0521855047 cambridge university press from modernism to postmodernism american poetry and theory in the twentieth century jan 2006

FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM In this ambitious overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist American poetics Ashton moves between the iconic figures of American modernism – Stein, Williams, Pound – and developments in contemporary American poetry to show how contemporary poetics, especially the school known as language poetry, have attempted to redefine the modernist legacy She explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest that connect contemporary poets with their modernist forebears The works of writers such as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery are explained and analyzed in detail This major new account of the key themes in twentieth-century poetry and poetics develops important new ways to read both modernist and postmodernist poetry through their similarities as well as their differences It will be of interest to all working in American literature, to modernists, and to scholars of twentieth-century poetry j e n n i f e r a s h t o n is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago cambridge studies in american literature and culture Editor Ross Posnock, New York University Founding Editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory Board Alfred Bendixen, Texas A&M University Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St John’s College, University of Oxford Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Gordon Hutner, University of Kentucky Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Recent books in this series 148 m a u r i c e s l e e Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 147 c i n d y w e i n s t e i n Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 146 e l i z a b e t h h e w i t t Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 145 a n n a b r i c k h o u s e Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere 144 e l i z a r i c h a r d s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle 143 j e n n i e a k a s s a n o f f Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race 142 j o h n m c w i l l i a m s New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620–1860 141 s u s a n m g r i f fi n Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction 140 r o b e r t e a b r a m s Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature 139 j o h n d k e r k e r i n g The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century JENNIFER ASHTON    Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521855044 © Jennifer Ashton 2005 This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published in print format 2006 - - ---- eBook (NetLibrary) --- eBook (NetLibrary) - - ---- hardback --- hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate To Edward C and Katherine D Ashton Contents Acknowledgments page viii Introduction: modernism’s new literalism 1 Gertrude Stein for anyone 30 Making the rose red: Stein, proper names, and the critique of indeterminacy 67 Laura (Riding) Jackson and T¼H¼E N¼E¼W C¼R¼I¼T¼I¼C¼I¼S¼M 95 Modernism’s old literalism: Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and the objectivist critique of metaphor 119 Authorial inattention: Donald Davidson’s literalism, Jorie Graham’s Materialism, and cognitive science’s embodied minds 146 Notes Index 177 199 vii Acknowledgments The earliest work for this project could not have been conceived without Sharon Cameron and Allen Grossman, from whom I learned how to study the history of poetry as well as individual poems, and whose advice shaped the first chapters of this manuscript I am heavily indebted to Glen Scott Allen, Scott Black, Sharon Bryan, Josefina Dash, Julie Reiser, and Michael Szalay for conversations that both altered and improved the direction of those chapters The New York Americanists offered an important occasion for discussing many of the ideas here, and I am grateful in particular to the group’s founders, Maria Farland and Michael Szalay, as well as to Rachel Adams, Mary Esteve, Amy Hungerford, John Lowney, Jean Lutes, Douglas Mao, Sean McCann, and Michael Trask, for their incisive comments and criticism I have also benefited enormously from conversations with colleagues and students at Columbia University, Rice University, Trinity University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Tel-Aviv University, and Chuo and Hitotsubashi Universities in Tokyo, where I had the opportunity to present portions of this manuscript in various stages of progress I am especially grateful to Reiichi Miura of Hitotsubashi University for making possible my contact with other scholars of poetry across Japan, and for his willingness to translate a slightly altered chapter from this book into Japanese I am grateful as well to Akitoshi Nagahata and Takayuki Tatsumi for acquainting me with the reception of L¼A¼N¼G¼U¼A¼G¼E in Japan Here in Chicago, conversations with some of the members of the Chicago Literature and Society Seminar (CLASS) – John D Kerkering, Oren Izenberg, Clifford Spargo, Joyce Wexler, Benjamin Schreier, and Jessica Burstein – were invaluable in shaping the final arguments of the book And I can’t imagine a happier intellectual life than the one I have found among the students and colleagues with whom I have worked, first at Cornell University and now at UIC I particularly want to thank viii Acknowledgments ix Dawn-Michelle Baude, Peter Becker, Tom Bestul, Erica Bernheim, Laura Brown, Nicholas Brown, Nels Buch-Jepsen, Tim Canezaro, Mark Canuel, Mackenzie Carignan, Cynthia Chase, Mark Chiang, Ralph Cintron, Nancy Cirillo, Tiffany Coghill, Walter Cohen, Jonathan Culler, Lennard Davis, Liz DeLoughrey, Madhu Dubey, Ann Feldman, Pete Franks, Lisa Freeman, Debra Fried, Judith Gardiner, Roger Gilbert, Lisette Gonzalez, Arthur Groos, JoAnne Ruvoli, Jacqueline Goldsby, Tom Hall, Brandon Harvey, Hannah Higgins, Molly Hite, Sharon Holland, John Huntington, Kyoko Inoue, Mary Jacobus, Helen Jun, Dominick LaCapra, Michael Lieb, Cris Mazza, Deirdre McCloskey, Dorothy Mermin, Chris Messenger, Jonathan Monroe, Bob Morgan, Tim Murray, Yasmin Nair, Rob Odom, Nadya Pittendrigh, Larry Poston, Anya Riehl, Mary Beth Rose, Edgar Rosenberg, Shirley Samuels, Dan Schwarz, Cameron Scott, Rob Sevier, Alison Shaw, Harry Shaw, Reginald Shepherd, Caleb Spencer, Hortense Spillers, Sean Starr, Joe Tabbi, Todd Thompson, Pete and Andrea Wetherbee, Virginia Wexman, Jackie White, Jessica Williams, Gene Wildman, and Anne Winters Several of the chapters in this book have been published in somewhat altered form as journal articles: portions of the introduction and chapter appeared in Modernism/Modernity, and a longer version of chapter appeared in ELH The University of Illinois at Chicago English Department insisted on and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences kindly approved a semester’s leave from teaching in the spring of 2004, which helped speed this project to its completion To Gerald Graff, and to the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, I am indebted for comments and questions that sharpened my understanding of the project in vital ways during its final stages of revision I am extremely grateful to Ross Posnock, not only for including the book in the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture series, but for helping to expedite the transition from manuscript to print I would also like to thank Ray Ryan, Maartje Scheltens, Liz Davey, and Audrey Cotterell at Cambridge University Press for their invaluable advice and assistance throughout the book’s production I owe thanks of a different order altogether to friends who have helped make the past four years the best of my life: Jane Tompkins and Stanley Fish, Lenny Davis, Jerry Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, Oren Izenberg and Sonya Rasminsky, Jack Kerkering, Sharon Holland and Jennifer Brody, Nicholas and Anna Brown, and Ray and Takae Miura The debt that the argument of this book owes to the published work of ... “passes” to the beholder Ashbery has seemed up to this point to be maintaining a distinction between the irrecoverable “meaning” of the “strewn evidence” in the painting and the “circle” of the painter’s... and “keeps it lively and intact,” and the actual lived experience of the painter in the process of painting is something that, according to the poet, the portrait both captures and conceals in. .. literalism – the transformation of readers into experiencing subjects and of texts into concrete objects – has an important analog in the history of From Modernism to Postmodernism art in the last century,