William Carlos Williams

November 16 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Due Second thousand word paper: close reading of a brief text of your choice by Stein, Williams, or Zukofsky. • Focus The Zukofskys' homophonic translation of Catullus's oeuvre. Soundfile Sappho's "Phainetai moi." Handouts Catullus 51 in Latin, in Zukofsky translation, in "straight" translation. Traditional view of translation: same signifieds, different signifiers. The Zukofskys' mad aspiration: sr = sr, sd = sd. Barrett Watten on the project in "Three Tests of Zukofsky." The task of the translator in the era of imperial English. Looking ahead Read handout on library assignment to be completed by November 23. Review guidelines for annotated bibliography entries and some samples.

November 11 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus Student-led discussion of projects for second thousand word paper.

November 9 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus Paterson, books one through three.

November 4 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on "The Descent" by William Carlos Williams. The potential and the actual. Framing of existential projects. And the failure of such frames. "No defeat is made up entirely of defeat."

November 2 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Class visit by poet Alice Notley. Importance of Stein and Williams to her development as a poet. Reading from The Descent of Alette. Reading Williams's "The Descent." Mysteries of the variable foot. Resource A tape of the classs visit is available for review.

October 28 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on Stein's late portraits. Intoxicated by melody. More on the sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent. Audiotext Kurt Schwitters reading from the Ursonate. Audiotext Stein's "If I Told Him—A Completed Portrait of Picasso."

October 26 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on the Marxist social theory underpinning Zukofsky's first half of "A"-9. Student questions and comments. Capitalism as mode of production. Relations of production and forces of production. Example: music file sharing vs. RIAA-driven commodification. Reproduction. Division of labor. Alienated labor and objectivated labor. Artist as exemplar of non-alienated labor. Marxism as immanent critique of capitalism and as utopic imagination of alternatives to capitalism. TINA (there is no alternative) vs. "another world is possible." An impulse to action: what does "A"-9 want of its reader? Thesis eleven of the "theses on Feuerbach": "the point is to change it." Rilke's "you must change your life." And Rimbaud's "lettre du voyant": the poet as "multiplier of advances." Simultaneity of demands for political and aesthetic transformation. Aside on John Ruskin (thanks Christine). Kinds of anti-capitalism, including the reactionary anti-capitalism of poets like Pound (and Eliot). A desire for the time before capitalism as opposed to a time after. Our third time through the claim "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" (Fredric Jameson). Lesson in Hegel's master - slave dialectic (scroll to ¶189) and the struggle to the death for recognition. The eventual triumph of the subordinated term (slave in Hegel, proletariat in Marx). Tuition strike at UMaine? Marxism as a theory (and practice) of struggle. Looking ahead We'll discuss Stein's late portraits, especially "If I told him," on Thursday and begin a discussion of Paterson that will continue into next week. Resource CLR James on the master-slave dialectic and Marx.

October 21 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on Zukofsky's first half of "A"-9. The pamphlet he made and copyrighted. The canzone form. Terminal and internal rhyme schemes. Zuk's focus on the nasal phoneme /n/ and the liquid /r/. The status of the object within capitalist social relations: the commodity. Arrested labor. Thingification (reification): relations between people come to appear as relations between things, and vice versa. Welcome to Sam's Club. Passages from the opening chapter of Capital. On fetishism: magical properties of a Boston Redsox cap, made in India, worn in Maine. Voicing of poem in its entirety. Degrees of condensation: "A"-9 brings to focus Marx's Capital which brings to focus the commodity and the capitalist social formation that produces commodities. Money and abstract equivalence: the dollar store. The difference between 1938-40 and 1948-50: a brief social history. The object after Einstein: particles and waves. Handout Typescript of first half of "A"-9 along with prose "restatement" and a version of Calvalcanti's "Donna mi pregha" by Ezra Pound. Also, definitions of "commodity" and "commodity fetishism" from Tom Bottomore's Dictionary of Marxism.

October 19 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Class visit by British poet Tony Lopez. Rewriting the modernist text. Second-order compositions: citation, found language. Discussion of Stein's Tender Buttons and "Composition as Explanation." Composition qua totality of social activity. And as the artistic description of same. Generations. Parallels between Stein's practice-based (as opposed to static or object-based) materialism and the Marxist theories important to Zukofsky.

October 14 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on your papers, due a week from today. Open discussion. Resources Check out Professor Kenneth Sherwood's site for a course on our poets plus the fascinating Mina Loy. Looking ahead The first of three 1000-word essays will be due at the start of class on Thursday, 21 October. With a minimum of rhetorical padding, and a maximum of clear hard thinking, you will answer this question: what is the status of the object in the poetics of Stein (and/or) Zukofsky (and/or) Williams?

October 7 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on Stein's Tender Buttons. "Act so that there is no use in a center" (344). An aesthetic program, but also an ethical and political one. John Cage, Merce Cunningham. An aside on my asides. Anarchist decentering: "the difference is spreading" (313). The gross structure: objects, food, rooms. Domestic space and public space: gendered divisions of experience. Semiotic threads. Kinds, types, and singularities. Disjunction between rubric and textual body. Multiple voicings of "A carafe, that is a blind glass." Reading "A box" (314). "A piece of coffee" (315). Techniques and themes. The colors. The negative particle ("not"): striking through the posited entity. The problematic of "relatedness" and seeing resemblance (carry over of typification strategies of Making of Americans). The suffix "-ness." "Painful cattle." Logical operators (if, so) followed by non-sequiturs. Repeated consonant rack: /r-d/, /r-p-d/ (redness, rudeness, rapid, rudimentary). Reading Stein: in an anxious mood, understandably; in a joyful one, preferably. Jouissance. Schools of Steinian interpretation: the decoders and translators who believe the manifest text can be "solved" at the latent level once the right "key" has been identified. And those who take the manifest text as is: unresolvable hermeneutic crisis.

October 5 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Handout "Portraits and Repetition." | Focus on Stein's early portraits, especially "Ada" (275-77). From "life" to "portrait." Voicing and close reading of "Ada." The patriarchal family. Circuits of desire and discourse. One, everyone. The lesbian couple in "Ada" (last paragraph) and "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene." Palindromic Ada. Grandmother, grand-daughter: mother elided (a-d-a). Patrilineal family identities. The meanings of "gay" after Nietzsche's The Gay Science and the trial of Oscar Wilde. Connotations of "tender," connotations of "buttons" (for Thursday). Stein on the "cinema picture" and repetition: "Each time that I said the somebody whose portrait I was writing was something that something was just that much different from what I had just said that somebody was and little by little in this way a whole portrait came into being, a portrait that was not a description and that was made by each time ("Portraits" 106). Remembering as confusion of times (past and present): "the repetition time of remembering and the actual time of talking" (108). The problem with writing in this presentist model. Brief allusions to "Matisse" and "Orta or One Dancing." | Resources Eve Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet (1991).

September 30 — Thursday | back to syllabus • course overview

Focus on Stein's "Melanctha." The project of inhabiting one's desirous autonomy within and against the strongly determining constraints of race, class, gender, and sexuality. • Skin shades, blood lines. Stein's subject position and Melanctha's. • Structuralist reconstruction of characters and events. Distinction between manifest and latent text, plot and story. Loop structure. • Heterosexual couplings: Rose—Sam, M's Mother—M's father, John Bishop—Mrs. Bishop, Melanctha—Jefferson/Jem. The absence of a corresponding term for Jane. • Melanctha's "wandering": the social types she encounters, the social spaces she traverses, the manner of her "escapes." Sexual bonds, affective bonds. Euphemism and the boundaries of what this text can say. The concept of "romance" as found in "The Good Ana." • Melanctha's critique of Jeff; Jeff's critique of Melanctha. The carnal and the cerebral. • "One day there had been much joy between them, more than they ever yet had had with their new feeling. All the day they had lost themselves in warm wandering" (177). Jeff's "turn": a horror of sexuality as such? Simple jealousy? • Jem, or indifference. • Absence of the will to live in "Gentle Lena" and "Melanctha." Analogy to Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise. When the social order affords no survivable position is it meaningful to speak of "suicide"? • From "lives" to "portraits." And from narrative means to poetic ones. | Resources Two books by Lillian Faderman are of interest in light of today's discussion: Surpassing the love of men: romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present (1981) and Odd Girls & Twilight Lovers: a history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America (1991). And Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: the emergence of the Afro-American woman novelist gives a lucid account of the contradictions surrounding black female sexuality in the reconstruction period and beyond. Finally, an article by Richard Walsh examines the conceptual difficulties associated with the story (fabula) / plot (sujet) distinction I employed today here (this is a demanding read: those of you thinking about grad school should check out the level of discourse you'll be expected to master there). | Looking ahead We'll stay with Stein on Tuesday, focusing on her early "portraits." Read 275-312, 356-387. On Thursday we'll discuss her "Tender Buttons" (313-355).

September 28 — Tuesday | back to syllabus • course overview

Voicing of "A"-7 in its entirety (great work everyone!). • The decision to work with sonnets in sequence. The four-beat line and the five-beat line: the popular, the literary. A small lesson in rhythm and meter. Stress vs. unstressed (rhythm), beat vs. off beat (meter). The handcuffs and who likes them. Adjacent stressed syllables force us to pause. Gerard Manley Hopkins and "sprung rhythm." Poetic forms as history at a standstill. The genesis of the sonnet form (to Petrarch), and the dissemination of the form (after Petrarch). Sonnet as dialogic construct: the octave, the sestet, the volta between. Or: three quatrains, the turn, and a couplet. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). • "A"-7 as diabolic machine for recirculation of materials encountered in first six movements. "A"-24 as a similar proposition at a much larger scale. The fugue as model ("A"-6: 38). The "Sirens" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses as parallel. • Clavicembalo, or harpsichord. • Zuk and citationality (recall "Poem Beginning 'The'"). • The tense hyphen: Judea-Christian. "See him? Whom?" And the trope of salvation. "Liveforever"? • Ricky and the elegiac; Kay and the erotic. • The political economy of the poem: "what months rent in arrears?" And the bad pun on "butt." The anaphoric use of "out of." And the ambiguity of that phrase (like German aus). • A poem incorporating and articulating its own poetics. Lower limit speech, upper limit music. "My one voice. My other: is / An objective — rays of the object brought to a focus" (24). • Spinoza, Enlightenment philosopher, lens grinder. The companion voice to Marx's in "A"-9. | Resource: Simplest Things Last on Zukofsky. For help with scansion, check out the excellent Interactive Tutorial on Rhythm Analysis, esp. the section "What is meter?" and the subsection explaining Derek Attridge's Beat-Offbeat Method. The ITRA glossary defines a number of terms you heard today, including elision and caesura.

September 23 — Thursday | back to syllabus

Looking ahead For Tuesday, complete your reading of the first seven movements of Zukofsky's "A." On Thursday we'll focus on Stein's "Melanctha" (which is long, so you'll want to get started on it as soon as possible). | Chalkboard potluck of common objects from "Song 22" assignment. The six endwords of "Mantis" and the pattern whereby they repeat. Audiotext Ten minutes of Williams reading before live audience in mid-1950s. "All art is sensual...." The status of the object in the objectivist poetic. WCW's premise: there can be no restriction of poem's subject matter or lexis. Poem: "The Visit." Remarks: "Poems are not made of thoughts, beautiful thoughts, they're made of words." Poem: "By the road to the contagious hospital" (Spring and All chapter XIX: I). Social tenses in the object world: the now, the new, the outdated. Under what conditions is the "new" constrained to emerge. Aside on Heraclitus and the river you cannot step in twice—or even once, according to David Antin. Geological time: "[W]ith blinding rapidity, though we do not have time to notice it, their legs advancing a millionth part of an inch every fifty thousand years" (94). Nieztsche and the myth of the eternal return (WCW: "that process of miraculous verisimilitude" [95]). Objects in nature; the object world of automotive culture; the objects of human labor. Communication between objects without the human relay: carrot language, potato language. Roads as marks: a first literacy. Who is "they." The dialectic of "now" and "still." "They enter the new world naked." How can a "world" be "new"? The Aztecs and the Spanish. "This Is Just to Say." The cultural style of the 1950s: tittering about psychoanalysis. Enclosing the poem within the university curriculum. • Reading "Mantis": "thought's torsion." The troubadours and the birth of the European lyric tradition. Dante's Vita Nuova. What happens here? The economy of the poem: who has what? and who says so? Patterns in the endwords: stone & leaves; it & you; poor & lost. If "Song 22" had three opaque passages, this poem has perhaps three "clear" ones. | Resources Some accounts of the Zukofsky celebration in New York: at Cahiers de Corey, day one, day two, and day three. And the first of several posts at Silliman's Blog (including Zuk and gender).

September 21 — Tuesday | back to syllabus

Resources Brief definition of architectural term used in "Song 22," modillions (7th stanza). The sestina form encountered in "Mantis" is described here. You can read poet Lorine Niedecker's 1956 essay on Zukofsky here. | Class visit by poet Marjorie Welish. What is reality? The imagination, the imaginary, and ideology. The actual and the real. The status of the object in objectivism. Williams, pragmatism, and medical hermeneutics. Spring and All XXII: "so much depends." Various voicings. Welish's recasting of poem into sequenced permutations. "The Black Poems" (from The Annotated "Here" And Selected Poems). Zukofsky's "Song 22." Opaque passages. Temporality and historicity of a washstand. The things that make an age. Personal experience yielding to refraction (the mirror), intersubjectivity, and language (inscription). | Writing assignment Taking "Song 22" as your model, address a poem to an object that has a place in your habitual experience and might also bespeak this "age." E-mail the text to me by noon and bring a hardcopy to class.

September 16— Thursday | back to syllabus

Handout "To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven" (WCW). • Audiotext Louis Zukofsky reading "Song 22" from 55 Poems (available at Factory School Digital Audio Archive; scroll to Z, opens in RealPlayer). Our reenactment of a scene from the Marx Brother's A Night at the Opera. • A few words about Stein's 3 Lives and Flaubert's Trois Contes. From translation to imitation to something else. "Melanctha" the breakthrough. • Louis Zukofksy at last. Celebration of his centennary in New York this weekend. And a news article about it. • Stein's emphatic concept of "contemporaneity." Being in time together. Who is present, and to whom? The recently published Williams-Zukofsky Correspondence. • First sketch of objectivism: the poem as object equal to other objects in the world. • First of two harsh assessments: against Ayn Rand and her lame ideology of "objectivism." • The special issue of Poetry Zukofsky edited in 1931. Influence of "objectivism" on Charles Olson's "Projective Verse." • The discussion of line break promised on Tuesday. Meaning-making and meaning-changing breaks, versus arbitrarily delineated prose. Second of two harsh assessments: the poems in the American Poetry Review. • Three voicings of William's "The Great Figure." How meaning unfolds, lines by line. Analogy to Robert Creeley. Framing the shot. • Zukofsky's "Poem beginning 'The'": the literacy it proposes. • Line one: "The." First line of "A": "A." Definite and indefinite articles. • First glimpse of "A." One of two "long poems"—the other being Paterson—we'll study. • "Poem Beginning 'The'" as microcosm of "A.": structured by movements. • Some impressions of reading "Poem Beginning 'The.'" Katie on movement three: "in cat minor." • The canonical modernist device: collage. Small lesson on film montage: Eisenstein (October, Strike, Battleship Potemkin) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera). Element X juxtaposed to element Y produces third meaning Z, not present in either of the two elements considered individually. The surrealists. "Soluble Fish." • The first of the 55 Poems: memorializing Lenin. Does communism extinguish the individual, or effect the full realization of individuality? Lenin's answer and Stalin's. • Dialectic of time immemorial and historical particulars. • Aside on Chris Marker's Immemory. • Poetic apostrophe: O! (courtesy of Katie and in homage to Professor Cowan). • Moving into second poem. What changes? The gestalt (form or shape) presented by the lines even before you read them. Zuk's "Under: The Dragon:" (Complete 22). Pound's "and then:" (Canto 1). • Moving into third poem. Working people and the poor, urban experience, advertisements, electricity—and the continued presence of archaic Bacchic/Dionysian forces. | Looking ahead We'll begin with "Song 22" ("To my washstand") on Tuesday and proceed to "Mantis" and "Mantis: An Interpretation." You may wish to read Mark Scroggins's remarks on "Mantis" and the sestina form here. Read Williams's "Spring and All" (published 1923) keeping alert to parallels and differences in "55 Poems" (composed 1923-1935).

September 14 — Tuesday | back to syllabus

An extraneous amusement: the plot of Random Harvest (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1942; with Greer Garson and Ronald Colman). • A game of "stop Thursday's reading quiz from happening by displaying thorough knowledge of Stein's latter chapters." Ultimately successful: good work! | Audiotext "To Elsie" (a second listen). Revisiting of questions and themes from Thursday. • Passages from Kora: XXVI.1 ("Doors have back sides also") and XXVII.2 ("There is nothing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else"). • Imagination's transformative, and deceptive, power. • The dialectic of perception and imagination (one only sees what one can imagine: hence, ideology. • The dance a "thing itself." • Aside for philosophers on Kant's epistemology, bracketing the "thing itself" while vouchsafing internal consistency of consciousness's operations. • Small lesson on print's impact on lyric tradition. Orpheus a rock star (see sixteenth-century woodcut below). • Giving rhythm to movement (dance), to sound (music), to words (poetry). • WCW's quest for a "measure" adequate to contemporary reality. The break with meter and end rhyme. The modernist fascination with "rhythmic signatures." Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1911). And see image below on left ("Improvisation 31"). • Small lesson on interpretation. To interpret an utterance is to assign it a situation, to frame it. X (utterance) means Y (signification) in context Z (situation). "Class dismissed." Writing as a special case: neutralization of many framing mechanisms operant in everyday oral discourse. • Polysemy results when multiple plausible frames simultaneously coexist. • On the relation of "text" and "explanation" in Kora. Maybe one in ten "explanations" explains anything. • The idea of "improvisation." Forecasting jazz. • A text for those who can read it. • The sun & the moon. Perceivable universals. Also clichés. • The night: Joyce's "Circe" or "nighttown" chapter of Ulysses. Djuna Barnes's brilliant Nightwood. The surrealist fascination with dreams. • The carnage of world war one: a night descending, a grave opening. A fairly "light" version given in Stein's Autobiography. • Three little magazines: Transatlantic Review, Rogue, transition. Don't neglect The Little Review. And be sure to visit Suzanne Churchill's excellent site Housing Modernism: A Study of Little Magazines. • The final paragraphs of the Autobiography. Quick sketch of Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer). Another modernist with duplicating first and last names. See also Williams's elegy for him (handout next class). Back to Stein: "And she has and this is it." • Williams's "Arrival" (Selected 32). Erotic economy of the adulterous tryst. See also Kora IV.2.

September 9 — Thursday | back to syllabus

Handout Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar." • On Stein the lecturer. • Blurring line between "composition" and "explanation." | Today's focus: Kora in Hell. • Two descents: the myth of Persephone in the underworld; the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. • Two forms of love: mother-daughter; lover-beloved. • Before and after Christianity: the pagan, the chthonic, the secular. • The temporality of birth, death, and rebirth. • The 1918 prologue to Kora in Hell. A project not unlike Stein's much later Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—testament to heroic, slapdash, early modernism. • The UPenn modernists: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D. • A compass point (south): Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." And to the north, Marianne Moore. • How Duchamp's ready-mades fundamentally altered the meaning of art (an argument fully rehearsed in Thierry de Duve's Kant after Duchamp). • Eliot, the "subtle conformist." • But what has the prologue to do with the text? Separated in 1957 edition. • Williams and his mother. • A first look at the devices and themes of William's "improvisations." • What kind of speech acts do we encounter? Exclamations, questions, imperatives. • The multiplicity of languages. • The political economy of the text: who has, and who lacks for, what? • Official art (see Stein 689). From outlaw to classic. • Cezanne and Zola in the biopic: "let the pages of hypocrites warm the bones of honest men." • The word "revolution" after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution in 1917. • Think like a structuralist: the importance of binary oppositions. A few of those structuring Kora in Hell: fecundity~sterility, reason~imagination, purity~pollutedness, vitality~sickness, beauty~disgust, masculine~feminine, virgin~whore. • Liminal (or threshold) cases. • Audiotext: William Carlos Williams reading "To Elsie" (from Spring & All) in 1954 (note that soundfile at linked site is from a later reading, probably after WCW suffered the first of the strokes that will eventually kill him). • "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx on modernity): the liquidation of "tradition." • The making of Americans: who counts as one? who represents the "truth" of the nation? • The Palmer raids and the red scare. | Resources Stuart Davis's cover for the first edition of Kora in Hell, from Joe Conte's excellent website on the New York avant-garde, 1913-1929. • The Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Gregory Nagy's translation on the Diotima site. • About François Villon (mentioned in improvisation III.3). • About the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. • James Clifford's analysis of "To Elsie." • And a panel discussion of the poem held at UPenn in 1999. | Looking ahead We'll return to Kora on Tuesday and also get started with Zukofksy's "55 Poems." No need to lug "A" to class though.

September 7 — Tuesday | back to syllabus

Audiotext: "Pablo Picasso" (words and music by Jonathan Richman), from the LP Modern Lovers by The Modern Lovers, 1976 (released on Rhino in 1986). Click here for mp3. | Crash course in modernist painting. Katie's "non-representational ekphrasis" of Bonnard's Siesta. And Marshall's. And Natalie's. Identifying with the painted, identifying with the painter. In what "tense" is a painting? Fabric and flesh; the rumpled, the decorative, the little dog. Absent presence: the space where the lover lay? Bonnard and Fragonard. A painting we know how to look at, though the connotations are slyly illicit. • Applying Stein's strategies—the gerund ("-ing") and the continuous present; restricted lexical sets; punning—to the painted canvas. • Some pervasive binaries: subject-object, painter-painted, gazing-gazed at, active-passive, masculine-feminine. • All unsettled by Stein one way or another. • Renaissance codes of representation. The illusion of depth and the control of perspective. The articulated, singular face. • Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. Another gerund. The Armory Show and the debut of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring. Duchamp's genders: Rose Sélavy. The naked and the nude (John Berger). The human and the machine. The multiplication of planes and perspectives. Secularism in art: doing without the hypothesis of god as guarantor of meaning. • Abstraction and "primitive" representations. The mask and the face. The restricted palette (Duchamp's browns, Picasso's grays). Blue as idiot magnet. • Cezanne's "Bathers" and the simultaneous presence of conflicting perspectives (duck-rabbit figure to right of canvas). • In praise of TJ Clark's Farewell to an Idea (on reserve at Fogler: click here, enter "eng 440" in search field). • Matisse, color, and hedonism (The Joy of Life). • Manet's Olympe: the gaze returned. • Stein's automotive poetics. | Looking ahead. Focus for Thursday: "Kora in Hell" (in Williams's Imaginations). For next Tuesday, Zukofsky's "55 Poems," and a reading quiz on Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas next Thursday?

September 2 — Thursday | back to syllabus

Handout: Guillaume Apollinaire's art criticism for 1907. | To get things started: the sentence from the Autobiography that most interested, amused, annoyed you. Or the one most deeply typical. Stein's ideas about punctuation. Contemporary ideas about reforming the "irrational" English language (all more mad than the madness they sought to replace). A Steinian premise shared by many modernist artists: acts are real, living, pluridimensional; nouns are gravestones. • Identifying with Toklas: the bewildered newcomer. • A word on métier and Stein's disapproval for Picasso's poetry. • Audiotext of Stein reading another excerpt from The Making of Americans and "Idem The Same" (475). Trying to imitate her voice. Lexis and rhythm and syntax. Stein's use of function words, especially deictics (or "shifters"). Stance toward the "little words" shared also by Williams and Zukofsky. The commonness of Stein's lexis: no word you haven't known since you were five, but combined in defamiliarizing ways. Hence the mocking label "The Mother Goose of Montparnasse." • "You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely" (477). Sappho on a similar theme: click here for various translations of fragment 31, "phainetai moi." The State's investment in the reproductive heterosexual couple. Stein's disinterest in same. Does desire circulate differently when subject and object share a gender? • The graphic component of written texts: Apollinaire's calligrammes ("il pleut" and others). And the sonic component of spoken ones, including sound poetry. Shift from paint/words as means of representation (mimesis) to compositional materials interesting in and of themselves. • Quick mention of WCW's "The Wanderer: A Rococo Study" (3-12; and here's a definition of rococo). More important for themes that will recur in later texts than for somewhat clunky composition. | Non-representational Ekphrasis Assignment: Compose a "word portrait" of one of the paintings found here. Your goal is to create a verbal equivalent of the painting, not a literal description. Target length is three hundred words, all of which should fit on one printed sheet of standard-sized paper. Due as an e-mail (or attached file if the formatting is complex) by noon on Tuesday; bring hardcopy to class.

August 30 — Tuesday

Introduction to course. Circulation of syllabus. • Getting to know one another. Pop culture likes and dislikes: films, music, annoying celebrities, the Olympics, etc. Björk's "Oceania" video (click in the banner to the right of "magz04"; opens in QuickTime). • The staggered loop structure of our semester's reading: Stein, born 1874, Williams, born 1883, Zukofsky, born 1904. A Steinian theme: the ugliness and difficulty of first making and the ease of afterwards inheriting. Modernism into postmodernism. Have we ever been modern? (Probably not.) 1922/1923 as watershed: Zangezi, Ulysses, The Waste Land, Spring & All, Cane, etc. • Audiotext of Gertrude Stein reading an excerpt from The Making of Americans. First impressions: her use of repetition (and her disbelief that repetition exists), the emphasis on "the little words," a certain boastfulness ("and it is very interesting"). The James family: Henry, Alice, and William. Stein's teacher Williams James, psychologist and pragmatist. Truth inheres in actual practice. Stein's medical studies. Her project to describe everyone who was living, had been living, or ever would be living. And her realization that this would be impossible (which didn't stop her from continuing with the book). Analogy to other monuments to boredom, such as Andy Warhol's Sleep (more here). • A question to keep in mind while reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: Where is Gertrude Stein in this text? And how is the lesbian couple presented (or not presented). Anecdote concerning the many readers who "never notice" that they are reading about two lesbians. | Resources: brief biography of Stein. The World of Gertrude Stein website.

Assistant Professor Steve Evans • 215 Neville Hall • 581-3809 • "Steven Evans" on FC • OH Tuesdays 3:30-5pm