powerful sense of psychological drama in which the personal and the impersonal speak with the same voice.
5 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s abstractionist language, while laying emphasis on representation as constituting a distinct order of reality, also enables ordinary objects to appear in dispensations that are inaccessible to naming.
6 The poems that William Carlos Williams wrote around the time of the First World War show a critical assimilation of the principles of Imagism as well as a growing awareness of the ongoing revolution in the visual arts.
7 Marianne Moore’s very Modernist search for a balance between the natural and the willed, the imaginary and the real comes home in her animals, which provide subjects as well as models for her art in the way they nest desire within design and the graceful within the practical.
8 The development of Ezra Pound’s poetics may be described as directed by the quest for a self-certifying representational practice: his discovery of Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character was serendipitous; but his acceptance of it as his ars poetica was disastrously uncritical.
9 Pound’s first Canto stages a struggle for attention that is depicted as the domination of the past by a resolute and creative present. Discuss.
10 In their themes as well as in their aesthetic values, the poems of William Carlos Williams derive from his engagement with the artistic avant-garde of New York.
11 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.
12 Ezra Pound’s appeal to origins and beginnings in the first Canto foregrounds his conviction that the Modernist project of cultural rejuvenation cannot be accomplished without taking lessons and advice from the past.
13 Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium poems constantly evoke the possibility of a repetition that does not seek to avoid difference: the task of bearing reference is therefore able to celebrate the freedom of the imagination.
14 “[Marianne] Moore’s world is both its opaque, substantial, unrepeatable self and a natural resource for allegories of poetry. Characteristically, her poems are at the same time descriptions of reality and representations of imaginative activity.” (Bonnie Costello). Discuss.
15 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 volume Spring and All is an intrinsic part of his attempt to defend and legitimize the role of the imagination in Modernist art and poetry.
16 “The unpractised reader, picking up H.D.’s Sea-Garden and reading it casually, might suppose it was all about flowers and rocks and waves and Greek myths, when it is really about the soul . . . .” (John Gould Fletcher).
17 In “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sounds a warning against succumbing to the lure of practices that culminate in man’s subjugation of nature: the functioning of the artistic imagination is not inconsistent with the exercise, experience and bestowal of freedom.
18 The Modernist problematization of representation is haunted by the fear of ekphrasis: in consequence, the Modernist text is self-reflexive, but pines for semiotic transparency, and desires, but falls short of openness.
19 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s language revisits objects from everyday life, but transforms the occasion into a subtle and radical celebration of the female subject and body.
20 In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein’s objects inhabit a world in which identity is superseded by difference, objects by representations, and attention by distraction. Discuss.
21 The poems of William Carlos Williams explicitly as well as implicitly declare allegiance to a concreteness of experience that is prior to the intervention of thought and interpretation, and thereby reverse and invert the dominant and Platonist epistemology of the West.
22 Williams’s poetry favours objects untouched by ideas and poetic practices that resist tradition: but within these very stances lie implicit but significant moral choices and commitments. Discuss.
23 In Spring and All (1923) Williams turns the topos of spring into an opportunity for launching an aggressive critique of the Modernism represented by Pound and Eliot: to unpack the differences between Williams and Eliot is to recognize two very different strains of Modernism, one more or less democratic and the other more or less aristocratic. Discuss.
24 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ early work Spring and All (1923) signals a disruptiveness that is iconoclastic: but it nevertheless promises and demands new beginnings for the artistic imagination.
25 In the Harmonium poems, Wallace Stevens oscillates between rapt fascination for a world that is accessible through sensation and is hospitable to the imagination, and canny fear of its anarchic and inviolable independence from human needs and purposes.
26 Marianne Moore’s poems find in the natural world a serendipitous combination of rigours and freedoms that determines as well as describes an art that is both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation.
27 The Futurist aesthetic demands a radically performative immediacy of presentation that pulls art in the direction of abstraction while making it welcome the products, processes and obsessions of modernity.
28 It is characteristic of Marianne Moore’s poetic practice that in describing the tropical landscape of her seaside town in “The Steeple-Jack,” her nouns and colours take on a tropic dimension that is nevertheless insistently concrete.
29 *Examine the thesis that the Modernist experimentation with form displays a paradoxical tendency to remember wholes while presenting fragments, to interrupt freedom with the nostalgia for method, to find inscribed in representation a history of representation, and to attribute normative historical value to individual enterprise and experience, and that it proceeds from an ekphrastic fear, which is the fear of literalism and the fear of loss, both of memory and of meaning.
30 *Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos represents the culmination of his incarnatory aesthetics. Its unique significance lies in the fact that it dovetails the religious, aesthetic and economic dimensions of his work within a problematic of representation for which the mystery of the Eucharist functions both as a definitive metaphor and as a luminous detail. Discuss.
31 *Modernism, despite its stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in its preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in its valorization of the individual self as the authentic and liberating source of originary experiences. Discuss.
32 *The influence of abstract art on Wallace Stevens’s work was not limited to the influence of specific works, artists or movements on specific poems: it enabled him to reconceptualize the relationship between art and aesthetics, between the artist and the work of art, and between the viewer/reader and the task of interpretation. The result was an art that attempted not to borrow concreteness from extra-linguistic experience, and an aesthetic that privileged a radically performative and self-reflexive mode of presentation. Discuss.
33 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?
34 Modernism depletes the world not of objects but of representations of objects; Postmodernism exhausts the avenues not of representations but of objects of consciousness. Discuss.
35 Objects in the poetry of Rilke are the enviable shadows of experiences that challenge
art into transcendence.
36 Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘thing-poems’ (Ding-Gedichte) inaugurated a very important and paradoxical preoccupation of the Modernists when they found in physical objects models both of what may be possessed and of what transcends the possessor-possessed dialectic. In his poems we watch things become poems and poems become things. Discuss.
37 Ashbery’s poems exploit the pathos of a world that is only ever experienced and accessible to consciousness through words and as words. Discuss.
38 Theodor Adorno’s account, in Aesthetic Theory, of the relationship between art and society seeks to free art from all forms of tutelage without freeing it from social responsibility. Discuss.
39 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?
40 Modernism’s break with the mimetic impulse in Western art is fraught with ideological consequences that reverberate in typical Postmodern stances. Discuss.
41 The characteristic features of Modernism self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.
42 Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic method ascribes to details and particulars a luminosity that stops short of narrative, but nevertheless implies narrative: thus, sensuous affect and elements of form become metonymic indices of order, coherence and meaning. But this methodology is flawed by its inability to account for historical difference, referential opacity and conflicts in interpretation. Discuss.
43 Through their use of Greek and Egyptian myths in describing emotions, and their presentation of known objects and landscapes as transformed underwater growths and seascapes, HD’s poems exhibit an ambivalence towards the real world that seeks altered modes of human agency. Discuss.
44 In demanding from their readers a competence and commitment that had to be proved through encounter with radically terminal forms of reference and representation, Modernist poems in effect created the (reader-) subjects for whom they might then become objects as well as models of attention and agency. Discuss.
45 Modernism presents a wide range of responses to the protocols of attention and interpretation that transform immediate concrete sensation into secondary intellectual abstraction: Pound’s poetics, hinging as it does, on the possibility of a transparent continuity between experience and expression, ‘inverts’ Platonism without exploring the possibility of an alternative epistemology of difference and distraction. Discuss.
46 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.
47 Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus reserve for art a plenitude of being that becomes an ontological substitute for a spiritual life. As a giving, art gives life back to itself in the uncertainty and the wonder of the gift that it itself is. Discuss.
48 Eliot, despite his stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in his preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in his valorisation of the individual self—albeit embedded in and transforming tradition—as the authentic and liberating source of authentic experience. Discuss.
49 In Eliot’s poetry, form reflects content: his tropes thematize alienation, while his treatment of anomie takes the form of metonymic images and presentations. The result is a poetics of adequacy and a politics of conformity. Discuss.
50 By describing natural processes and objects under the aspect of artifice, Marianne Moore introduces a tension between art and life that creates contexts for discovering the apparently self-certifying foundations of thought and experience. However, this cross between the mechanistic and the imaginative privileges being and identity, and fails adequately to account for process and difference. Discuss.
51 In ‘modernizing’ his verse under the influence of Ezra Pound, Yeats was in effect changing its content and imagery without changing its formal emphases and routines: reactionary Modernism took the cue and often incorporated the revolutionary form of the new art without addressing its substantive concerns, thus reifying change and making it an end in itself. Discuss.
52 Eliot’s theory of artistic objectivity and impersonality transfers agency from the human subject to the aesthetic object, and thereby privileges tradition as the ultimate arbitrator in human life. Time, change and difference are domesticated and rendered subservient to memory, form and identity. Discuss.
53 Gertrude Stein’s writings function within an intransitive mode of discourse that discovers modernity as difference and discontinuity rather than as the persistence of identity and coherence. This is what distinguishes her work so starkly from that of the male Modernists. Discuss.
54 Aesthetic self-reflexivity in Stevens is an outcome of his notion of a fully autonomous and therefore free and freeing art. Discuss.
55 In its valorisation of particulars and concrete images, in its problematization of
metaphor, and in its reversal of Platonism, radical Modernism seems set upon overcoming metaphysics. But more often than not, it ends up arguing a case for a more ‘natural’ (and therefore binding) metaphysics—one rooted in unique but normative particulars and ‘facts.’ Discuss.
56 Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons attempts the difficult (perhaps impossible) task of affirming existence as radically removed from memory and resemblance. The result is a poetics that prefers process to product, becoming to being, means to ends, and openings to closures. Discuss.
57 The Modernist poets hold back from metaphor—taken as implying an explicit metaphysics—only to succumb to a metonymic presentational strategy that activates the desire and the search for implicit metaphysical wholes. Discuss.
58 The characteristic features of avant-garde Modernist poetry and art movements self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.
59 Modernist poetry, by its valorization of difference, raises questions about being and knowing that find clear echoes in the work of Heidegger. Explore the ways in which this connection can be established in the themes and preoccupations that engage the work of Wallace Stevens.
60 Repetition in Stevens’s Harmonium functions both as an instance of difference and autonomy and as a reminder of structure and belonging. Discuss.
61 Stevens’s poems find in music the idea of an imaginatively self-sufficient and truly abstract art because it can dispense with the mimetic imperative completely: music therefore represents the peril that they must avoid in order to keep being poems, as well as the model that they must follow in order to keep being imaginative. Discuss.
62 In his 1923 volume Spring and All, William Carlos Williams takes up the challenge of encountering modernity without rendering the artistic imagination subservient to the past as Eliot and Pound had done. Discuss.
63 In tone as well as in values, Marianne Moore’s poems work out a ‘middle path’ that avoids the extremes of gaudy ornament and bland generalization. Explore the ways in which the figure of the Buddha and Buddhism may have influenced this move.
64 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.
65 Stevens’s poems are an elegiac reminder of the essential unknowability of the world to which our senses refer us: the employment of the imagination is therefore duty as well as destiny. The one philosopher who haunts the Harmonium poems and whose words sometimes directly appear in them is Kant. Discuss.
66 Modernist poems raise ontological issues only to reduce them to problems of epistemology and representation. Discuss.
67 Marianne Moore’s poems find in art modes of being and knowing, giving and having, that can be both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation. Discuss.
68 Modernist poems negotiate a distance between poet and society that grants the poet an autonomous and therefore critical social value. Discuss.
69 Explicate the Modernist notion of impersonality in art as it evolves from Yeats’s theory of the mask to Eliot’s doctrine of the dialectic of tradition and the individual talent.
70 In what ways does Stein’s artistic practice in Tender Buttons constitute a critique of Western metaphysics?
71 Write a critical evaluation of the influence of the ideas of the New York avant-garde artistic scene upon Williams’s Spring and All.
72 Stevens was too Romantic to be a Modernist and too Modernist to be a Romantic. Explore this thesis through a reading of the Harmonium poems.
73 The Modernist valorisation of concreteness in poetry is a consequence of the desire to achieve radical particularity of reference and presentational immediacy. Discuss.
74 Eliot’s enunciation of his theory of impersonality unfolds through stages that make submission to the authority of orthodoxy and tradition seem desirable, necessary and even inevitable. Discuss.
75 By frustrating the attempts of its reader to derive determinate meanings, Stein’s Tender Buttons forces her to discover and generate complex networks of reference and suggestion within the text that seem to dispense with the need for any permanent or global centre. Discuss.
76 What traces of the influence of William James do you find in the artistic practices that Stein employs in Tender Buttons?
77 The difficulties that Modernist texts offer their readers in effect transform the relationship between the reader, the author and the text in ways that demand active readers but also curtail freedom of interpretation. Discuss.
78 The experience of the First World War had important effects upon the Modernist use and understanding of poetic forms (like the epic, the heroic poem, the lyric and the pastoral), as also upon its thematizations (of love, the seasons, women, and the individual). Discuss.
79 The crisis of representation in Modernism is the artistic counterpart of a crisis of subjectivity. Discuss.
80 What points of similarity do you find between Heidegger’s philosophical project and the concerns and artistic practices of the Modernist poets that you have studied?
81 What parallels do you find between the techniques of psychoanalysis developed by Freud and the new kinds of texts and reading strategies generated by the Modernists?
82 Write a critical account of the ways in which scientific developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transform the world that the Modernists write about or represent.
83 What connections do you find between the ideas explored by Heidegger in Being and Time and the themes and concerns addressed in the poems you have studied?
84 In what ways is it possible to characterize Modernism as a response to the global phenomenon of modernity?
85 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.
86 In what ways do Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism differ in their conceptions of their readers and viewers?
87 How did the development of abstract art in the Modernist era affect the writing, presentation and reading of poetry?
88 In attempting to go beyond the given and accept the aleatory and contingent moment of human experience, Dadaism and Surrealism were able to raise fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of art as a social institution. Discuss.
89 The self-referential turn in Modernist art had a profound influence upon the structure and conception of William Carlos Williams's poems. Discuss.
90 Colour functions in Marianne Moore's poems not just as a secondary attribute of objects, but often as the very conduct of being and existential expression. Discuss.
91 Starting with the work of his own father, modern art had a deep and abiding influence upon the poems of WB Yeats. Discuss.
92 The antithesis between tradition and modernity provides much of the power and thematic urgency of Yeats's poems. Discuss.
93 It is when Yeats begins directly to address the politics and conflicts of his times that his poetry gains its resolute modernity. Discuss.
94 Music is the primary and most favoured metaphor for characterisations of the imagination and its productions in Stevens's Harmonium. It is for these poems the model of an abstract art, which is independent of the need to achieve external reference, but is itself the object as well as sign of its own self-reference. Discuss.
95 In Harmonium, Stevens tries out various lyric voices and stances, exploring the possibility of writing within an aesthetic of abstraction. Discuss.
96 In his early poems, Pound explores an aesthetic of transcendence and embodiment that draw eclectically upon several mystical traditions of contemplation. Discuss.
97 Gertrude Stein's use of negatives in Tender Buttons is part of a pervasive critique of patriarchy that is implicit in the work as a whole. Discuss.
98 Stein's experiments in Tender Buttons serve, through disruptions, to foreground the most basic assumptions upon which acts of representation and communication in general are premised. Discuss.
99 In Modernism's emphasis upon the autonomy of art and the autotelic nature of artistic production, we encounter an attempt to counter the commodification of art that regimes of mass production made inevitable in the age of modernity. Discuss.
100 The urban locale supplies both the problems as well as models for the new and experimental forms that inform Modernist works. Discuss.
101 The crisis of authority in Modernism reflects, parallels and responds to the crisis in imperium that is in turn a consequence of the legitimation crises sponsored by modernity. Discuss.
102 Through his study of Eastern thought, Eliot was not only able to work into his poems a critical perspective on the decadence and spiritual bankruptcy of Western civilization, but also to indicate the ways in which regeneration might become possible. Discuss.
103 In an age criss-crossed by doom and despair, Buddhism provided a corrective perspective, generating the possibility of moral values and aesthetic perspectives that survive the onslaughts of nihilism and solipsism. Discuss.
104 Repetition functions as the guarantee as well as the paradoxical defeat of individuality, conferring as well as withdrawing agency: consequently, the Modernist text is forced self-reflexively to remember and represent the history of representation while engaged in ‘making it new.’ Discuss.
105 The despair of Eliot’s The Waste Land is the despair of a tottering patriarchy, face to face with the history of its own violence, and stoutly resisting its self-destruction through reactionary projects of renewal and regeneration. Discuss.
106 The Modernist body, like its textual counterpart, in trying to come to terms with its own materiality, its subservience to metaphysical regimes for its experience of wholeness, and its essential fragmentariness, is forced to generate models of self-sufficiency that militate against traditional, social certifications of being. Discuss.
107 In defending the human subject against its reduction to mere sensory residue of sensory experiences, the Romantics valorised human subjectivity, only to discover in its represented objects nothing much more than reflections of itself. How do the Modernists respond to this dilemma?
108 The Modernist use of the fragment continues and extends Romantic anxieties about the status of human identity, which is experienced as embedded in history: history as a narrative of revolutions and ruptures therefore makes disjunction and fragmentation the fate, not merely of Modernist art and literature, but also of the human subject. Discuss.
109 In science, the Modernists found models of method, economy and focus, and Modernist poetics is consequently never too far from scientific allusion and example. Discuss.
110 In themes as well as technique, Eliot’s work takes the developments in the visual arts, particularly Cubism, to their literary extremes. Discuss.
111 Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden is an attempt to reconcile the revelation—made possible by the emerging practices and theoretical insights of psychoanalysis—of the psyche as operating through a sediment of personal as well as public symbols and archetypes, and the Imagist injunction to achieve an unmediated, direct representation of objects. Discuss.
112 Underlying the iconoclastic energies that animate the experimentalism of William Carlos Williams’s 1923 volume Spring and All is a creative engagement with the works and ideas of the Dadaists. Discuss.
113 Dramatized in the difficult relationships that obtain between the fragments that comprise the Modernist work is a panorama of human relationships, viewed under the optic of an inexorable and unrelenting modernity. Discuss.
114 Metaphors of blindness—and sensory deprivation generally—often serve to indicate the breakdown in understanding that may be said to characterize life in the era of instrumental reason. Discuss.
115 The move towards objectivity in Modernism is also a move from the singular, homogeneous and unified interiority of the subject to a multiplicitous, heterogeneous and fragmented external world, and the devices of fragmentation and multiple perspectives can then be understood as comprising the objective moment of Modernism. The experience of the world as discordant and multiple therefore reverberates in the reader’s experience of encountering the polysemous Modernist text.
116 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.
117 Though Pound’s poetics often advocate the classical notion of the impersonal author, Pound’s poetry itself resists the subordination of individual human agency and creativity to the demands of the forces of tradition and history. Discuss.
118 The anti-realist modes of representation used by avant-garde artists like Gertrude Stein and Picasso not only aim at a more accurate and objective representation of the world, but also try to produce objects that resist traditional ways of seeing and understanding. Discuss.
119 The Modernist street is a metaphor for the fate of subjectivity in the age of mass production: the privacy of consciousness is forced into a threatening public space through the experience of being analyzed into and reduced to its constituent fragments, and of being evacuated of individuality through the experience of anomie, manic terror and alienation. Discuss.
120 Modernism oscillates between acquiescing to the forces of a combative, Darwinian version of linear progress that rejects the possibility of returns, and proposing a cyclical model of existence that affirms the possibility of new and pristine beginnings. Discuss.
121 Despite their stylistic dissimilarities, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are all equally concerned with exploring the interface between the scientific-encyclopaedic way of dealing with objects and representation on the one hand, and a subjective, idiosyncratic, and creative approach on the other. Discuss.
122 The Modernist emphasis on sound rather than meaning is an indication of its desire for a self-certifying, autotelic status for art. Discuss
123 Eliot’s adoption of Christian eschatological time in his later works conflicts with his use of Bergson’s concept of real duration. Discuss.
124 William Carlos Williams’s poem on the red wheelbarrow sets out to function from within an aesthetic of particularity and concreteness, but finally points to the inevitability of metaphysical generalizations.
125 Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar” is a cautionary parable of what happens to art when it succumbs to the lures of commodification.
126 Gertrude Stein’s poem “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass” is less about seeing or representing a carafe than about seeing and representation themselves.
127 Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an expression of and a response to the inauthentic and hollow ways in which human beings relate to each other, to art, and to the world of objects in the modern world.
LIT110 Modernist Poetry: Course Descriptor, August 2007
LIT110 Modernist Poetry Rajiv C Krishnan
In this course, we will discuss poems by such figures as WB Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, HD, and Marianne Moore, and try to arrive at a basic characterization of Modernism. We will also look at the work of artists and philosophers active during the period. You will be required to do a series of short assignments and undertake a small research project under my supervision. Your report on the project should be a paper of about 20-25 pages, typed, double-spaced, and following MLA specifications in matters of style and documentation. There will also be a final exam towards the end of the semester. The internal assessment will be worth 75% of the marks, and comprises short assignments (50%) and the Project Report (25%). The end semester exam will account for the remaining 25%.
This is a writing-intensive course, so you should be prepared to write a lot. I am planning to run a writing workshop every two weeks or so during one of our classes. I expect you to read as many of the items listed in the list of secondary sources (at least two books) in addition to the primary materials.
Your project will have to address a topic arrived at through discussion during tutorials, and will ordinarily have to be based upon readings of one or more of the following texts:
0 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
0 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
0 Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos
0 TS Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
0 TS Eliot, The Waste Land
0 Marianne Moore, Observations
0 Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
0 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
0 HD, Sea Garden.
Those who wish to take this course for LCS credits are welcome to do projects which draw upon Cultural Studies paradigms of analysis.
You can use either of the following anthologies of Modernist poetry for the course:
0 The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair
0 Modernism: An Anthology. Edited by Lawrence Rainey
Class hours: M W F 8-11 am
The Assignments
0 100 Poems 01: Journal
0 100 Poems 02: Journal
0 Attendance plus postings of class summaries (20x100 words)
0 Marianne Moore: “The Steeple Jack”
0 Marianne Moore: “The Jerboa”
0 Ezra Pound: “Canto 1”
0 Gertrude Stein: from Tender Buttons
0 Wallace Stevens: “Anecdote of the Jar”
0 Modernism and Imperial Authority
0 Modernist Art: analysis of any one work
0 Modernist philosophy: short introduction to any one philosopher
0 Assignment based upon the Extracts
0 TS Eliot: The Waste Land
0 Critical reception of The Waste Land
0 Reading report on any one Modernist collection
0 Revision of any one assignment
0 Compiling the Working Bibliography for the Project
0 The Portfolio
0 Research Methodology
Modernism—A Reading List for LIT110
Primary Materials
We will read poems by the following poets during the course:
WB Yeats
Rainer Maria Rilke
Guillaume Apollinaire
Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Hilda Doolittle (HD)
Marianne Moore
Jean Toomer
Francis Ponge
e e cummings
TS Eliot
and John Cage.
SECONDARY MATERIALS: A Short List
Altieri, Charles. “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry.” PMLA 91 (1976): 101-14.
Bell, Ian F. A. Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound. London: Methuen, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.
Bigliazzi, Silvia. “The Sign of Silence: Pound, Eliot, and the Image.” Paideuma 26.2-3 (Fall & Winter 1997): 211-225.
Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, ed. Modernism, 1890-1930. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978.
Brown, Dennis. Intellectual Dynamics within the Literary Group—Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot: The Men of 1914. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. London: Hyman, 1987.
Chandran, K. Narayana. Singer in the City: Studies in Modern American Poetry. Hyderabad: American Studies Research Centre, n. d.
Chefdor, Monique, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel, eds. Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.
Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthestics of Modernism. London: Vision, 1970.
Childs, John Steven. Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos. London: Associated UP, 1986.
Cianci, Giovanni and Peter Nicholls. Ruskin and Modernism. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Cianci, Giovanni. “Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: The Early Pound between Imagism and Vorticism.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (1981): 3-39.
Clearfield, Andrew M. These Fragments Have I Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research P, 1984.
Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1951.
Cork, Richard. Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. 2 vols. London: Fraser, 1976.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. 1955. Postscript added. London: Routledge, 1976.
Diepeveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
Easthope, Anthony. “Eliot, Pound and the Subject of Postmodernism.” CIEFL Bulletin 1.2 (December 1989): 1-10.
Easthope, Anthony. Poetry and Phantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Eisenstein, Samuel A. “Literature and Myth.” College English 29.5 (1968): 369-373.
Ellmann, Maud. “Ezra Pound: The Erasure of History.” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Benington, and Robert Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Sussex: Harvester, 1987.
Farr, Dennis. “Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.” Burlington Magazine 98 (August 1956): 279-80.
Feder, Lillian. Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” The Little Review 6 (September 1919): 62-64; (October 1919): 57-64; (November 1919): 55-60; and (December 1919): 68-72.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights,1936.
Fingesten, Peter. The Eclipse of Symbolism. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1970.
Ford, Ford Madox. “Impressionism—Some Speculations.” Poetry 2 (August 1913): 177-187; (September 1913): 215-225.
Gage, John T. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.
Gamache, Lawrence. “Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.2 (1992): 63-81.
Gardner, Joann. “Yeats, Pound, and the Inheritance of the Nineties.” Journal of Modern Literature 14 (1988): 431-43.
Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Giles, Steve, ed. Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
Gregory, Horace and Murya Zaturenska. A History of American Poetry 1900-1940. New York: Harcourt, 1946.
Hamilton, Scott. Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954.
Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. New York: Harper, 1953.
Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1960.
Ingram, Claudia. “Sharing Strategies with the Discourses of Authority: Ezra Pound and the Legal ‘Modernists.’” Paideuma 24.1 (Spring 1995): 39‑52.
Johnson, William A. “Toward a Redefinition of Modernism.” Boundary 2 (1974): 539‑56.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. London: Cape, 1956.
Juhasz, Suzanne. Metaphor and the Poetry of Williams, Pound and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1974.
Kayman, Martin A. The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
Kronick, Joseph G. American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Moderns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
Last, R. W. Hans Arp: The Poet of Dadaism. London: Wolff, 1969.
Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960.
Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Levin, Harry. “What Was Modernism?” Varieties of Literary Experience. Ed. Stanley Burnshaw. New York: New York UP, 1962. 307‑29.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Beacon Hill: Beacon, 1957.
Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Materer, Timothy. Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
McDonald, Gail. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot and the American University. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
McNeil, Lynda D. Recreating the World/Word: The Mythic Mode as Symbolic Discourse. New York: State U of New York P, 1992.
North, Michael. The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1968.
Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy. London: Tate Gallery, 1985.
Riddel, Joseph N. “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josuè V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 322-358.
Schneidau, Herbert N. “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.” Modern Philology 65 (February 1968): 214-17.
Schneidau, Herbert N. Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Shlovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-24.
Spears, Monroe K. Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
Stead C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Szabolcsi, Mikós. “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions.” New Literary History 3.1 (Autumn 1971): 49-70.
Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993.
Walker, Jeffery. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
Weisstein, Ulrich. “Vorticism: Expressionism English Style.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 13 (1964): 28-40.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. New York: Scribner's, 1959.
Woolf, Viginia. “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown.” A Modernist Reader: Modernism in England 1910-1930. Ed. Peter Faulkner. London: Batsford, 1986. 112‑128.
In this course, we will discuss poems by such figures as WB Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, HD, and Marianne Moore, and try to arrive at a basic characterization of Modernism. We will also look at the work of artists and philosophers active during the period. You will be required to do a series of short assignments and undertake a small research project under my supervision. Your report on the project should be a paper of about 20-25 pages, typed, double-spaced, and following MLA specifications in matters of style and documentation. There will also be a final exam towards the end of the semester. The internal assessment will be worth 75% of the marks, and comprises short assignments (50%) and the Project Report (25%). The end semester exam will account for the remaining 25%.
This is a writing-intensive course, so you should be prepared to write a lot. I am planning to run a writing workshop every two weeks or so during one of our classes. I expect you to read as many of the items listed in the list of secondary sources (at least two books) in addition to the primary materials.
Your project will have to address a topic arrived at through discussion during tutorials, and will ordinarily have to be based upon readings of one or more of the following texts:
0 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
0 Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
0 Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos
0 TS Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
0 TS Eliot, The Waste Land
0 Marianne Moore, Observations
0 Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
0 William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
0 HD, Sea Garden.
Those who wish to take this course for LCS credits are welcome to do projects which draw upon Cultural Studies paradigms of analysis.
You can use either of the following anthologies of Modernist poetry for the course:
0 The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Edited by Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair
0 Modernism: An Anthology. Edited by Lawrence Rainey
Class hours: M W F 8-11 am
The Assignments
0 100 Poems 01: Journal
0 100 Poems 02: Journal
0 Attendance plus postings of class summaries (20x100 words)
0 Marianne Moore: “The Steeple Jack”
0 Marianne Moore: “The Jerboa”
0 Ezra Pound: “Canto 1”
0 Gertrude Stein: from Tender Buttons
0 Wallace Stevens: “Anecdote of the Jar”
0 Modernism and Imperial Authority
0 Modernist Art: analysis of any one work
0 Modernist philosophy: short introduction to any one philosopher
0 Assignment based upon the Extracts
0 TS Eliot: The Waste Land
0 Critical reception of The Waste Land
0 Reading report on any one Modernist collection
0 Revision of any one assignment
0 Compiling the Working Bibliography for the Project
0 The Portfolio
0 Research Methodology
Modernism—A Reading List for LIT110
Primary Materials
We will read poems by the following poets during the course:
WB Yeats
Rainer Maria Rilke
Guillaume Apollinaire
Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Hilda Doolittle (HD)
Marianne Moore
Jean Toomer
Francis Ponge
e e cummings
TS Eliot
and John Cage.
SECONDARY MATERIALS: A Short List
Altieri, Charles. “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry.” PMLA 91 (1976): 101-14.
Bell, Ian F. A. Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound. London: Methuen, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.
Bigliazzi, Silvia. “The Sign of Silence: Pound, Eliot, and the Image.” Paideuma 26.2-3 (Fall & Winter 1997): 211-225.
Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, ed. Modernism, 1890-1930. Hassocks: Harvester, 1978.
Brown, Dennis. Intellectual Dynamics within the Literary Group—Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot: The Men of 1914. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s. London: Hyman, 1987.
Chandran, K. Narayana. Singer in the City: Studies in Modern American Poetry. Hyderabad: American Studies Research Centre, n. d.
Chefdor, Monique, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel, eds. Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986.
Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthestics of Modernism. London: Vision, 1970.
Childs, John Steven. Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos. London: Associated UP, 1986.
Cianci, Giovanni and Peter Nicholls. Ruskin and Modernism. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Cianci, Giovanni. “Futurism and the English Avant-Garde: The Early Pound between Imagism and Vorticism.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 6 (1981): 3-39.
Clearfield, Andrew M. These Fragments Have I Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research P, 1984.
Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1951.
Cork, Richard. Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. 2 vols. London: Fraser, 1976.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. 1955. Postscript added. London: Routledge, 1976.
Diepeveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
Easthope, Anthony. “Eliot, Pound and the Subject of Postmodernism.” CIEFL Bulletin 1.2 (December 1989): 1-10.
Easthope, Anthony. Poetry and Phantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Eisenstein, Samuel A. “Literature and Myth.” College English 29.5 (1968): 369-373.
Ellmann, Maud. “Ezra Pound: The Erasure of History.” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Benington, and Robert Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Sussex: Harvester, 1987.
Farr, Dennis. “Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists.” Burlington Magazine 98 (August 1956): 279-80.
Feder, Lillian. Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” The Little Review 6 (September 1919): 62-64; (October 1919): 57-64; (November 1919): 55-60; and (December 1919): 68-72.
Fenollosa, Ernest and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights,1936.
Fingesten, Peter. The Eclipse of Symbolism. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1970.
Ford, Ford Madox. “Impressionism—Some Speculations.” Poetry 2 (August 1913): 177-187; (September 1913): 215-225.
Gage, John T. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.
Gamache, Lawrence. “Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.2 (1992): 63-81.
Gardner, Joann. “Yeats, Pound, and the Inheritance of the Nineties.” Journal of Modern Literature 14 (1988): 431-43.
Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Giles, Steve, ed. Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
Gregory, Horace and Murya Zaturenska. A History of American Poetry 1900-1940. New York: Harcourt, 1946.
Hamilton, Scott. Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954.
Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. New York: Harper, 1953.
Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1960.
Ingram, Claudia. “Sharing Strategies with the Discourses of Authority: Ezra Pound and the Legal ‘Modernists.’” Paideuma 24.1 (Spring 1995): 39‑52.
Johnson, William A. “Toward a Redefinition of Modernism.” Boundary 2 (1974): 539‑56.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. London: Cape, 1956.
Juhasz, Suzanne. Metaphor and the Poetry of Williams, Pound and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1974.
Kayman, Martin A. The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
Kronick, Joseph G. American Poetics of History: From Emerson to the Moderns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984.
Last, R. W. Hans Arp: The Poet of Dadaism. London: Wolff, 1969.
Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960.
Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Levin, Harry. “What Was Modernism?” Varieties of Literary Experience. Ed. Stanley Burnshaw. New York: New York UP, 1962. 307‑29.
Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Beacon Hill: Beacon, 1957.
Longenbach, James. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Materer, Timothy. Vortex: Pound, Eliot and Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
McDonald, Gail. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot and the American University. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
McGann, Jerome. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
McNeil, Lynda D. Recreating the World/Word: The Mythic Mode as Symbolic Discourse. New York: State U of New York P, 1992.
North, Michael. The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1987.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1968.
Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy. London: Tate Gallery, 1985.
Riddel, Joseph N. “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josuè V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 322-358.
Schneidau, Herbert N. “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.” Modern Philology 65 (February 1968): 214-17.
Schneidau, Herbert N. Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Shlovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-24.
Spears, Monroe K. Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
Stead C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
Szabolcsi, Mikós. “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Modernism: Questions and Suggestions.” New Literary History 3.1 (Autumn 1971): 49-70.
Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993.
Walker, Jeffery. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.
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