Modern/Postmodern American Poetry - Spring 2005 - Prof. Steve Evans

After Patriarchal Poetry? Feminism, Gender, and the Avant-Garde in 20th-Century American Poetry & Poetics

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adamson, Walter L. "Futurism, Mass Culture, and Women: The Reshaping of the Artistic Vocation, 1909-1920." Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997): 89-114. Annotated by Taryn Norman.

Adamson outlines the aims for his article clearly in his introduction and proceeds to explore each of these under section headings. He argues his aims are "to clarify" the relationship of Futurism to modernism and mass culture, to explore how this interplays with our understanding of Futurism and gender, and finally, examine how F.T. Marinetti and fellow Futurists' art interacted with the mass market (90).

The article is careful to draw distinctions between the movements with which Adamson is concerned with – modernism, avant-garde and Futurism – thereby engaging this subject in a manner accessible to even the uninformed reader. He argues that whilst modernism "is committed to the autonomy of art…the avant-gardes are concerned with the aestheticization of life…drawing on mass-cultural elements" (90-91). Futurists intertwine themselves between these two concepts through their insistence on artistic autonomy which is centered in mass culture. Adamson offers the example of what he views as Marinetti's awareness that he need to cultivate a marketable public image, whilst not allowing his art to be reduced purely to its marketable value. Adamson argues that what Futurist's really desired was to "have matters both ways" (93-94) – a place and a market for their art, but one that was not considered to be "the arbiter of taste" (93) or that would prevent their art from critiquing bourgeois culture. Essentially, Futurists desired to redefine art and the artist within a consumer market they would control. Marinetti's attempt at this was in his move to "raise kitsch to art or, perhaps more accurately, to blend kitsch and art" so that both the artist and the consumer market would be satisfied (95).

Fundamental to Adamson's article is his exploration of the apparently contradictory relationship between Futurism and women. Futurism is associated with the masculine through its condolence of Fascism, yet it was a popular artistic form for women. Adamson states that this relationship is only traditionally considered contradictory due to a lack of critical attention that has persistently reduced Futurism's relationship to Fascism as telling of its misogyny. Through the example, again of Marinetti, Adamson challenges this claim by highlighting Marinetti's support of female emancipation. In a statement that is familiar to Mina Loy's words in Feminist Manifesto, Marinetti argues, in Mafarka le futurists, that he "want[s] to conquer the tyranny of love, the obsession with the unique woman, the romantic moonshine that baths the façade of the bordello" (103). Futurism's relationship with mass culture (typically "gendered as feminine") allowed for the opportunity to move the traditionally defined female away from sentimentalist connotations (89).

Although Adamson concludes by recognizing Futurism's failure to "reinvent mass culture in its own image and dominate it," he does pay credit to the mark it has left on modern culture. Marinetti's personal aim to redefine art and the artist was achieved, in Adamson's opinion, by its inclusion of women and subsequent validation of the worth of the female artist.

Blair, Sara. “Home Truths: Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant-Garde.” American Literary History 12.3 (2000 Fall): 417-37. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

De la part de qui venez-vous?

In her essay, “Home Truths: Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant-Garde,” Sara Blair attempts to explain how the physicality of space, particularly 27 Rue de Fleurus, influenced not only Stein’s work “If You Had Three Husbands,” but also the avant-garde or modernist movement as a whole. Blair posits that because 27 Rue de Fleurus was both a private, domestic space and a highly-social public space, a mecca where artists, bohemians, writers, friends and strangers gathered to exchange ideas or view art, the place itself should be considered a modernist object in which the avant-garde movement was, literally, given room to take shape.

The argument unfolds in three parts. First, Blair explores what it means to write “to” the imaginative and social space in which the act of writing or literary production takes place. She notes that Stein’s key insight as manifested in “Three Husbands” is the idea that the “sociotemporality of home,” or “bourgeois domesticity,” in both the private and public sense, is inherently linked to consumer culture, production, marketing and display. Second, Blair questions how to read the particularities and uniqueness of 27 Rue de Fleurus as a social forum in relation to other spaces of avant-garde cultural production, and in turn, how Stein participates in the revitalization or revision of “the salon.” In this way, Blair relates how Stein’s “Three Husbands,” “insists on the space of domestic modernity, where tissues of association, desire, and social promise swirl and coalesce,” thus blurring the distinctions between consumption and production or “domesticity and the public world of culture making.” Blair concludes her argument likening 27 Rue de Fleurus and Stein’s “Three Husbands” to the larger, cultural circuits of production and reception by critiquing the journal Broom, which the work was first published. Blair insinuates that both Stein’s writing and the intensions of the publication Broom itself strove to imagine the home as a place constantly reinvented and made new, creating a distinctive “site of experience” which allowed the avant-garde movement to flourish.

Although Blair’s article focuses specifically on 27 Rue de Fleurus, its subsequent relation to Stein’s “If You Had Three Husbands,” and the modernist movement overall, the article can be useful to those wishing to better understand how the geography and social significance of any place influences the production of cultural artifacts. I found Blair’s analysis intriguing, especially the idea that 27 Rue de Fleurus was, essentially, a private space in which public consumption was made visible, thereby creating a domestic space that not only nurtured social networking and exchange, but also marketing and consumerism. One could extend Blair’s argument into her/his thinking of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, if one wanted to further explore the significance of 27 Rue de Fleurus as both social and private space, or if one wanted to trace the possibility of The Autobiography as an advertisement for 27 Rue de Fleurus, Stein, her contemporaries and the whole of the avant-garde movement.

Blau, Amy. “The Artist in Word and Image in Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36: 2 (2003 June):129-44. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Self As Artist As Self

Amy Blau’s essay entitled, “The Artist in Word and Image in Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits,” explores how Stein constructs herself, as author, into the narrative of her livres d’artise, or literary portraits, to create a sense of immediate present in which she is both the observer and creator. In this way, Stein’s “Dix Portraits,” a collection of ten literary portraits and ten illustrations, including portraits by Stein and self-portraits by some of Stein’s subjects, not only calls attention to the presence of her subject as she “experiences” him, but also to Stein’s own process of understanding, writing and experiencing. Blau does note that Stein’s “Dix Portraits,” an interdisciplinary relation of the portrait in text and image, and Stein’s own self-presentation within her livres d’artise, has received little critical attention.

Blau unfolds her thoughts mainly through a critical analysis of Stein’s, “If I told him / a completed portrait of Picasso,” “Kristians Tonny,” and “More Grammar Genia Berman.” Yet underlying Blair’s critique is the notion that both the visual and literary portraits are self-referential in some way, and thereby call attention to the artistic process of creation and the artist’s role in his/her own process of understanding. In Stein’s portrait of Picasso, Blau reveals that Stein intentionally meant to assert herself as Picasso’s creative equal—that both Stein and Picasso were geniuses of the same caliber, able to bring meaning to matter, although working in different artist mediums—in order to position herself within her own writing of Picasso. Stein explores a different set of ideas in “Kristians Tommy.” As Blau relates, both in Stein’s literary portrait of Tonny and Tonny’s own self portrait, the subject is de-centered and fragmented thereby eliminating the notion of a main figure or subject altogether. Stein’s portrait of Berman, Blau surmises, investigates the difficult relationship between words and image. By this Blau means to assert Stein’s understanding that some things cannot be created in words.

This article is very insightful and quite a pleasure to read, as Blau attempts to correlate both the visual and literary art movements to create an interdisciplinary dialogue. Though Blau centers her discussion on Stein’s work, “Dix Portraits,” the essay would be useful to anyone wishing to explore aspects of Stein’s genius, such as her narrative technique, her connection to visual imagery or her role as facilitator to an inter-arts dialogue. The article would also help those wishing to further understand or research Stein’s relationships to Picasso, Genia Berman and Kristians Tonny, not to mention Stein’s own image of herself as a writer.

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiographies.” Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (1978): 81-93. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

Bloom endeavors to explain the presentation of Gertrude Stein through Stein’s writing of Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. The article explains some of the narrative consequences that result from telling one’s life story through the filter of another person in a non-fiction text. Bloom’s work would be useful to anyone interested in point of view in Stein’s writing or, more generally, in issues of narrative perspective in modern literature.

Bloom argues that there are three primary ways in which Stein’s point of view works in The Autobiography. Stein’s narration of Toklas’s perception of Stein effects an illusory minimalization of Stein’s ego. Since Stein uses Toklas “vantriloquistically,” as Bloom would say, Stein is free to control what Toklas would say about her; thus, Stein can present herself exactly as she wants, simultaneously satisfying her ego and making her role in her presentation appear nonexistent. This displacement of the narrator’s ego marks a change from traditional autobiography, where ego is very overt—after all, the subject normally discourses on him or herself for the length of the text. According to Bloom, Stein’s ego is apparently further lessened, perhaps surprisingly, by Stein’s use of her full name where the pronoun “I” would normally appear in a standard autobiography. While the reader is inundated by the appearance of the name “Gertrude Stein,” the use of Stein’s full name objectifies her, thereby distancing her from the side of narration in the work.

The second significant result of Stein’s use of Toklas’s perspective, according to Bloom, is that we see Toklas apparently “interpreting” Stein. This interpretation is how countless of Stein’s value judgments, mindsets, and opinions make their way into The Autobiography. Since it is ostensibly Toklas interpreting Stein in the text, the reader is not alienated by the dominating presence of the autobiographical subject and feels able to accept Toklas’s perspectives.

The third major effect of the unique point of view in The Autobiography is the multi-faceted objectification of Stein. Were Stein writing her own autobiography, she could not be as selective with events in her life and as deliberately unimpassioned about certain experiences as she can by narrating through Toklas. Typical autobiographers are compelled, for a variety of reasons, to share issues with the reader that they may rather not share, but Stein can avoids autobiographical convention because she doesn’t establish a genre-based contract with the reader. We can assume that Toklas doesn’t know Stein as well as Stein knows herself, so we don’t question the fact that there are generalizations made about Stein at times—these vague spots, though, are where Stein skirts certain issues.
Bloom’s very readable article provides a rich starting point for the scholar considering questions of narrativity in Stein’s work. While Bloom focuses on the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she also mentions Stein’s other autobiographies and the similarities and differences among them. Bloom’s discussion does not feel like it resolves any textual questions, but it does offer an accessible means of approaching The Autobiography.

Castronuovo, Antonio. “Rrose Selavy and the Erotic Gnosis.” Tout-fait 2.5 (April 2003).
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/castronuovo/castronuovo.html. Annotated by Christopher Fritton.

Castronuovo begins the article with a short chronology of works by Marcel Duchamp that (at the direction of the artist) were attributed to Rrose Selavy. Anemic Cinema is the most important of these pieces; it is a series of nine black disks inscribed with spiralling white words. These disks were filmed by Man Ray as they spun – the phrases of Rrose Selavy came to life in a sensual pirouette, one that included bon-mots, senseless phrases that were constructed to sound peculiarly suggestive and explicit. Castronuovo goes on to give a thorough account of the origins of Rrose, even pinpointing the moment in 1920 when Duchamp signed a Picabia painting as the instant “Rose” was transformed into “Rrose.” Initially, the transformation is seen simply as the addition of another “I,” a femalian artist that would facilitate a different mode of production, a counterpart to Duchamp’s masculine sensibilities. It plays with the notion that a linguistic shift could cause a modal shift, but the result Castronuovo notices is quite different. For Duchamp, the creation of Rrose was “a safety net” allowing him to “pass through all mirrors,” however, the shift that took place in the perspective of the observer revealed that “only woman can make herself understood without recourse to meaning, as in Rrose’s aphorisms.” Rrose was allowed freedoms that Duchamp may not have been – but they weren’t freedoms that transformed production, they were freedoms that allowed art to escape the scrutiny inherent in consumption.
There is a paradox, however, in Rrose, and it issues from androgyny. Her phrases, bon-mots especially, are impregnable, but she is not. Meaning can germinate within her language, but not within her. So she provides linguistic possibility but reproductive sterility. Castronuovo regards this sterility disparagingly, because Duchamp feared repetition – if Rrose’s phrases are impregnable, but she, as a mode of production is sterile, she is doomed to repeat herself, reproduce herself linguistically. Duchamp reportedly quit painting for this very reason, “when he was questioned about it, he always replied in the same way.” It must be noted that this sterility is not the same sterility envisioned by Leotard in his essay Acinema, “a simple sterile difference in an audiovisual field” (Lyotard 170). This a necessary sterility, the kind that makes all visual contrast possible, therefore, all vision. Castronuovo continues on, comparing the “sterile celibacy of Rrose’s sayings” with Giordano Bruno (to no avail). Finally, Duchamp’s choice to remain sterile is recognized by Castronuovo as a free choice, “he elects to be sterile and leaves the multiplication of nothing to be performed by the fertile…others.”

Castronuovo concludes the article by introducing the notion of gnostic optics, or optical gnosticism, and then tries to expand this into the concept of erotic gnosis, or erotic gnosticism. Beyond catch phrases, these ideas are given a superficial glossing which is heightened by Castronuovo’s constant references to the phrases of Rrose Selavy, because throughout the course of the article he doesn’t provide a single example.

This article would be particularly useful for those interested in theories of reproduction, sterility, androgyny, and how they relate to cultural production. It is often digressive and the argumentation and analysis are insubstantial, but in its defense it incorporates interesting bits of anecdotal history that can be useful as a springboard for further discussion.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1980. 245-264. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

In this manifesto, Cixous implores women to write. The essay demands attention because of its sincerity, because it is concerned only with writing’s role in feminism and suggesting that through writing, women can erode some of the world’s most enduring and complicated patriarchal systems. Cixous aligns herself in this essay with “radical” French feminism, in the sense that she is committed to a socialist project of working out feminist problems from a theoretical standpoint. Her work is both provocative and exciting to read, but it is conceivable that the reader unfamiliar with the history of French feminism would resist the essay’s bold commands and often intangible theoretical arguments.
Cixous argues that women’s writing has historically been done in private. Women have written for themselves only to “take the edge off,” just as one would masturbate to release tension, she asserts. Cixous feels that woman must write woman and man should write man (247). She is adamant that women writers have been repressed by male political economies, indicating that woman has never been able to truly express herself, and women’s writing has been “marked” by this systematic repression. Cixous admits that some men have, in good faith, tried to represent non-repressed woman in writing, but these efforts have failed because non-repressed woman cannot exist in actual social systems; thus it happens that Cixous makes the following fragmented argument: “Only the poets—not the novelists, allies of representationalism” (250). She continues by stating that poetry works through the unconscious, where the repressed can survive. Here we understand that if woman begins to write herself—her body—into existence, she will end her repression and supplant established pallocentric symbolic systems.

While Cixous is quick to reveal a variety of problems with the patriarchal tradition of writing, her argument doesn’t always seem fully developed, which suggests a sense of impulsiveness in her work. We see this, for example, when she asserts that “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing” but concedes that feminine writing will always be characterized by circumnavigation of phallocentric linguistic systems (253). We learn that Cixous wants to abandon conventional syntax because it’s a male creation—so if this happens, feminine writing is occurring. This argument denies the possibility of a male who discards syntax, but Cixous would likely argue that when a woman breaks syntax, she is writing with her body, and if a male breaks syntax, he is still working with his phallus, simply reorienting language and creating new boundaries with his penis, or “centralized body” (259).
As she approaches the end of her essay, Cixous becomes explicitly dialogical, and it is increasingly evident that her writing performs the very type of syntactic breach she champions. For example, Cixous starts each paragraph—each micro-argument, really—almost in medias res. Stylistically, this technique brings a sense of urgency to both the work and the cause for which Cixous is writing.

Dunn, Susan E. “Fashion Victims: Mina Loy’s Travesties.” Stanford Humanities Review 7.1 (1999): 101-17. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Mina Loy’s Fashion Poems

Dunn’s essay presents close readings of Mina Loy’s poems tiled, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-1925), “Mass Production on 14th Street” (1942), “On Third Avenue” (1942), and “Chiffon Velours” (1947) as each relates to the industrial world of fashion and the concept of “travesty” or the “parodic imitation of disguise” (a recurring theme in Loy’s work). Loy believed fashion was a medium that could be used to cross boundaries, not just of gender but of aesthetics and was thus an important aspect of her work (101). Building on Duchamp’s idea of the “ready-made” both in her poetry and personal aesthetic, Loy designed her own articles of clothing and accessories—which suggested incongruity, deceit therefore travesty—the most famous being an earring fashioned from a store-bought thermometer.

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

In this poem, Dunn suggests that Loy uses fashion to explore the ways in which subjects can be hemmed in by cultural patterns of femininity, masculinity, and bourgeois gentility (102). Loy posits that one dresses in a particular way to assume an identity formed by the culture at large. Therefore, the fashion industry uses the human body to construct “useful” subject positions as one must literally “purchase” the identity she or he wishes to assimilate; clothing becomes an economy of desire (103). The body is clothed in such as way as to disguise itself; thus, the body is a part of fashion’s constructions (102-3).

Mass Production on 14th Street

Dunn describes this poem as focusing on commodities and the shoppers who are lured into consumption by department store window displays. Loy uses the city as metaphor for the Garden of Eden, with items appearing in window displays akin to Eve’s forbidden fruit subsequently leading women into temptation and robotic dispositions. Juxtaposing industrialization and nature in this way, Loy is able to make a clear distinction between “the worker” and the “resulting product.” However, the “window-shoppers” in Loy’s poem look but do not buy anything; therefore, inhabiting the city, for Loy, is less about avoidance (non-consumption) than it is about how to become an effective consumer. Thus, one must take in all aspects of the economy (107); one must be aware of the patriarchal structures of the fashion industry—sweat-shop labor—while also being abreast of the latest creations from designers (107).

On Third Avenue

Loy’s “On Third Avenue” is an elegy divided into two parts and examines the salvages of the garment industry, what was left over or otherwise discarded (107). She depicts Third Avenue as an “inferno of neon red light and walking dead (108),” insinuating that the garment district has turned into a wasteland of sorts, and thus she uses it as a metaphor for anti-productivity (108).

Chiffon Velours

Dunn writes, “Chiffon Velours becomes ones of Loy’s most hopeful poems by presenting the image of an old woman as the symbol of the dynamic interplay between oppression and subversion in fashion (109).” The old woman, dressed in youth, resists her body’s connection to age and death. Loy creates a dialogue between the fashion institution and the body of the aging woman (110). Yet the woman is dressed in garments she made herself from purchased fabric, and in this way she models a “ready-made” creation, thus demonstrating how for Loy fashion can be a tactical maneuver in the practices of everyday life (110).

This article was great to read, although the focus was more on Loy’s use of fashion and the fashion industry in the aforementioned poems rather that how she, herself, utilized clothing to construct her own identity (which, of course would have been juicier). As Dunn’s essay is a close reading of specific Loy poems, it would be useful to anyone wanting to study the particular poems in greater detail. The article would also help anyone wishing to understand how Loy put Duchamp’s concept of the “ready-made” into both her poetic and artistic practice. Perhaps the essay would be enlightening to those who would like to research Mina Loy’s commentary on industrialization, capitalism, and social injustices, especially as pertaining to women and immigrant workers.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Sub Rrosa.” The Pink Guitar. New York: Routledge, 1990. 68-82. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s chapter entitled “Sub Rrosa” from her book The Pink Guitar is a provocative read for an avid fan of Duchamp or anyone interested in an analysis of the viewer/subject relationship or feminist discourse. The structure of the “essay” is nontraditional, and in her “Acknowledgments” section at the beginning of the book, DuPlessis explains that her goal in writing these essays, particularly with consideration to feminist thought, is to make her writing “non-objective, polyvocal... most speculative and most uncontainable, most meditative and most passionate... colloquial and yet intense” (vii). She insists on an experimental medium because a more conventional one would reinforce patriarchal thought. In other words, she utilizes an innovative mode of writing in order to break new ground (like Duchamp).

As a result, the essay reads differently from an orthodox critical essay, yet accomplishes the same goals and includes an added element of poetic, authorial voice. Abandoning conventional syntax, the essay is peppered with fragments, and she poses as many questions as she answers. She also includes pieces of poems between discussions of Duchamp’s piece, weaving her own response to the work in and out of her essay, embracing subjectivity.

The essay itself describes in detail and discusses Duchamp’s installation piece entitled Etant Donne, as seen in the Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum. Briefly said, the piece involves the viewer walking into a dark room off the main gallery and finding a heavy barn door built into the wall (with no hinges) at the end of the room. As the viewer approaches the door, there are two peepholes that look into a diorama comprising of an idyllic scene with a mood lighting, a waterfall, and in the foreground a lump of wax resembling a naked woman holding a lamp with gender icons: one breast, legs open, and a clump of blonde hair. DePlessis contends that in this piece Duchamp defies the park structure of the museum and renegotiates the power dynamic of spectator/voyeur and subject, voyeur because the viewer inevitably feels in violation of privacy.

She also claims that Duchamp challenges our spurious possessiveness of art as the audience because we cannot enter the piece, even through the door frames it. Yet a powerful paradox exists here in that the spectator is both powerful, instinctively objectifying the woman, and powerless, a humiliated Peeping Tom of erotica. Besides covering the multiple cultural and allusive icons that this piece invokes , she focuses on the asymmetrical, curved gash signifying a vulva because it assaults the viewer’s glance immediately. Through a series of questions, opinions, and poems, she asks whether or not a spectator can approach this piece as a female and how a piece can be at once erotic, sacrificial and punitive. Overall, this was a worthwhile piece to read with a novel mix of poetic and analytic response. Although DuPlessis focuses entirely on one piece of artwork, she raises many integral questions relevant to the domains of art and feminist theory.

Dydo, Ulla E. “The Voice of Gertrude Stein.” Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003. 11-22. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Ulla E. Dydo’s chapter entitled “The Voice of Gertrude Stein” from her larger work Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises is an impressive introduction to the complicated language of Stein. Covering some of the most important, basic elements of Stein’s writing, she breaks it down into sections on publication, her use of “naked words,” and both the contextualization and decontextualization of her works.
She starts out showering us with many common questions about Stein’s work, assuming that the reader has had at least nominal exposure to some of it. Immediately she establishes that although most readers have a difficult time fitting Stein into their definitions of genres, Stein saw herself as a poet, playwright and novelist. As a result, Stein challenges our notions of genre as well as grammatical structure. The outrage readers expressed upon reading Stein, blaming her for their incomprehension, bestows us with great insight into our reliance on normative structures cemented over hundreds of years of readership that Stein attempts to shatter with relentless ventures to publish nearly ever piece she ever produced.

Dydo goes on to outline Stein’s project in greater detail. She contends that Stein’s greatest nemesis was writers using words carelessly in the same way without cognizance of their precise meanings, which lead to lack of perception. Stein attacks this lackluster relationship with words with her new compositional form. As Dydo writes, “For her, questioning the forms of perception went with questioning the forms of language” (15). Stein accomplishes this, Dydo explains, through a persistent repetition of words that eventually releases the word from its reference and makes it an entity unto itself. However, Stein did not create a new vocabulary, but rather break down words to launch new grammatical structures, such as “disappoint meant.” By deconstructing words, repeating them, and punning them she refuses to let language settle down and “for Stein, every word is a repository of ideas and unexpected possibilities” (17).

After Stein strips the words down, Dydo maintains, she employs them in dissettling, unfamiliar ways, making and remaking the meanings of words. As a result, Stein erects a new language of democracy, rebelling against the patriarchal, hierarchical, prescriptive form. The focus is on essence rather than detail, leaving out proper names, a testament to our assigning such importance on names. With the intentional absence of details, Dydo states, Stein is not concealing but rather “constructive,” as the composition determines the subject, not the other way around (18). The final point Dydo makes regarding Stein’s writing involves the interesting tension formed as the reader is compelled to both gaze outwardly through her frequent referencing and inwardly at the design with its immediacy in construction.

This chapter reads easily for a novice reader of Stein, and covers many important premises and goals of her writing. It projects her writing through the feminist lens, and covers the significant arenas of grammar, internal/external friction, and compositional form. On the other hand, for a more learned Stein scholar, it would appear far too perfunctory in nature.

Galvin, Mary E. “‘This shows it all’: Gertrude Stein and the Reader’s Role in the Creation of Significance.” Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport: Praeger, 1999. 37-50. Annotated by Kristin Stelmok

After a curt dismissal of outdated “heterosexist” interpretations of Stein’s oeuvre at the beginning of this chapter, Mary Galvin quickly shifts her position to a seemingly paradoxical dismissal of lesbian readings of Stein. The most common of these readings, which interprets Stein’s writing as filled with encrypted messages to her lover, Alice B. Toklas, is, according to Galvin, also the most hostile to Stein’s actual poetic endeavor:

… the major shortcoming of this [the lesbian hermeneutical] method is that it rests on principles that are antithetical not only to Stein’s approach to composition, but also to her articulation of a nonhierarchically based lesbian existence. (39)

Galvin argues that a consideration of Stein’s antihierarchical project would instead suggest that Stein invites the reader into her writing and even into her relationship. Galvin supports her argument in two ways: first, by emphasizing the different ways in which Stein subverts the patriarchal and hierarchical literary traditions, largely through her disobedience to/of grammatical conventions; and second, by using a specific example of Stein’s work to illuminate just how Stein discourages an encoded interpretation and instead encourages an “intersubjectivity” between the reader, the text, and the lesbian couple themselves. It is through this intersubjectivity, Galvin argues, that Stein breaks down the traditionally hierarchical separation between author and reader, thereby creating a truly “democratic” text.

Galvin’s argument begins with her denial that Stein employs any kind of “coding.” Such writing is what the reader expects, as a part of our literary tradition, and, according to Galvin, Stein’s rejection of this structure denies such a hierarchy (which Galvin explains would give the author a “mastery” of the text unavailable to the average reader). Galvin identifies Stein’s abandonment of such literary techniques as linear temporality, complex diction, and dependence on nouns and adjectives, indeed, an abandonment of “representationality” itself as evidence that “Stein also sought to establish a nonhierarchical relation to her readers” (44). In abandoning these overly literate conventions that might alienate the less sophisticated reader, “Stein considered her writing to be accessible to anyone who would listen” (42).

This Galvin proves rather successfully in an examination of what she argues is Stein’s most overtly lesbian poem, “Lifting Belly.” Galvin chooses this, a very public poem about the relationship between Alice and Gertrude to prove that it is not Stein’s intention to alienate her readers from her writing or her relationship (after all, Galvin reminds us that “[i]n her personal life, Stein was not ‘in the closet.’… There is little reason to assume she was closeted in her writing” [42]). Instead, “Lifting Belly,” both in its subject matter and in its decidedly nonhierarchical poetic structure, invites a very democratic reading. “Throughout “Lifting Belly,” Stein is not trying to exclude the reader, but to create a shared linguistic space” (48 – my italics).

This article offers a convincing and well-constructed argument against a complacent of reading of Stein as an unwitting defender of the patriarchical literary tradition. It would be useful to any scholar of the postpatriarchal tradition in postmodernism.

Graham, Theodora R. “ ‘Her Heigh Compleynte’: The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.” Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983. 164–193. Annotated by Kevin Davies.

Graham’s paper is concerned with Williams’s use, in books I and II of Paterson, of letters he received in 1942 and ’43 from the poet Marcia Nardi (1904–1990), the ways in which the original letters differ from Williams’s use of them, and what Williams’s quotations and revisions reveal about his view of women in general and Nardi in particular. The paper’s appearance predates by eleven years the publication of all surviving letters between Williams and Nardi (Elizabeth Murrie O’Neil, ed., The Last Word: Letters between Marcia Nardi and William Carlos Williams, U of Iowa P, 1994); Graham conducted her research in three different archives and interviewed the elderly Nardi.

Graham shows persuasively that both Nardi herself and the use Williams made of her letters were crucially important to Williams’s conception of the poem, and that Williams’s ambivalence to Nardi is similar to his ambivalence to women in general. Additionally, many parts of Nardi’s letters reveal a strong feminist analysis not acknowledged as such. Graham’s close reading of the omissions Williams made of parts of Nardi’s letters shows that these omissions serve to alter the letters’ tone and make it appear that Nardi has a less than sure grasp of reality. The results of Williams’s deletions include: the diminishing of his own involvement with Nardi; significant oversimplification of Nardi’s ideas; and a more whiny and unreasonable cast to the character “Cress” than is evident in the character that emerges from the original letters. Furthermore, what Graham characterizes as the “interesting continuity” of one letter is destroyed by Williams’s editing, which, furthermore, dilutes Nardi’s contrast of male writers’ relative privilege to her own situation. Also, additions to this same letter — “references to sex appeal and the right set” (181) — appear to completely alter the character of the letter writer, tending to “weaken” the character that emerges in his poem; Graham asserts, as well, that this weakening is thematically related to certain aspects of Paterson. In particular, Nardi’s original letters note Williams’s relative social (petit-bourgeois) insulation and highlight his conflicted relation to “bohemia.” Graham also notes that in the same issue of the New Directions Annual in which Nardi’s (Williams-sponsored) poems appear, Williams reviews Anais Nin’s Winter of Artifice, wherein he argues (more than a little incoherently) that there are different subject matters appropriate to men and women due to their differing roles in the reproductive cycle. Graham further argues that despite Williams’s changes to the letters, and despite the greatly differing critical response to his inclusion of them in Paterson, “the final arrangement [. . .] represents one of the most tenuous balances between art and life in modern poetry” (187); the reader is left to infer that this fact alone makes the issue appropriate for further scholarly analysis and debate.

This paper will be of crucial interest to Paterson scholars and to Williams scholars generally, as well as to the tiny tribe of Nardi scholars. Feminist scholars and students of women’s social history might find this a useful introduction to Nardi’s complete letters. Anais Nin scholars might find Graham’s discussion of Williams’s review worth a footnote.

Gregory, Elizabeth. “Figures of Williams’s Modernist Ambivalence: Poetic Lineage and Lesbians in Paterson.” William Carlos Williams Review 21:2 (1995): 37-58. Annotated by Brent Griffin.

In response to a conceived trend in Williams studies crediting him with “an enlightened relativism” in relation to all centralized systems of authority, Gregory attempts to qualify Williams’s challenge specific to gender hierarchies. Arguing Williams’s relativism is both interested and ambivalent, Gregory examines Williams’s Paterson to illuminate the ways in which “his choice of poetic heirs…and the lesbian figures that Williams introduces into the poem serve as representatives of his ambivalence."

After first laying out the claim that Williams’s relativist position grew out of his position as a post-Romantic, an American, and a modern, Gregory moves to argue that his works betrays a commitment to denying the relevance of hierarchies in which the notion of the ‘secondary’ is implicit (i.e. cultural, gender, and aesthetic hierarchies where the secondary is of ‘less value’ than the primary). As the Romantics valued artistic originality, Williams, Gregory argues, moves to an aesthetic of “pointed unoriginality”, explicitly demonstrated by his use of quotations in Paterson; the quotation being both an attempt at rejecting the hierarchy of originality and a revaluing of the secondary. The effort being, Gregory claims, is not Williams’s desire to create a new Williamsian hierarchy but to call an entire set of related hierarchic structures into question.

Despite Williams’s noted effort to “undo” hierarchy, Gregory’s major claim throughout is that Paterson betrays ambivalence in relation to traditional hierarchies and a new system. In other words, in Paterson Gregory claims to detect a reluctance on Williams’s part to abandon the notion of hierarchies particularly as sources of value. Williams was privy to specific pleasures and privileges of certain hierarchies (i.e. as a male within a traditional gender structure, aesthetic aspirations to originality, and cultural identification), and the challenge to hierarchy meant he was faced with a threat “to all that is familiar along with all that offends.” For Gregory, Williams’s ambivalence in relation to changes to traditional hierarchies is most prevalent in his treatment of gender in Paterson.

That Williams moves in Paterson to overturn gender hierarchies by granting a voice to women writers, is nonetheless problematized to the extent that Williams still judges within the traditional framework that views the feminine as secondary. Williams is capable of locating the value of the feminine in the male, but apparently cannot or does not locate the value of the masculine within the female. For Gregory, Paterson’s poetic filiation, namely its representation of a pattern of succession, demonstrating a shift from female heir to male heir (i.e. Nardi to Ginsburg) betrays an ambivalence toward authority (Williams removes all parental models beside himself) and gender dehierarchization—an ambivalence that manifests itself further through the appearance of lesbians in the poem which complicates patterns of sexual relations and inheritance; working, Gregory argues, to balance the “insistent macho stance adopted at other points in the poem.”

While most of Gregory’s article carefully lays out her notion of ambivalence and its manifestations in Williams’s Paterson, her discussion of lesbians as examples of Williams’s ambivalence toward the transformations he proposes is much less clear. Instead, her discussion of lesbian figures points primarily to their significance in challenging traditional gender distinctions—the ambivalence on Williams’s part is hard to locate in her argument. Furthermore, Gregory assumes Dr. Paterson’s position is representative of Williams’s own which certainly demands a bit of skepticism. In the end, Gregory presents a fairly convincing and compelling argument that suggests the difficulty Williams seems to have found with the complications of destroying hierarchical systems and the way a new system would be able to argue for its own value without implying the notion of the secondary. This would be a valuable source to anyone working on a close reading Paterson, or anyone working on exploring the implications behind relativist positions and dehierarchization.

Hopkins, David. “Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity.” Art History 21.3 (1998 September): 303-23. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

_O__IM/MIRROR

The essay entitled, “Men before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity,” examines the ways in which Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray construct and subsequently blur gendered identity in both their respective and collaborative works of art. Hopkins focuses his critique primarily on the ‘readymade’ titled Men Before the Mirror (1934), a book created by Duchamp (and his feminine counter-identity Rrose Sélavy) to showcase Man Ray’s Photographs by Man Ray 1920, as well as short texts crafted by various Dadaist or Surrealist writers such as André Breton and Paul Eluard. However, Hopkins also devotes particular critical attention to certain thematic links of male subjectivity underpinning Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), and his L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) in an attempt to trace how and why Duchamp encodes “gendered reversals” in his artistic practice overall.

The article begins with a Freudian analysis of both Duchamp’s Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. as “bi-gendered” or hermaphroditic works of art, as a way to introduce Hopkins’ larger argument. Hopkins notes that while the urinal, Fountain, clearly addresses “male needs,” it also evokes forms of the Holy Virgin or the female vulva, and in this way “castrates” the object’s masculinity. Hopkins' analysis of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, the Mona Lisa as transvestite, makes reference to a similar idea. Hopkins writes that the L.H.O.O.Q., “characterizes a particular fetishistic/homosexual formation of male-gendered sexual identity vis-à-vis its castrated ‘other’ (femininity) at the Oedipal moment” (306). In this way, Hopkins posits that the idea of the phallus is always present in Duchamp’s works, even if the phallus is not overtly referenced or becomes sublimated by the work of art itself; therefore, Hopkins claims that the notion of male subjectivity underlies Duchamp’s artistic creations and “gendered reversals.”

Building on his earlier claims, Hopkins’ critique of Men Before the Mirror begins with a discussion of “authorial duplicity.” Hopkins states that because Duchamp implicitly blurs the gender of the author of the work—from Duchamp, himself, to Rrose Sélavy—readers are prevented from having a secure position from which to determine the author’s “authority.” It can be inferred, then, that the photographic images and written text presented in the book also encode a similar type of gender reversal, albeit at the “submerged level.” This is most apparent, Hopkins notes, in Man Ray’s photograph of Gertrude Stein—the last photograph in a series of photographs of women—which appears opposite to the written text titled “Men Before the Mirror.” Stein’s photograph is significant in that it is “mannish” and thus initiates the shift from female to male gendered identity in the book. A photograph of Barbette, a female impersonator of the 1920’s, is equally significant in that it initiates the other end of the gender reversal process, this time moving from male to female gendered identity. Hopkins reveals that Duchamp and Man Ray’s play on gender produces a “mirrored effect” in which gender identity becomes altogether reversed and therefore blurred.

This article was complex, but insightful. Hopkins, it appears, utilizes the psychoanalytic method of critique and this works well given his subject matter. Although Hopkins’ thesis anchors itself in the fact that “male subjectivity” pervades Duchamp’s work, the article ends by stating that there may, after all, “be a (kind of) woman in this [Men Before the Mirror] text” (319). What I think he means by this, as made clear in an earlier paragraph, is that the structural order of photographs and text as they appear in Men Before the Mirror favors the female who “secretly possesses the phallus” (319); thus Hopkins’ original claim that “male subjectivity” underpins Duchamp’s work would hold “true.” Hopkins’ makes many side arguments concerning Duchamp’s “rayographs,” his obsession with secondary sex characteristics—as in bodily hair removal and transplantation—and his somewhat tumultuous feelings about Gertrude Stein, which I could not include in my annotation. The article would be useful to anyone interested in further exploring the idea of gender reversal or blurring, Freudian analysis of Duchamp and Man Ray’s works of art, and Duchamp’s use of anonymity—as both artist and author.

Johnson, Bob. “A Whole Synthesis of His Time: Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939.” American Quarterly 54.2 (2002): 179- 215. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Bob Johnson, primarily a historian, gives an overview of the political, social and aesthetic positions of William Carlos Williams during the Depression era. Although predominantly historical in nature, this 36 page article does discuss at some length WCW’s writing as a product in light of his political and cultural ideologies in the context of the Great Depression. The modern artist, Johnson purports, was faced with a new task in the 30s; “having promulgated a rhetoric of aesthetic revolution throughout the 1920s, the modernist moving into the Depression found him or herself being challenged to adapt that rhetoric to the context of economic scarcity and radical politics” (180). Writers were forced by the public and their own to be more overtly political, and as a result Johnson claims that the Depression diversified, rather than dampened, modern art.

Although WCW was clear in his writing practices, such as diction and enjambment choices, he was mostly equivocal in his political and social stances. But this notion buttresses Johnson’s principal thesis, that “[t]his characteristic of William’s work in the 1930s reveals more about American political consciousness and culture during the Depression than can be explained by standing histories of the culture and politics of the period” (181). By outlining many of WCW’s short stories, political and medical articles, poems, and even an operetta, Johnson comphrehensively reveals the eclectic nature of WCW’s social and political responses to the time period, manifested in subjects such as inter-racial consummation, transvestites, homosexuals, and the severely impoverished as well as in techniques such as linguistic, psychological and cultural stream-of-consciousness.

Johnson offers some insightful theories regarding the drastic changes going on at the time, stating that “radical politics shifted the focus of modern art away from ontological alienation and formal innovation and toward the documentation and inscription of a constellation of images that Williams would have termed ‘the low’ (184). Williams and others could not ignore the segmentation and diversity of America at this time of crisis, and Williams found himself often torn between two polarities. Also, Johnson contends, during the Depression the role of the writer/artist was extremely important and this high status served as a rejuvenation for modernist writers, propelling them beyond their threadbare innovations with an incitement of political consciousness and a defamiliarization of language to appear exotic and revelatory.

Johnson details some of WCW political alliances, but also targets the important changes in his writing. Although WCW developed sensibilities for “the low” in life, his intention changed from testing the bourgeois palate to creating a heightened social and political awareness. Concluding on an important note, Johnson maintains that one of the most significant contributions WCW made at this time was his inability to synthesize the American experience, and it is precisely through techniques such as his collages, fragments, juxtapositions, and “constellations of images” that we are able to view the multifarious picture of the time. This article was useful in contextualizing some of WCW’s works, and though history-heavy was quite relevant to the issues of writers at the time. He gives a thorough portrait of a specific time, covering all genres of WCW’s work in the 1930s.

Johnston, Georgia. “Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996): 590-606. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

Johnston’s argument suggests that the reader can relate to The Autobiography in two ways. One possibility is that the reader finds the narrative extending itself beyond the borders traditionally established by autobiography through the exploration of intertextual references. This act leads to reading what Johnston calls “the intimate text.” This event occurs as Stein’s references to other texts and artworks introduce additional narratives, proposing a vast number of narrative combinations that inhibit textual unification. The Autobiography is intimate in the sense that thoroughly considering and ultimately understanding these outside references will yield a reading similar to one that Stein or Toklas would experience; this notion is what sets an intertextual reading of The Autobiography apart from intertextual readings of other works void of personal reference.

Johnston also argues, conversely, that The Autobiography can be read as a “text for strangers,” where intertextuality is not considered and the reader stays within the boundaries of the provided text. The stranger’s text makes the reader “consumed while perceiving him- or herself as controlling the permutations of the unified text” (592). The “stranger” feels that he can locate and understand all possible narrative combinations and reach a unified whole by working with a limited textual economy.
One complicated component of the argument is the presentation of “oedipal reading,” a reading in which, according to Johnston, a subject masters an unknowing object. She says that “In The Autobiography, mastery exists on the level of generic production” (595). It’s unclear, though, whether this is a mastery of the autobiography itself by the reader or rather a mastery of Toklas by Stein, which gives the text its genre.

There is further complication of the oedipal reading concept when Johnston presents the possibility of a “male text,” or a work that “binds, masters, delays, services, and discharges,” against the oedipal text that finds resolution through “a return to origin.” The relationship of the oedipal text to the male text is unclear; it is difficult to determine whether the two types of reading stand in binary opposition to one another or whether these are only two among several gender-oriented reading possibilities. But regardless of this confusion, Johnston explicitly says that an oedipal reading will not yield the intimate text, since the oedipal reading seeks resolution from within the text. Johnson seemingly feels compelled to introduce the oedipal reading possibility to give her propositions credibility, but she only renames her concept of the “reading for strangers.”

Johnston, Georgia. “Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 42:3 (1996 Fall), 590-606. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Johnston’s article explores the operation of “a new economy of reading” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (hereafter cited as AABT), an economy that produces a doubling of reading positions. Stein presents a text that “can be read as if unified and bounded by its textual frame and a text that can be read as if it were the origin of a web of other readings” extending beyond the boundary of AABT (591). Johnston identifies the first type of reading as one in which the reader is a “stranger” and the second position as a more “intimate” one, echoing Stein’s assertion that she writes “for myself and strangers” (AABT 66). The narrative written for strangers conforms to conventional expectations of narrative progression and closure, engaging readers in a linear movement from beginning to end and producing a sense of mastery and coherence. Beyond the boundaries of the narrative-for-strangers, an alternative reading practice emerges through the use of multiple perspectives that “traverse temporal and spatial gaps” (594). Toklas’ narratives move back and forth in time and are continually interrupted/fragmented by digressions and repetition. This digressive mode does not present an account of the formation of the autobiographical subject but focuses on the “effects of that ‘I’” (595). Stein, for example, is presented as “always reading” and as having particular habits and likes (such as walking around Paris). Johnston finds in this narrative presentation of subjective agency an invitation for the reader: “the reader does not need to be formed by this text (as Stein is not formed by this text)…[but] may control the reading” (595).

Presenting Toklas as the author of the text, Stein subverts autobiographical conventions, as well as the traditional separation of subject and object and its promotion of mastery. The narrative strategy of switching/merging “I’s” produces a coupling that is no longer a traditional relationship between separate individuals and proposes a different, more intimate mode of reading: Toklas-as-narrator becomes a “conduit through which readers move from the autobiography to other texts” (596). As she constantly refers to other texts without presenting/including them in her narrative, she invites the reader to read beyond the boundaries of the autobiography. In order to be other than a stranger--to enter into the private, intertextual reading practice that the autobiography both articulates and withholds--the reader needs to go beyond the autobiography itself, to read what Toklas and Stein read, what Stein/“Toklas” writes.

Johnston moves beyond the text to read “Ada” as a doubling of AABT. Through helpful and fairly extensive notes, she connects her article with other critical readings of Stein’s work. Her analysis of Stein’s alternative construction of the narrating subject in AABT intersects the work of Leigh Gilmore and others who focus on the articulation of a lesbian subject position. Like Stein’s, Johnson’s narrative moves involve both “listening” and “telling”: the alternate/intimate reading practice she perceptively presents and enacts is not defined in terms of a text but in terms of an “other, who is loving while telling and listening” (600).

Kern, Robert. "Williams, Brautigan, and the Poetics of Primitivism." Chicago Review 27.1 (1975): 47-57. Annotated by Eric York.

Robert Kern presents an argument for an American aesthetic primitivism that is at odds with the traditional notions of it, and includes Williams with others as participants in a tradition of no tradition. This is the most useful fact for us: the establishment of a distinction between European modernism’s and American modernism’s relation to notions of tradition, the former based on aggressive rebellion and the latter on ignorance or innocence of tradition, and Kern’s placement of Williams’s poetic firmly in the American camp. Less useful is the secondary thrust of the article which focuses on primitivism in American post-modernism and uses Richard Brautigan as a prime example.

Primitivism first appeared in England in the eighteenth century with the ideal of the noble savage and a doctrine which stated that “the best poetry should be natural or instinctive”. (From: Holman, C. Hugh and Harmon, William; A Handbook to Literature: Seventh Edition; Prentice Hall; Upper Saddle River, NJ; 1996; pp 407-8). This led to the fashion of the search for the “inspired peasant” who wrote without the long tutelage of conventions, but straight from the heart.

Different from this, the later, nineteenth century American idea of primitivism was based on moving backward culturally, not simply finding an innocent untouched by tradition. This leads to the highlight of a distinction between cultural primitivism on the one hand, which is a preference for the natural to the artificial, the instinctive to the consciously worked; and chronological primitivism on the other hand, which naively looks back toward a “. . .’Golden Age’ and sees our present sad state as the product of what culture and society have done. . .”. (Handbook, 408.). Though these terms are not mutually exclusive, Robert Kern decidedly puts Williams with the former, cultural primitivists.

Kern argues that for Williams, primitivism formed the foundation of his modernism, indeed, that American modernism and post-modernism are forms of aesthetic primitivism pioneered by Williams. This would become for Williams: “an ignorance, acquired or real, of the history and rules of art, culture and civilization, of manners, conventions and established norms, particularly those associated with Europe.”(Kern, 48). I find it interesting to note here, though Kern does not, that even the idea of primitivism as it came to America from England was changed, a kind of meta-working of the concept upon itself.

In any case, Kern goes on to form an important distinction between American primitivism as innocence or naiveté, and the aggressive and rebellious European avant-gardism of the dadaists and surrealists which attacked history itself. Instead, Kern says, working with Hugh Kenner, American primitivism sought to rewrite whole cloth, “from scratch”, and “homemade. . . its own world in the absence of knowledge of the past”.(Kern, 48). The main thrust of the article, however, seeks to place Williams firmly, along with Whitman and Richard Brautigan, on the American side of things.

Here there is a major gap in Kern’s work, and that is that he fails to make any account of Pound, and Pound’s relation to American primitivism. Instead, Kern focuses on Williams’s In the American Grain as a “literary manifesto in Williams’s campaign as a stay-at-home against the expatriates Pound and Eliot.” Kern goes on to say that: “What Williams finds, like Whitman before him, is that to be an American is an opportunity to be fully modern, and to be modern is not to be in the vanguard of history, but to be permanently at the beginning of history, to be pre-historic. . .”(49).

In this article, there is also a very cogent presentation of “Red Wheelbarrow” as prima facia evidence of primitivism for Williams. It is not just rejection of conventions, but that it is so stripped of literary-ness that it achieves a state of “novelty that will not stale”(52), a particularly modern idea. Let me present the poem: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens” (51).

Kern outlines the basics of this poem’s importance to Williams’s development, and moves on to discuss the poem in terms of its absolute unadorned and unliterary presentation of the central object. He says: “. . . in concentrating so steadily on the absolute presence of things in external reality (to the exclusion of just about everything else a poem might contain), the poem is released from the temporal and spatial limits that a more subjective or self-conscious discourse would impose. It is both particular and unlimited. . .” (52). Thus, Williams’s poetic of a particularly American notion modernism is achieved in the practice that is the poem.

Then Kern moves on into territory that is much less useful to us, though very interesting. He sees this American primitivism taken up by a figure of post-modernism, extended to the extreme in the poetry and prose of Richard Brautigan. What is important to us post-patriarchalists is Williams’s belonging to an American tradition of un-tradition.

Kouidis, Virginia M. "The Female Self.” Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana UP, 1980. 26-48. Annotation by Monica Fauble.

Kouidis begins this article by discussing Futurism’s invocation of Whitman’s interests in science, technology, and progress; she notes that Loy, who also references Whitman, is more interested in Whitman’s statement of the importance of the self and sexuality. This assertion that sexual completion and freedom allows for a fully embodied selfhood is, according to Kouidis, a central theme in Loy’s work.
Kouidis first offers us a reading of the then-unpublished “Feminist Manifesto” highlighting its debt to Futurism but also stating that it differs in its assertion that independence is gained through sexual freedom. She also inverts the most obviously Feminist reading of the Manifesto by stating that Loy’s assertion that women are not equal to men is actually meant to be read in a way that suggests men are superior, “more intellectual, physically braver, and able to bear pain” (28). This conclusion is drawn from Kouidis’ understanding of Loy’s letters, and I am not certain that such is relevant in the context of the Manifesto.

Although Kouidis later asserts that irony is a central feature of Loy’s work, she often provides readings of Loy’s work that fail to take irony into account. In a reading of “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” Kouidis asserts that the men’s ability to “look into things” suggests that the men have an “attainment of selfhood, of ‘infinity’” (32). But, I argue, this poem never suggests that the men in the poem have a more advanced intellect or understanding than the virgins, only that they have more freedom and agency. It seems that Kouidis is here equating agency and selfhood.

The theme of vision comes up again in other readings of Loy’s poems, such as “Magasins du Louvre” (from “Three Moments in Paris”) in which Loy equates the ability to see with selfhood; the virgin eyes in this poem see “nothing,” and thus, says Kouidis, have no hope of independent selfhood. This reading seems more stable, mostly because this poem itself is more emphatic in its statements.
Continuing with the theme of the feminine, Loy uses the image of a door as an image of the entrance to the female body in several poems. Often, the door is “passable” as in “The Effectual Marriage,” but this image of entrance within Loy’s work often represents the unfulfilled. Such disappointment, along with the effects of sexual repression, are central themes in Loy’s work.

Kouidis offers the possibility that Loy was influenced by Henri Bergson’s idea of the self’s need for a combination of intellect and intuition and a desire to merge with the cosmos. Such is especially apparent in “Parturition” and in Loy’s general emphasis on consciousness and also the impact of women’s maternity and reproductive rhythms.

While this article would be useful for anyone interested in Mina Loy’s emphasis on sexuality, I often found Kouidis’ readings of individual poems to be somewhat limited/limiting. Although Kouidis notes Loy’s use of irony several times as a theme within her work, I found that Kouidis’ readings do not always seem to take ambiguity into account.

Kouidis, Virginia. “Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy.” boundary 2 8.3 (1980): 167-188. Annotation by Robin Brox.

Kouidis begins with a brief summation of Mina Loy’s place in modernist American poetry despite her British citizenship. Loy’s publication history is given, but a salient factor of Kouidis’s presentation of Loy is her reliance on male artists to validate Loy’s artistic merits. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams provide an appreciative framework from which one can approach Loy’s poetry; later poets like Kenneth Rexroth and Jerome Rothenberg continue to support Loy’s importance, though it seems dubious to me that her work needs to be viewed through the lens of established patriarchal poets. Despite my misgivings about such a framing device, Kouidis places Loy in the company of elite modernists, stating “Her poetry aligns itself with that of Stein-Pound-Williams to form a ‘counter-poetics’ that by generating postmodern poetry is emerging as the most vital force in twentieth century American poetry” (Kouidis 168). After an introduction reliant on the praise of canonized poets, Kouidis moves on to the bulk of her article, which “attempts to place Mina Loy in her cultural and literary milieu and, most important, to suggest the achievement of her poetry” (168). Kouidis reads chronologically through Loy’s oeuvre, and supplies examples, often in the form of entire poems, to orient the reader by doing close readings. Given that the article was published in 1980, one explanation for this tactic could be its ability to introduce an unfamiliar readership with the writing of Mina Loy; I believe Kouidis’s attentiveness to Loy’s poetry on its own helps her article remain useful twenty five years later.

The author intersperses her criticism of Loy’s poetics with information about her personal life. Kouidis puts herself in the uncomfortable space between New Criticism and a biographical approach to poetry. She cites the influence of art movements like Futurism on Loy’s poetry, and indicates how Loy fit into the modernist landscape of literature. Loy’s early work, according to Kouidis, “was attacking her Victorian heritage which calculated the marriage value of women according to their purity and ignorance, and imprisoned their spiritual vitality in busks as rigid as those which molded and suppressed their bodies. Artistically she was fighting the failure of literature to treat life honestly” (170). Kouidis explains Loy’s poetics in terms of “metaphysical exploration” (172), and engages in a discussion of Loy’s use of the word, “the Bergsonian flux of Being (or consciousness) in language” (174), collage structure, Futurist techniques, and her eventual reliance on “abstract-concrete images that unite intellect and intuition in a clearly crafted moment of vision” (182). Though Loy’s writing up to the Lunar Baedeker is well covered by Kouidis’s careful and useful analysis, the author rather patly dismisses Loy’s later work by stating, “they lack the structural innovations that distinguish her early poetry” (186). I wonder if she does this because no prominent male poet or critic spoke favorable of late Loy; clearly the author’s historical position provides an opportunity for dissatisfaction. Despite her drawbacks, Kouidis writes lucidly about some incredibly difficult poems from Loy’s early works.

Kristeva, Julia. “Préliminaires théoriques,” “Le sujet phénomenologique de l’énonciation.” “La chora sémiotique: ordonnancement des pulsions.” La revolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. 11-30. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Kristeva describes her project as a “theory of signification based on the subject, its formation, and its corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic.” She examines the operations of poetic language in particular works of modern literature (including those of Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Joyce, and Artaud), which constituted a “new phenomenon” in writing, a “spectacular [shattering] of discourse.” By shattering the subject and the ideologies that sustained it, this phenomenon reveals that normalized language is only one way of articulating the interrelationships among the body, social apparatuses, and language itself. This “signifying practice” (signifiance) points to the limits of socially useful discourse and toward the process that exceeds discursive production of the subject: a process of engendering meaning that pervades the body/subject; an unlimited, unbounded operation of drives toward, in and through language and the exchange system. Kristeva points out that these instinctual operations constitute a (signifying) practice “if and only if” they enter into social and linguistic codes of communication (15).

She situates her exploration of this signifying practice in relation to two trends in linguistic research that engage the trans-linguistic “externality” of language. The first relies on Freudian theories of the unconscious and primary processes to present the relation between signifier and signified as motivated (rather than arbitrary), in connection with the operation of the drives. The second trend, represented by Benveniste, introduces a trans-linguistic layer within formalist language theory by positing a subject of enunciation that opens onto the realms of logic, semantics, and intersubjective relationships. Kristeva relates these two theoretical trends to two inseparable modalities within the signifying process, which she defines as “the semiotic” and “the symbolic.”

She connects the semiotic to the signifying modality that Freudian psychoanalysis attributes to the structuring operations of the drives and primary processes. The drives--“energy” charges moving through the body of “one who will later become a subject”--are organized, in the course of the subject’s development, according to social and familial constraints imposed on the body (which is “always already involved in semiosis”). The drives articulate what Kristeva, borrowing the term from Plato, calls a chora: “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (23). Kristeva distinguishes theoretical description of the chora from the operation of the chora itself and notes the fundamental ambiguity of this term, whose preverbal, pre-symbolic functioning, once named, becomes a receptacle for symbolic meaning. She seems to adopt Plato’s coding of the chora as feminine, maternal. The drives in their pre-oedipal semiotic functions connect the body to the body of the mother, which mediates the symbolic order (“established through constraints constituted by biological differences, including sexual differences, and through concrete, historical family structures”). Along with the chora, Kristeva introduces the problematic of how to put this threshold phenomenon into words without ontologizing it. The indeterminate operation of the chora in her theory (as phenomenon/term/“mystery”) participates--potentially--in the grounding error of metaphysics (explored by Heidegger and others), in a fascination with the “feminine” as produced/seen from a perspective that is masculine.

Kristeva’s theoretical categories involve a nuanced, multidimensional account of the biological, linguistic, and socio-historical formation of the subject, which seems well suited to the analysis of avant-garde textual practices. Her presentation of the semiotic chora as a signifying process that is coded as feminine, her focus on the operation of the semiotic in texts written by male authors, and her own practice in writing of avoiding the first-person singular and relying on the gender-neutrality of third-person pronouns and the ambiguously inclusive “we” raise the question of whether the model works as well, or differently, when the subject of enunciation/writing is female. How will this terminology--which, so far, suspends any interrogation of the role of “woman”(-as-mother) in the production of the syntax that assures discursive coherence--work to engage the entry into language of a subject who speaks as a woman?

Kristeva, Julia. “Préliminaires théoriques,” “Le sens hylétique de Husserl: une thèse naturelle commandée par le sujet jugeant,” “Le sens pré-supposé de Hjelmslev,” “Le thétique: rupture et/ou frontière,” “Le miroir et la castration posant le sujet absent du signifiant.” La revolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. 30-49. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

In Part I, Chapters Three through Six, of La revolution du langage poétique, Kristeva locates her definition of the “semiotic” in relation to the work of other theorists (Husserl, Hjemslev, Lacan) and within an overall process of signification that constitutes the subject without reducing it to a transcendental ego and without denying the importance of the “thetic phase” (the separation of the subject from and through its image and its objects) that is the precondition of signification. She begins by distinguishing her project from that of phenomenology and its “linguistic substitutes,” pointing out the usefulness of this recourse to phenomenology for demonstrating “the insurmountable constraint of positing an ego as the single, unique limit that is constitutive of all linguistic acts, as well as all trans-linguistic practices” (40). “Le sens hylétique de Husserl” focuses on two points at which Husserlian phenomenology intersects “current linguistic preoccupations.” One trend in generative grammar regards syntactic competence as the product of an intentional transcendental ego that, as it speaks, simultaneously brackets out everything heterogeneous to its consciousness: the “object” of linguistics is always already intended/apprehended in an operation that posits it as the object of the naming and synthesizing ego. Kristeva notes another moment of Husserlian phenomenology that seems to move away from (syntactic) closure grounded in the intentional subject: the hyle, which (like the Platonic chora) must be grasped through a “difficult reasoning,” which is “lost as soon as it is posited” which is “nothing without this positing” (31). She argues that the hyle is the projection of a positing consciousness, and that the same is true for everything that may appear to be heterogeneous to consciousness, including phenomenological “drives” that belong to the pre-predicative sphere: “within the framework…of the transcendental ego, no heterogeneity in relation to predicative articulation is possible which is not already the projection of the subject’s positionality” (32).

Kristeva works to distinguish her definition of the semiotic (which refers to pre-sign, pre-symbolic signifying operations) from Husserl’s “Meaning” (where the hyle--the “matter” of meaning--is meaningful only to the extent that it “resembles” the intentional) and from the “presupposed” meaning of Hjemslev’s semiotics/glossematics, which similarly posits the existence of a meaning situated beyond the operations of linguistic functions (and thus continues to participate in the “phenomenological universe”). She suggests that we need to look beyond the phenomenological universe, to focus on what the subject produces rather than on the operations of the “I” posited as origin, to ask how the thetic--the positing of the subject--is produced. The perspective she describes would consider the positing of the subject within a signifying process that goes beyond it, shows it as producible, and thus opens the possibility of research into the “semiotic conditions that produce [the subject] while remaining foreign to [it]” (35). The category of the semiotic, she argues, allows us to envisage a heterogeneous functioning within the larger signifying process that embraces it.

In distinguishing the semiotic (the nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their articulations) from a phenomenological signification that is structured as a realm of positions, Kristeva points to the break in the signifying process that structures/produces the positing of signification. She calls this break the “thetic phase” and explains that, “all enunciation, whether it is enunciation of a word or a phrase, is thetic” (41). In Chapter Six, she relies on Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and castration to examine the processes involved in the production of the thetic phase. According to Lacan, the mirror image with which the six-to-eighteen-month-old child identifies becomes the prototype for a world of objects: the positing of an imaged ego permits the positing of objects detached from the semiotic chora, i.e., objects that are separate, signifiable. This positing constitutes the break/cut (coupure) on which signification is established as a “digital system with a double articulation combining discrete elements”(44). Castration completes the process of separation that posits a separate, signifiable subject. The discovery of castration detaches the subject from dependence on the mother, whose “full” body has been the “receptacle and respondent/surety of all demands”: awareness of the “lack”” of castration “makes the phallic…the symbolic function” (45). Thus, as the formation of the thetic phase comes to an end, signification is established in the break (between the specular image and the motility of the drives, between the mother and the demands made upon her)--in what Lacan calls the place of the Other, the place of the signifier. The subject--a wannabe, lacking in the signifier--confers on an “other” the role of maintaining the possibility of signification.

In her critique of the phenomenological subject, Kristeva writes in close proximity to Lacan’s theory, using the concepts and terminology of his description of the subject’s entry into language. Most helpful is her articulation--based on Lacan’s division of the symbolic into signifier and signified--of the production of a “second-degree thetic,” a functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying disposition of language. She calls attention to the heterogeneous functioning of the instinctual semiotic in the position of the signifier and to language as a defensive construction that protects the body from the “attack” of drives by making it the locus of the signifier, the place in which the body can signify itself through positions (47). Poetic “deformations” of the signifying chain can be seen as effects of those drives that the thetic phase was unable to sublate (relever) by linking them as signifier-signified. For the subject firmly positioned through castration, drive attacks against the thetic lead to a second-degree thetic rather than to psychosis. Through textual practice, the subject (and only the subject, for whom the thetic is a position assumed/undergone) can call the thetic into question. It is Kristeva’s focus on this production, on the return of the semiotic in the symbolic position, that allows her to theorize a signifying practice that has a socio-historical dimension, i.e., that is not simply the self-analysis of a subject withdrawn from direct practice. Through her revision of the Lacanian model, Kristeva describes a textual practice that involves social as well as unconscious and subjective relations. However, Kristeva’s rereading of Lacan (unlike Irigaray’s in Ce sexe… and elsewhere) does not question Lacan’s textual practice of inscribing “woman” as the Other who reproduces images of/for the masculine subject. Given her reliance on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva’s theory of signifying practices may be open to further revision when read in relation to the work of women writers who attempt to articulate the intersection of avant-garde textual/linguistic procedures with traditional socio-historical and discursive genderings.

Lénárt-Cheng, Helga. “Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get under Our Skin?” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 34.1 (2003): 117-31. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Helga Lénárt-Cheng considers The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as a self-promotional effort by Gertrude Stein to increase her readership and enhance her literary reputation. HLC describes the “seductive” potential of autobiography in general, as a “convenient means for manipulating pubic opinion,” employing “seemingly innocent marketing strategies” to which readers pay too little attention (117-18). Her examination of Stein’s successful marketing techniques in AABT is limited to a demonstration of the ways in which the autobiography conforms to four rules of good advertising (taken from a 1920 manual on advertising principles). HLC claims that, while critical attention has been paid to the relationship of modernist writers to the marketplace, the role of autobiographical literature in writers’ self-marketing has been overlooked.

She finds numerous examples to support her reading of AABT. Calling attention to the repetition of “Gertrude Stein” (approximately five times per page, more than a thousand times throughout), HLC notes the hypnotic effect of this repetition (rule #4: a good ad is repeated over and over). She seems also to describe a textual process through which Stein’s name is established as a brand or logo, though she doesn’t use these terms. HLC cites name-dropping, repeated references to Stein’s publications and work-in-progress, and the mention of positive responses to Stein’s writing and “genius” as attempts to promote the author and her work. She characterizes these image-enhancing strategies as “indirect,” because the autobiography is written in the third person (rule #3: in a good ad, self-praise is indirect). Regarding Stein’s third-person narrative simply as a clever disguise for asserting her own talents, HLC fails to explore the more complex implications of Stein’s manipulation of generic conventions in AABT.

Her reading seems most limited when she argues that Stein “conceals” her strategies of self-promotion in the text--that her self-advertisement is effective because it’s possible for readers to regard AABT as a gossipy, anecdotal account of the contemporary art scene in Paris rather than a book about Gertrude Stein (rule #1: a good ad conceals its strategy). If Stein’s self-advertising techniques are concealed, they are hidden in plain sight. By focusing only on the pragmatic function of Stein’s narrative strategies, HLC misses the complexity of Stein’s address to her readers. While it’s possible for a reader to enjoy AABT in the way HLC describes, it’s also likely that readers will notice the frequent gestures of self-promotion embedded in the text. The very explicitness of Stein’s “spin”--frequently interrupting the reader’s pleasure in the gossip-narrative--calls attention to his/her position as a literary consumer. This fragmentation of the reader’s locus of identification produces an awareness of different levels of narrative mediation/”packaging” and removes the possibility of any single, “authorized’ approach to reading this text. Finally, the charge of paying too little attention to subtleties of narrative strategy can be leveled at HLC herself. Save your time.

Moore, Patrick. “William Carlos William and the Modernist Attack on Logical Syntax.” ELH 53.4 (1986): 895-916. JSTOR. 30 Jan. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/>. Annotated by Robin Brox.

Moore begins his article with a summation of nineteenth century beliefs surrounding logic and syntax, and he enumerates the attacks, made on philosophical grounds, of the way sentences are constructed. He discusses critiques of the copula, quoting from Bertrand Russell, William James, Ernest Fenollosa, and Alfred Sidgewick. His article proposes that attacks such as these helped William Carlos Williams develop his poetics; according to Moore, he held “attitudes about syntax, logic, the representation of reality, and the dynamic nature of life in some way parallel theirs” (Moore 900). The remainder of the article enumerates five techniques employed by Williams that illustrate the means by which he frees his poetry to reflect the true nature of reality, not by adhering to logic’s use of syntax but by refusing to adhere to grammatical rules which cloud language’s accuracy. The first technique is Williams’s decision to avoid “finite verbs” and use instead “participles in modifying clauses” to “create separate and distinct images;” the second is extensive use of parataxis, which frees grammatical units from syntactic logic; the third is Williams’s frequent use of “copulative verbs, especially ‘to be’” to keep nouns from holding only one meaning; the fourth is Williams’s utilization of exclamations and rhetorical questions “to assert the priority of instinct and feeling over analytic discourse,” and the final technique Moore notes is Williams’s disruption of subject and verb by inserting “dependent phrases and clauses. . . to temporarily suspend closure and meaning” (904-905). Moore illustrates each syntactical device with examples from Williams’s poetry, thus making a clear argument for precisely how Williams is able to subvert traditional logic and syntax to achieve the desired poetic outcome-- “to jam things with significance, but without specifying what exactly the significance is,” leaving that up to a reader’s imagination (909).

Moore deftly shows how these techniques Williams employs allow him to create a representation of reality as it appears to the poet, not as it had been dictated by a logic controlled by grammar. According to Moore, Williams’s “syntax suspended the linear unwinding of time in poetry and helped to break the hold of logical syntax on modern verse” (914). The value of this article lies in its copious examples from Williams’s poetry, since each of the five means by which he liberated language from the confines of formal grammatical construction are explored in detail. It is especially delightful that Moore includes Williams’s praise of Gertrude Stein for “‘tackling the fracture of stupidities bound in our thoughtless phrases, in our calcified grammatical constructions and in the subtle brainlessness of our meter and favorite prose rhythms--which compel words to follow certain others without precision or thought’” (901). Through the examples and thoughtful analysis Moore provides throughout his article Williams’s preoccupation with liberating the language of poetry from the stultifying limits imposed by rules of logic and syntax; Williams espouses the poet’s ability to write outside his confines, since within one “‘there burns a fiery light, too fiery for logical statement’” (901).

Ngai, Sianne. “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 10:2 (2000). Annotated by Brent Griffin.

Article URL http://muse.jhu.edu.prxy4.ursus.maine.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.2ngai.html

In Ngai’s article the work of Gertrude Stein, particularly The Making of Americans, marks a unique literary innovation committed to challenging readers’ “capacity for response” (4). The use of repetition and “long strings” (2) of words combine to defy syntactical and grammatical conventions, and Stein’s work ultimately problematizes a reader’s sense of sense. Confronted by these specific challenges, Ngai argues that readers become “temporarily immobilized” (4), victims of a ‘hermeneutic stupor’ that leaves them either bored or shocked. According to Ngai, this effect was not only deliberate, but it betrays a commitment on Stein’s part to illuminate the ways in which “astonishment [shock] and fatigue [boredom]…come to organize and inform a particular relationship between subjects and language” (4). And, it is this same interest that Ngai argues can be found to occupy the work of Beckett, West, and Poe, along with such contemporary poets and visual artists as Dan Farrell, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Ann Hamilton.

Ngai refers to this kind of aesthetic experience as the ‘stuplime’ (12), in which boredom and astonishment “[are] paradoxically united” (12), where the aesthetic overpowers the observer. For her, the stuplime allows for a new way of “theorizing the negatively affective relationship to stupefying objects previously designated by the older aesthetic notion of the sublime” (12). While notions of the sublime work to elicit a sense of astonishment or awe in the observer through a confrontation with the infinity or limitlessness of concepts, the stuplime “points to the limits of our representational capabilities…through a no less exhaustive confrontation with the discrete and finite in repetition” (12). Furthermore, Ngai argues the sublime has the potential to invoke terror in the observer. As the observer of the sublime becomes forced to surrender to the limitations of one’s “conceptual apparatus” (13), the temporal and emotional consequences become extreme excitement and terror. The sublime becomes an experience of defeat and surrender, according to Ngai, with no encouragement to the observer to attempt to “formulate reformulate new tactics for reading” (13). The stuplime, on the other hand, includes a “series of comic fatigues” (13) that unlike the single, immobilizing blow one sustains from the sublime, forces the reader to continue on in an attempt to ‘read’ the object (13). And, she continues her article by examining a series of contemporary productions that invoke fatigue and astonishment--positing the stuplime as capable of opening up an avenue for critical agency.

While this presents an interesting argument for distinguishing between two aesthetic experiences, certainly a bit of skepticism is called for at this point; especially if one is familiar with Fredric Jameson’s work on utopian politics and the utopian impulse. For Jameson, the utility of a utopian project is that it confronts its reader with the limits of his or her own conceptions. The challenge becomes one of interrogating those limitations in the effort to surmount them. The important point being that an abrupt confrontation with one’s own conceptual limitations does not necessarily immobilize the individual. In fact, as Jameson argues, it is only by this kind of specific confrontation can any formulations and reformulations of ‘reading’ occur. For Ngai, the conceptual limitations one experiences from viewing the sublime and the stuplime are different—the stuplime encourages new tactics of reading while the sublime terrorizes the observer into a hermeneutic stasis. And while Ngai would probably not refer to a utopian text as sublime, or stuplime for that matter, Jameson’s work perhaps cautions us from adopting too quickly the notion that certain confrontations with our conceptual limitations are somehow less conducive to hermeneutic interrogation.

In the end, however, Ngai’s article is quite useful for anyone who has ever felt after reading Stein’s The Making of Americans or Beckett’s How It Is, for example, exhausted, tired, or just downright bored. For gleaning an understanding of the terms necessary to confront such works, her article is as equally useful.

Peppis, Paul. “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes and Sexology.” Modernism/modernity 9.4 (November 2002): 561-579. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

In his article “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes and Sexology,” Paul Peppis contends that Loy and Stopes do what their feminist contemporaries do not: merge lyrical and scientific language to create a new language of sexuality. Peppis begins by acknowledging the fundamental problem of writing about gender and sexuality with the only available discourse being sexist, and then later illustrates how Loy and Stopes circumvent this paradox. He also contextualizes their writings by describing the polarization of the Women’s Movement at this time -- at one extreme the social purists calling for abstinence, at the other the free-love liberators. His interest lies in how both of these writers collapse this dichotomy using language as the vehicle. For the purposes of our class, I will focus my annotation on the larger Mina Loy section.

Peppin claims that Loy “develop[s] new idioms of female experience by adapting established vocabularies, conjoining in different ways scientific and literary language” (504) and “unite[s] antagonistic, and differently gendered, vocabularies of sentimental love and rationalist science” (506). Although he touches upon the eugenics and free love of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and poem “Parturition,” his main thesis relies on The Love Songs of Joannes which he argues as a later work does a more sophisticated job of expressing the limitations of attempting to metamorphose sexual relations through language. In all of these works, he argues, Loy parallels her advocacy of sexual liberation with the demand for superior female creativity to be realized. But while the two earlier works presents a sanguine attitude toward the possibility of “free love maternalism,” Love Songs points out the failures.
In his analysis of Love Songs, Peppin focuses on the lack or abnormality of offspring created in free-love sexual unions. Either the offspring is “a butterfly/ With the daily news/ Printed in blood on its wings” (Lunar, 54) or “NOTHING/ There was a man and a woman” (LB, 64). According to Peppin, what is also revolutionary about Love Songs is its unwillingness to allow for marriage between a scientific and sentimental depiction of sex. Instead they continually insist on “opposing and undermining each other, enacting formally the unrealizability of union between lovers and languages” employing the literary techniques of “fragmentation, collage, jarring juxtaposition” portraying sex as “discordant, contradictory, ugly” (574). Although this analysis contradicts his initial premise of Loy merging the two arenas, the point is a significant one.

In his conclusion he purports that the importance of Love Songs resides not in its eloquent diction or even radical feminist stance, but rather in its success at tilling a new terrain of thought. Love Songs “remains suspended between free love and social purity, literature and science, sentimentalism and modernism.” Loy neither chooses a side nor attempts to conciliate the polarities, but instead offers her readership something entirely new: an intricate juxtaposing of these extremes to “forge new relations between these allegedly incompatible disciplines” (575). When we consider what a male-dominated domain science was at this time (and still is), we can appreciate the boldness of Loy’s writing and the compelling questions and restiveness she exposes with her writing. This article offered insight into Loy’s singular projects of motherhood and sexuality.

Peppis, Paul. “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology.” Modernism/Modernity 9.4 (2002): 561-79. Annotated by Brent Griffin.

Peppis traces the work of “popular science” author Marie Stopes and the avant-garde poetry of Mina Loy as central in the debate around the new science of ‘sexology’—a debate that preoccupied both the English and American public at the turn of the twentieth-century. As this new science attempted to ‘establish’ a discourse on male and female sexuality, Stopes and Loy took active roles in the debate around it, and regarded language “as the scene and material of conceptual change”—a medium, or mechanism, that “enables and constrains reform” (562). Stopes and Loy, Peppis argues, recognized the “inherent sexism” (562) embedded within the available discourses being used to discuss sex and gender and sought to illuminate such limitations. What they were up against, Peppis continues, were essentially two opposing arguments concerning female sexuality—social purity and free love. Social purists felt that women had transcended the stereotypical ‘baser’ natures of femininity. Women had been successful at abandoning their ‘animal instincts’ which were bent on fulfilling sexual desires in favor for a more ‘civilized’, socially pure existence. For many women, this notion was unacceptable, believing that it led to a denial and repression of female sexual desire and advocated instead for a ‘free love’, or free sexual unions. For Stopes and Loy, Peppis claims, both positions were inadequate at representing female sexuality and sought, instead, to merge both arguments. Recognizing that both positions deployed radically different, gendered vocabularies (social purity relied on notions of rationalist science, while free love arguments relied on notions of sentimentality), the two women worked to unite the two vocabularies in the effort to “develop new idioms of female sexual experience”, the goal being a liberation of “sexual language” (564). Offering a careful analysis of Stopes’s Married Love and Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes, Peppis elucidates both authors’ belief in the intimate connection that discourses on sex have with “lexicons of science and literature, intellect and sentiment” (563). In Stopes’s Married Love, Peppis suggests her attempt to “fashion a language of female sexuality out of the gendered discourses at hand” (568), relying heavily on the lexicons of sex science. Loy’s Love Songs, on the other hand, offers a unique perspective that details the limitations of such attempts, even the efforts of Stopes’s which some claim ultimately reinforces the heteronormative ideals and institutions of British patriarchy (568). Loy, Peppis claims, achieves a kind of “suspension between free love and social purity, literature and science, sentimentalism and modernism” (575). In this way Loy’s work not only rewrites the “languages of female sexuality” but it simultaneously call attention to its own limitations and the limitations of “modernism’s reformist aesthetic and sexual ambitions” (575).

Peppis’s article provides useful insight not only to modernisms attempts to reform the language and the politics of the sex/gender economy, but by exposing these issues, he is also able to carefully present the ambitious work of two women in the movement to “modernize gender by rewriting sex” (566). His argument is both compelling and convincing, lending itself to an equally close examination of both Stopes’s and Loy’s achievements in the task of bridging “the great divide between science and literature” (575).

Peppis, Paul. "Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes and Sexology." Modernism/modernity 9.4 (2002): 561-579. Annotated by Taryn Norman.

In modernism's infancy many women felt that "their time[…][had] come to "speak out" about sex, to re-present female sexuality" (561). Peppis' article explores the roles played by poet Mina Loy and sexologist Marie Stopes in this attempt to use language to redefine female sexuality. Peppis justifies his case studies through his attempt to demonstrate the crucial role that the lyrical and scientific played in this movement.

Focusing firstly upon Stopes' widely accepted marriage manual, Married Love, Peppis explores the relationship between sentimental and scientific language. British feminism had become polarized between "social purity and free love" (566). WWI was the stile between Victorianism and Modernism which provided the footing "to liberate sexual language" by transforming "established vocabularies" (564). According to Peppis, Stopes' manual shielded itself from accusations of pornography, that Loy fell victim to, by implementing the vocabulary of the male dominated spheres of science and rationality. Married Love autonomizes female sexuality through providing it with this authoritative vocabulary, aiming not only to provide facts, but also "liberate female sexual pleasure" (567). As a result of these aims, Married Love has become associated as one of the first books to deal with the issue of birth control. Whilst implementing scientific language, Stopes also interjects sentimentalism that was typically associated with the social purity camp of the time, which promoted reproduction. Peppis argues that one need only look at the books popularity to demonstrate its success in using language to affect change.

Whilst recognising Stopes' achievement, Peppis is more critical of Loy's success. Peppis argues, that although a supporter of free love, Loy's Feminist Manifesto encourages social purity's reproduction in the furthering of eugenism. Loy calls for the demolition of the separate categorization of the mistress and the mother in her Feminist Manifesto. Peppis feels it is also her call to "demolish the division that separates female creativity into the biological and the aesthetic, and the division that separates language into the masculine-literal-scientific and the feminine-metaphoric-spiritual" (572). On the one hand, Feminist Manifesto and Parturition free a discussion of female sexuality from the sentimentality that Stopes' applies, but, on the other hand, Pappis feels the failure of parturition in Love Songs to Joannes thwarts the "'maternalist hopes" that animate the earlier works" (573). The language of sentimentality and science oppose and undermine each other in Love Songs to Joannes, and they unravel the achievement made in Parturition to combine free love and eugenics. Loy does help to bring into question though the idea of "the great divide" between the "allegedly incompatible disciplines and discourses" (575).

Peppis' article engages an interesting debate of how gender issues intersect with the supposedly polarized languages of science and sentimentality. His argument of how language and gender interplayed to affect change is certainly convincing, specifically in terms of how these women challenged the traditional assumption of the incompatibility of female rationality by opening up a dialogue.

Perkins, Priscilla. “’A Little Body With a Very Large Head’: Composition, Psychopathology, and the Making of Stein’s Normal Self.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996 Fall): 529-45. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

In order to demonstrate Stein’s understanding of issues of agency in her writing, Perkins examines the 1895 “Radcliffe Manuscripts,” work submitted by Stein in a two-semester composition class at the Harvard Annex. Describing two methods of self-presentation/self-construction identified by Foucault—those involving “surveillance and externally imposed discipline,” and “individual acts of discursive resistance” to cultural norms—Perkins explores the tension between these strategies in Stein’s early construction of textual personae (530).

Stein’s experimentation with different methods of self-presentation emerges in Perkins’ juxtaposition of two texts: “In the Red Deeps,” the first of the manuscripts, and “In the Library,” a later piece. The former is written in the first-person and expresses the narrator’s interest in and sensitivity to pain, her experience of “the joy of suffering” (Perkins 532). Stein’s instructor, William Vaughn Moody, comments, “One is puzzled to decide whether it is a personal experience, related in exaggerated terms, or a study from an object stand point of a morbid psychological state” (“Radcliffe” 109, cited in Perkins 533).

Moody’s response delineates the normative boundaries between authoritative and “morbid”/improper writing: if Stein is writing from “an object stand point,” i.e., at a distance from her own language, he grants her a certain diagnostic authority; if she is writing about herself, she is either exaggerating or exhibiting pathological symptoms. Perkins reads his remarks as a prescription regarding the “brand of textual selfhood that he believes it is appropriate for a young college woman to produce” and argues that Moody’s intervention pushes Stein to “refine her understanding of her own agency” (534). Perkins sees “In the Library” as an implicit response to Moody’s commentary: the contrast between the bookish, socially acceptable character of the young female protagonist (Hortense Sanger) in the early part of the text and the freer, more sexualized self who surfaces in later passages is presented within the framework of a third-person, past-tense narration. The use of the third person creates a “buffer zone” between Hortense and the reader of the text, shielding both narrator and character from the diagnostic pressures of institutionally sanctioned readings. Compared with the emotional first-person narrative of “In the Red Deeps,” “In the Library” is a more “objective” character study, distanced from its author, and susceptible to two different “developmental” readings: in one reading, Stein’s altered narrative strategy emphasizes her internalization of her teacher’s evaluation of the earlier piece; from another perspective, the disembodiment of the third-person narration represents Stein’s ongoing attempt to affirm her authority as a writer, a refusal to relinquish her exploration of the process of self-construction in relation to the dominant discourses of her culture.

Stein’s trying-on of different strategies of self-presentation in these early writings connects in interesting ways to her later narrative experiments. The article also raises questions about writing and institutional power that many of us who teach composition engage on a daily basis. The “little body with a very large head” of the title appears in an early composition (“An Annex Girl”) and is an example of Stein’s critical use of what composition theorist David Bartholomae terms a cultural “commonplace.” Stein appropriates the 1890’s trope of the female college student as physically unhealthy/reproductively atrophied and inhabits that trope differently: she uses it to affirm her innate abilities and her privileged status as an educated woman, and to articulate the complex relationship of her writing to cultural definitions of normality. In Stein’s resistant appropriation, the large-headed body breaks through the discursive frames that would fragment and disparage it.

Perloff, Marjorie. “What’s in a Box.” William Carlos Williams Review 18.2 (1992): 50-57. Annotated by Robin Brox.

Perloff’s article brings together the art and dialogue between Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. She begins by illustrating the opinions Stevens and Williams had of Duchamp’s artwork; Stevens “‘made very little out of them,’” whereas Williams found Duchamp’s glass screen an inspiration, stating “‘I [was] feeling my own inadequacies, but burning with lust to write’” (Perloff 50). Strengths of this article include its ability to reveal the artists’ reactions to one another, and its author’s ability to explain how several modernists worked through the concept of the box. Williams’s appreciation of Duchamp’s readymades is linked to his admiration of Stein’s Tender Buttons, while Stevens’s dislike of both artists’ creations helps Perloff elucidate the existence of “two very different strains of Modernism which we might call the Ontological and the Constructivist” (51). From here, Perloff moves onto a close reading of Stein’s poem “A BOX,” and she helpfully relates that it was “exactly contemporaneous with Duchamp’s Box of 1914” (51). She argues that Duchamp’s suggestion that one “‘Make a painting of frequency’ . . . oddly echoes Stein’s imagery in the opening sequence of Tender Buttons. . . . But beyond such verbal parallels, it is Stein’s conception of the box that recalls the absurdity of Duchamp’s inventories” (52). The close reading continues, ultimately leading Perloff to conclude that “‘A BOX’ is thus best understood as a proto-conceptual art work, the creation, not only of a Cubist surface of dismembered planes, but of an oblique statement of poetics” (53), though I did not find an adequate explanation of said poetics, since the author moves directly onto another longer version of “A BOX.”

The usefulness of the second Stein example comes from its link back to Duchamp, since Perloff states that “Stein engages in the sort of mock-mathematical exercise for which Duchamp is famous” (54). Here the article returns to Williams and then to Stevens. Perloff again situates Williams as aesthetically sympathetic to Stein and Duchamp: “. . . although Williams doesn’t take the constructivist impulse as far as do Duchamp or Stein, he is in their line in wanting to use words. . . to make a verbal rather than a mimetic construct” (55). Stevens is placed at odds with these artists; Perloff gives an example of Stevens’s writing about boxes and emphasizes that for him, “what matters is what it is the box contains. . . . what really matters for Stevens is Poetic Truth rather than Poetic Form, what is inside the box rather than, say, how a box can function as a readymade, as does Duchamp’s birdcage filled with sugar cubes and a cuttle bone. . .” (56, author’s emphasis). Though the contemporaneity of the artists serves as a compelling facet of the article, I found it nearly impossible to summarize Perloff’s arguments, which is why so many quotations seemed necessary. Perhaps a higher degree of familiarity with Duchamp’s work would make this article more clear and more useful.

Pitchford, Nicola. “Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein’s Tender Buttons.” American Literary History 11.4(1999): 642-667. JSTOR. 20 Jan. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/>. Annotated by Robin Brox.

Pitchford’s article sets out to explore the distinctions between modernism and postmodernism and how Stein’s work has been placed in both categories; the author intends to illustrate the necessity of considering a literary work from within its historical context, and she utilizes contemporary criticism of Stein to show how Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas were received by the modernists. Pitchford argues in favor of considering Stein from within her historical framework in order to understand her exclusion from the modernist canon. “[A]nxieties over mass culture” seem to place Stein’s work at odds with that of her male counterparts, as the politics associated with a poetry situated within the feminine social sphere was viewed, historically, as inferior to the high art of modernism by virtue of the fact that the mundane and the feminine had mass appeal (Pitchford 643). Pitchford eloquently makes her argument by stating, “. . . even one of Stein’s least accessible texts was misread at the time because of the same critical conflation of femininity with mass-cultural consumption. . . . [And] the hostile or dismissive reactions of Stein’s contemporaries may still have been provoked by its specifically gendered aspects” (644, author’s emphasis). A close reading of one poem from Tender Buttons follows, with careful attention paid to the elements found to be common to the modernist aesthetic and to those that mark the text as gendered.

In the third section of the article, the author quotes from contemporaries of Stein to show their criticism of her so-called mass-cultural appeal, often based on the feminine and/or gendered nature of her writing. The attacks on Stein make for provocative reading, since such important figures as Tzara, Matisse, Braque, and Jolas voice harsh critiques of Stein’s work. Pitchford carefully illustrates how the facets for which Stein’s work is valued as postmodern were unavailable to modernists, since “what was unique to Stein’s practice--its transgression of the gendered categories of representation-- . . . could not [be] account[ed] for within standard modernist frameworks” (652). Autonomy theories come into the article so that the author can further illustrate the “binary opposition between art and mass culture as analogous to that between the political sphere and the feminine/domestic” (655). Finally, Pitchford critiques Stein’s placement in the postmodern, arguing that her art cannot be divorced from the modernist time in which it was created: “Examining what is specific to Stein’s particular experimentalism as modernism reveals the ‘suppression’ on which dominant readings of modernism are constituted” (664, author’s emphasis). The value of this article rests in its ability to present its claims clearly; the fact that Pitchford roots her analysis of Stein in issues of gender and modernism makes her work both interesting and useful.

Rose, Marilyn Gaddis. “Gertrude Stein and Cubist Narrative.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 42:3 (1996 Fall), 543-55. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Rose focuses on Stein’s narrative procedures in “The Good Anna” (Three Lives, 1908), Lucy Church Amiably (1931), and Ida (1941) as examples of “Cubist” fictional research. Invoking Wylie Sypher’s definition of Cubism as any form of art that studies its own processes “without recourse to representational reality” (543), Rose raises the question of whether “Cubist” is a viable term for literary analysis and, more specifically, whether Cubist methods will necessarily disappoint and frustrate the expectations of readers of narrative (544). Her thesis begins to answer this question by suggesting that an examination of these three works by Stein will demonstrate how “an artist of Cubist orientation can force [readers] to analyze the elements of narration by abstraction and rearrangement” (544).

Rose approaches her analysis of Stein’s writing through a description of the technique of Picasso and Braque, who engaged in a process of “form analysis in which the basic shapes in an object, scene, or person [were] itemized, simplified, and rearranged” (545). She argues that Stein was prepared—through her familiarity with the work of Picasso and Cézanne, her background in experimental psychology, and her recent translation of Flaubert’s Un coeur simple—“to detect basic shapes, recurring facets and colliding planes in her own writing” (545). “The Good Anna” is presented as an example of a verbal portrait constructed through the juxtaposition of interacting styles (expository, naturalistic, impressionistic, and abstract) in a pattern analogous to the juxtaposition of planes in Cubist visual art. A tendency toward abstraction is evident in “motif” sentences, where language becomes more one-dimensional as it is relieved of conventional referential associations through the recurrence of particular verbal patterns. The tendency toward abstraction is heightened in Lucy Church Amiably, where words have been “so truly purified of the language of the tribe that we cannot put together meanings” (551). Although there are no overt syntactic violations, the arrangement of words in sentences in this novel has the effect of undoing subordination and loosening the attachment of words to their referential ground(s). Compared to “The Good Anna,” where repeated abstract phrases are interspersed among styles of “relatively greater referential depth,” the words of Lucy Church Amiably are stripped of contextual reference, serving as “skewed” contexts for other words. Rose again cites the analogy of painting, describing the narrative as “lines centripetally arranged in one and two-dimensional effects”—an arrangement that frustrates the reader’s attempts to visualize anything in the novel (552). With Ida, the act of narration itself becomes the focus of a reader’s attention: “We are almost never shown anything, always told” (554). Rose sees it as a Cubist narrative, moving “its own elements around its center” (555).

Rose justifies borrowing terminology from art history for her examination of the “Cubist” elements of Stein’s narrative technique, because “literary history has not developed a vocabulary for such a discussion” (544). The borrowed terminology provides readers with useful analogies for recognizing elements of abstraction and rearrangement in particular textual examples. However, the inclusion of specific categories of narrative analysis would offer a more precise and nuanced vocabulary for an in-depth discussion of patterns of voice and focalization within Stein’s writing and for examining the intersection of Stein’s experiments in narrative portraiture with Cubist techniques in the visual arts. Rose’s analysis takes the first step in answering the questions she raises at the beginning of her article. In addition to considering elements of narrative abstraction and rearrangement in specifically narrative terms, subsequent steps might involve exploring the reciprocal “translatability” of the vocabulary of art history and narrative analysis, as well as the possibility of a collaborative development of terminology across disciplinary boundaries. Rather than applying Picasso’s or Braque’s definitions to Stein’s work, such an extension/elaboration of Rose’s project would allow Stein’s writing to participate equally in framing a cross-disciplinary discussion and definition of “Cubist” procedures.

Schmid, Julie. “Mina Loy’s Futurist Theatre.” Performing Arts Journal 18.1 (1996): 1-7. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Julie Schmid’s article “Mina Loy’s Futurist Theatre” argues that Loy’s relationship with futurism, though ambivalent, was compelling in light of feminist critique. Loy’s most prolific time period, 1913-15, encompassed the two years she was involved with futurism. However, as Schmid points out, Loy could never accept the embedded misogyny of Marinetti, the leader of the movement. Because of this, Loy’s position in futurism was consequential because her plays “constitute one of the only feminist responses to and reworkings of the futurist dramatic aesthetic” (1). Loy’s tactic, according to Schmid, was to fight the system from within, employing futurist aesthetics (which she greatly respected) to scrutinize the status of women in the movement itself.

Although her central focus is with Loy’s plays, Schmid also insists that her prose and poetry are both influenced by and challenge futurism. In her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” Loy calls for change in the consciousness of the individual rather than in technology, and in language in the form of compression. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” harbingers Marinetti’s “Marriage and the Family” Manifesto in the manner in which it attacks marriage’s construction of a choice between “Parasitism, Prostitution, or Negation” and the “quasi-Marxist reading of the institution of marriage”, both of which would be later reiterated in Marinetti’s manifesto (3).

Turning to theatre, Schmid asserts that Loy’s Two Plays typify and celebrate futurist theatre, while The Pamperers satirize the movement looking at it through a feminist, anti-bourgeois lens. However, in her descriptions of Two Plays, she points out the deviations from futurism that they take as well, somewhat contradicting her postulate. They both utilize the futurist words-in-freedom language with dashes, spaces, and a subversion of syntax and also exemplify a futurist universe with a solitary man on stage overwhelmed by external stimuli in the form of atoms and urban landscape. In Collision (one of the two), the milieu prevails as the protagonist with the man serving as a vehicle for it, describing the mobile scenery. Out of this chaotic display, something new is created (futuristic), yet Loy ends the play with the sense that this cycle will continue, diverting from futurism.

Meanwhile in The Pamperers, Shmid illustrates that Loy’s attack on futurism is more blatant, as the main character Diana, the absent feminine counterpart of futurism, triumphantly confronts a Futurist artist. Not only is the futurist language parodied, but Loy exposes the convergence of the futurists and the culture they attack. Overall, although Schmid does not offer a cogent explanation of futurism (perhaps too daunting a task), she does illustrate by use of example elements in Loy’s writing that both align themselves with and attack futurism. I was glad I read Poggioli’s chapter on futurism prior to this as a foundation for the mindset of the futurist. This article could prove to be scintillating fodder for insight as we approach Loy’s poetry as feminist/futurist/anti-futurist projects.

Sheffield, Rob. “Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: Poetry/Celebrity/Sexuality/ Modernity.” Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 46.4 (2003 Summer): 625-35. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Who’s That Girl?
—Madonna

The article “Mina Loy Too Much Too Soon,” is not scholarly, per se, but rather an informal, often opinionated, biographical essay on Mina Loy, focusing specifically on her celebrity status as a poet and “femme fatal” of the Modernist movement. Sheffield credits Loy’s poem “Love Songs,” which appeared in the debut issue of Others (1915), with making her, the magazine itself, and the whole New York scene infamous. Sheffield acknowledges that it was Loy’s audience, primarily poets in New York, who helped build her poetic “star-status.” He writes that it was both the New York scene’s admiration of her, and her willingness to be admired that made her poetry and the Modernist movement greater. He credits Loy with writing both to and for her audience, an act of mutual inspiration, which allowed her great freedom of voice, rhythm and language. In this way, Loy’s poem “To You” is written to her ideal audience, an audience Sheffield posits, she helped to invent.

Sheffield recounts how Loy thoroughly enjoyed her notorious celebrity status—used it to her advantage, she was the most famous of the New York poets—though it never overshadowed the ability for her poetry to stand on its own, as Loy’s was an “instantly recognizable poetic voice (625).” Loy, Sheffield postulates, was so confident with her poetic voice she did not ask to be listened to, but rather demanded one’s attention like a rock-star. Sheffield celebrates Loy’s unique play with language, her willingness draw upon languages other than English for inspiration and to make up words altogether if necessary to fit the beat of her rhythms. Sheffield, an avid Loy reader, deems her poetry “excessive” stating, “her poems are full of textual noise: asterisks, fields of white space, capitals, carats, tildes, readymades, foreign locutions, chatty throw-away lines, catch phrases that, if I’m not mistaken, really don’t mean anything at all” (631). Sheffield notes that after Loy wrote “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914) she had no trouble publishing in the New York scene, or anywhere else; her poems appeared in a variety of journals from 1914-1918. Her only book Lunar Baedecker (1923) was, at one point, banned in the U.S. as pornography and had to be smuggled into the country. Sheffield writes, “her secrets, as expressed in her poetry, were dangerous, often obscene, sometimes merely eccentric, sometimes actually illegal” (634).

This article was very easy to understand and helped as a general introduction to Mina Loy and her poetry. The tone was gossipy—including tidbits about Mina changing her name on multiple occasions, and having gusty affairs with Futurist painters—yet the style of Sheffield’s writing, the passion behind it, worked well to convey the sporadic and non-discursiveness of Loy’s poetry, as well as, exploring aspects of her poetics. Sheffield’s essay, itself, is an avid fan’s response to his shero’s work—which, it appears, Loy encouraged, actively engaged in, and fed from creatively. Though well written and entertaining, this essay is more useful to anyone wishing a quick run-down of Mina Loy’s life and poetry from the perspective of a well-read admirer, rather than an in-depth scholarly analysis of her work.

Shreiber, Maeera. “‘Love is a Lyric / Of Bodies’: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina
Loy’s Love Song to Joannes.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. 87–109. Annotated by Monica Fauble.

The lyric is considered to be an ahistorical, apolitical form, but, according to Maeera Shreiber, Loy’s love songs to Joannes examine the relationship between sexuality, which is often constructed as private, and an individual’s relationship to her society and culture. Shreiber argues that Loy’s poems offer a critique of the modernist notion that the lyric is an insular form that must be read apart from the speaker and/or the writer’s experience of her culture and the social world.

Loy’s lyrics often portray the sense of disconnect that occurs when a relationship falls apart, thus implying that an individual’s experience of love does impact her view of the social world and relations. Her lyrics are structured as collages, so that the word on the page is enacted as an “artifact,” thus offering a poetics of separation between writer and voice as represented on the page.

On the page, Loy’s poems appear to embody disruption and separation, but, reading the poems out loud, as Kenneth Rexroth notes, creates an entirely different effect. The sense of separation present in language, in the written effect of the poems, is remedied by the intermediary of human speech.
Thinking about the relationship between the female body and creative force, Shreiber notes that Loy locates herself in opposition to the notion that the writing process, for women, is akin to the cycle of reproduction and childbirth. Loy argues that such a connection creates the (false) notion that art is a stand-in for the social and physical creativity of an era; such serves to further entice fractured social relations. Language, according to Shreiber’s assessment of Loy, has no place within sex, the context through which bodies speak to each other. Sex, and the relationships between bodies, are rendered as forces that exclude language.

Loy’s poems insist upon the pleasure of the procreative aspect of sex because of her insistence on a lush and abundant social world; here again the public and the private intersect. Loy criticizes modernist poets’ use of abstractions and insists instead upon a poetry of social reality. Loy appreciates the Renaissance connection between religion and sex, and she rejects the secularity of modernist poetics.
Loy does not view poetry as a site through which identity can be formed. Identity can be found instead within the boundaries of maternity. Giving birth to a child is figured in Loy’s writing as giving birth to one’s self. The material effects of the birthing process allow for a sense of disorientation that requires a reinvestigation of one’s identity; identity, for Loy, is based on a re–envisioning one’s self. Both motherhood and abortion within Loy’s work allow for a discussion of presence and absence.

Shreiber asserts that love, according to Loy, is not an ideal but a changing set of conditions manifested within the boundaries of individual relationships. Love cannot be fully embodied or made present by the production of writing or of the lyric; love, for Loy, is not a textual or an abstract notion, but a corporeal event.

While discussing Loy’s relationship to the public and the private as its predominant focus, Shreiber’s analysis also offers many general insights into Loy’s verse. This article would be useful for anyone interested in the role of sex and reproduction in Loy’s work, and it analyzes the lyric as Loy uses this form. It is helpful, however, to have a sense of the history of the lyric before reading this article if you are interested in gaining an understanding of Loy’s break from the historical sense of this form.

Taylor, Linda Arbaugh. “Lines of Contact: Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams.” William Carlos Williams Review 16.2 (Fall 1990): 26-47. Annotated by Eric York.

Starting at the beginnings of their relationship after the first decade of the century, Taylor charts Mina Loy’s influence on William Carlos Williams’s conceptions of the masculine developed in his poetry. Taylor writes that Williams’s interest in Loy began in 1914 when her poetry began to appear in the New York avant-garde journals. From 1915 to 1919, Williams worked closely on the magazine Others, which, to much public controversy, published many of Loy’s poems. During this time, Williams’ poetry “underwent a complete transformation.” Taylor argues that:

Williams’ receptiveness to Loy’s work during a radically transitional period in his own development suggests a degree to which his notions of gender are encouraged and mediated by Loy’s feminist example. Moreover, Loy’s impact upon Williams demonstrates her importance in opening the American tradition to an articulation of a distinct female perspective during a particularly active moment in feminism’s history. (27)

After describing how Loy came to America from Britain and her relationships with prominent feminists such as Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, Taylor writes of the main aim of Loy’s poetry to tell “what woman will tell of herself.” (33). Her argument is that Loy’s practical development toward that aim was the foundations of Williams’ own poetic. She cites a great number of nodes of comparison along this line, including: similar imagery, similar de-romanticized notions of love, a mixture of the surreal and the natural, and an emphasis on erotic desires.

Taylor’s argument makes the point that Loy’s corollary belief that the dominant cultural institutions, which remain bastions of phallo-centric patriarchal power, much be broken down every bit as much as the beliefs in the minds of women themselves. Mina Loy is a fusion of feminism and the avant-garde because her poetic takes up both tasks. Her refusal to rely on the institutions of grammar, punctuation, and form as they inhibited her “thinking freely” was as important to her as her treatment of male sexuality from a feminine perspective.

To Williams, this meant a great deal. He, too, believed in breaking down the institutional barriers. This is clearly expressed in Williams’ and Robert McAlmon’s first edition of Contact, a precursor to Others when they rejected in the opening manifesto: “standards of social, moral, or scholastic value – hangovers from past generations no better equipped to ascertain value than we are” (26). Clearly Williams championed the avant-garde cause of rejection, and just as clearly he championed the cause of feminism, since Others frequently published great women alongside great men.

Since Williams’ poetic itself owes a noticeable debt to Mina Loy, the question raised by Taylor’s article is what does this mean to Williams himself, being the virtual embodiment of a phallo-centric institution of patriarchal power? Allow me to qualify, Williams was no Pound, and often worked in opposition to Pound’s “high modernism”, but isn’t there a degree to which Williams represents the very things Loy rejects, up until, at least, the point where his poetic began to change? I find it troubling that even after his “radical transformation”, Williams was so heavily influenced by Loy’s methods. It is also rumored, Taylor tells us, of Williams’ not-so-secret attraction to Loy, and his wish to marry her. This, coupled with his appropriation of her methods, suggest to me a desire in Williams to possess and master Loy’s feminine self. The very thing she writes against.

I wonder what she thought of him. Especially considering that high-school text books and college curriculums still teach Williams as one of the grand-papas of modernism, while Loy is hardly, if ever, to be found.

Taylor, Melanie. “The Poetics of Difference: The Making of Americans and Unreadable Subjects.” NWSA Journal Vol. 15 No. 3 (Fall 2003): 26-42. Annotated by Monica Fauble.

Melanie Taylor reads the repetition of Stein’s The Making of Americans in relation to the radical literary features of Stein’s work, especially those of grammar, syntax, and repetition. Taylor is primarily concerned with how these features relate to the concepts of “difference” and “sameness” and also to gender.

Problematically, Taylor’s analysis does little with the concept of “sameness,” so that this notion becomes a loose thread in the majority of her analysis. Stein herself often mentions binaries in reference to both parts of the term (men/women, different/same); it seems that an analysis of difference that mentions sameness should analyze difference in terms of sameness. Taylor sets out to do so but never fulfills this analysis.

Although Stein does not present a unified or entirely coherent/visible dismantling of fixed concepts of gender, she does, according to Taylor, render binary categorizations, such as the male and the female, nonsensical because of the innumerable repetitions in the text. Given Stein’s word play, categorizations that rely on fixed differences cease to embody singular or universal meanings and thereby they cease to be practical or functional methods of delineation; categorizations are brilliantly rendered useless in their unrecognizability. Within Stein’s repetitions, key words emerge and play off of other repeated words, thus creating new meaning each time such a word enters the text.

Taylor’s analysis relies heavily on Judith Butler’s theories of gender. Using Butler’s theories of gender as drag and of the performative nature of gender, Taylor asserts that Stein’s repetition enables agency because of its continuous opportunities for the reshaping of identity. Taylor uses examples of Stein’s repetition that mark a nonlinear development in order to illustrate that there is an embedded sense of incoherence in both Stein’s narrative style and also her representations of gender. Taylor links this sense of changing identity to the unstable nature of gender according to Butler.

Stein centers her text around notions of the female and the male, but, Taylor argues, Stein’s undermines the gravity and the semantic and grammatical functions of binary gender categorizations. Stein’s prose is thus rendered as a prose of boundless possibilities. Because the narrator of The Making of Americans is a genderless “I”; the subjectivity of this narrator is not predetermined; instead, as Butler would argue, the subject is created through the way it is revealed in language. In The Making of Americans, the coherence of Stein’s narrator, like the coherence of logic and ordinary associations, disintegrate as Stein’s text progresses.

This article would be useful for someone interested in analyzing issues of coherence and logic within Stein’s prose. Also, anyone interested in how binaries function within Stein’s work would also benefit from Taylor’s article as well.

Tischler, Alyson. "A Rose Is a Pose: Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature, 26.3/4 (2003); 12-27. Annotated by Taryn Norman.

Tischler’s article focuses on disproving Andreas Huyssen’s assertion that there was “a great divide” (14) between modernism and mass culture. She does this by highlighting Stein, as an example of the modernist movement, and demonstrating her integral relationship with mass culture.
Previous scholarship has outlined an “anxiety of contamination” (14) supposedly felt by modernist writers and Tischler argues that this argument has been challenged by more recent scholars such as Mark Morrisson. Tischler’s own conclusions are based upon her use of Stein’s collection of newspaper and magazine clippings stored at Yale University, which she feels prove that “the producers and consumers of mass culture were also engaged by modernism” (14) as much as modernists were engaged in mass culture.

Using the clippings, Tischler demonstrates how the advertising industry utilized Stein’s work in their campaigns. Bergdorf Goodman, in 1934, ran an advert for hats playing on Stein’s famous phrase, “a rose is a rose is a rose,” by altering it to, “a rose is a pose is a rose is a pose” (15). She goes on to convincingly note various other examples of New York companies that were influenced by Stein’s work from the Stein collection of clippings. Importantly, Tischler also notes that such adverts made Stein’s work accessible to the general public.

What is perhaps most interesting in Tischler’s argument is her emphasis on the importance of the role of New York’s The Evening Sun newspaper. Don Marquis’ continual parody of Stein’s work in this newspaper was, in Tischler’s mind, the source of information for adverts created by New York companies utilizing Stein and her work. Marquis became an “accidental promoter” (19) of Stein and provided readers with a ‘how-to’ read Stein guide, due to his strong readership. “Marquis’s column portrays modernism and mass culture as interpenetrating discourses that form an aesthetic loop” (21), establishing a catalyst for Stein’s rise in popularity, rather than Stein advertising herself through The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as Helga Lénárt-Cheng has asserted.

This article poses a convincing argument by drawing upon Stein’s own collection of predominately American newspaper and magazine clippings from the era. Tischler engages the debate of advertising and Stein, already being much discussed in scholarly journals, and uses the article to offer a different interpretation of Stein’s rise to popularity.

Tracy, Steven C. “William Carlos Williams and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms.” William Carlos Williams Review 15. 2 (1989 Fall): 17-29. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Rhythm and Blues

In his article, “William Carlos Williams and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms,” Steven Tracy tracks the ways in which jazz music, and its sub-genre “the blues,” formally influenced the work of William Carlos Williams. The essay begins with a brief history of the 1920’s “blues” movement in America—from conception to commercialization—and its subsequent impact on the Harlem Renaissance, Surrealist and Modernist writers. Tracy asserts that unlike writers of the New Negro Movement, Modernist and Surrealist writers could separate jazz from its African American tradition and thus use the music more “abstractly.” Williams, Tracy speculates, thought about jazz more intellectually than culturally and respected the music for its spontaneity, emotional and sexual freedom, rejection of middle class values, seeming primitivism, disjunction and cacophony (20). In a journal titled Blues (1929), Williams wrote a manifesto, “For a New Magazine,” in which he likened “the blues” to the revolution he felt necessary in modern poetry. Tracy writes, “thus when Williams applies the term ‘blues’ to what he perceives as the contemporary state of decay in the arts, he is only doing more obviously and directly what may be occurring covertly in its own way in the blues tradition itself in reference to the decadence of contemporary American society” (25).

Tracy posits that while Williams’ interest in classical music is more pronounced in his writings and biography, he began to seriously incorporate jazz and blues rhythms into his work during the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1940’s. Tracy notes, however, that when Williams wrote of “banjo jazz,” in Spring and All (1923), Williams was, at that time, also evoking the spirit of jazz music, specifically the sexual nature he saw in the rhythms. Thus, Tracy postulates that Williams’ fascination with jazz sprang, partly, from his associations of “the blues” with taboo, as well as with a revolt against the poetic forms of the past, such as “perfect sonnets.” Williams believed that the incongruous rhythms, forms and structures of jazz music were “imbued with life,” and were therefore essential for the revitalization of contemporary poetry. In this way, Williams (though not an aficionado by any means) incorporated jazz music—its complexity, frankness, rhythms, experimental nature, and uniqueness—into his own writings to create a “new” Modernist poetics he wished to see set in motion.

This essay was delightful to read, though not always pertinent to our subjects of discussion. Although the article is dated, it presents a “history” of the influence of jazz on Williams’ work rather than critical inquiry, and in this way Tracy’s postulations are still useful. The article would be of interest to anyone wishing to research the influence of “the blues” on writers of the Harlem Renaissance or W.C. Williams. The essay would also be helpful to those wanting to present a scholarly analysis of Williams’ use of rhythm, Williams’ manifesto “For a New Magazine,” or Williams’ correspondence to the poet Charles Henri Ford (a side point which I did not include in my formal annotation). One may also use this article if she/he would like to explore the idea of how the ecstatic and sultry rhythms of jazz translated into sexual or sensual imagery/innuendos in Williams’ writings.

Valesio, Paolo. “’The Most Enduring and Most Honored Name’: Marinetti as Poet.” F.T. Marinetti: Selected Poems and Related Prose. Ed. Luce Marinetti. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. 149-165. Annotated by Monica Fauble.

Futurism, according to Paolo Valesio, is the first avant-garde movement because it fused the following: first, a discourse on and of literature and the arts, second, an awareness that this movement is both artistic and political/social, and third, an assertion that before Futurism innovative movements had only occurred in “First World” countries (France England and Germany); Futurism realized that true innovation can better take place in a country that has not yet emerged and that thereby has the possibility of emerging. This last argument is somewhat shaky, as Valesio asserts that Marinetti himself portrays Italy as a superpower, but is likely aware that Italy was second world.

Valesio follows these statements with an assertion that Marinetti used his bilingual abilities in order to align himself with French, by writing his earliest poems in that language, and then to undermine the “imperialism” or dominance of this language by later writing in Italian. Regardless of Marinetti’s original intentions, it seems inevitable that he would eventually write in Italian.

After declaring that Futurism cannot be defined in this article, Valesio then lists qualities of Futurism and avant-gardism within a series of binary terms that show how often the avant-garde and/or Futurism play both sides of the binary. Speaking of “mass appeal versus elitism,” Valesio argues that Futurism sometimes claims that it is valid because all major artists are Futurists; at other times, it argued that Futurism is correct because it fights against the majority.

The same complexity applies when thinking of historicism versus antihistoricism; the avant-garde locates itself historically only in order to assert that its own sense of history, not the dominant climate, is correct.

Within Futurism, there are also tensions between the exaltation of chaos and an insistence on rationalistic and technological control, as well as between the simultaneous representation of depersonalization and subjectivity, and also the exaltation of art (and the artist) and an argument for the desecration of art. (Valesio’s argument does not make it clear who the agent of such desecration is.)
Valesio examines the avant-garde’s Romantic roots by stating that the avant-garde questions assertions that poetry is sacred; such occurs through the expansion of what is an acceptable subject for poetry. This first notion contradicts Valesio’s earlier argument that states the avant-garde practices an exaltation of art. It also, however, reinforces the way that Valesio states the avant-garde swings between privileging each term of the binaries.

Linguistic and literary experimentation, which is utopic in its belief in changing the world, is a feature of Futurism, and of Marinetti’s work. Although Valesio earlier argued that contemporary Italian poetry is heavily linked to an insistence on tradition and the traditional (ritorno all’ordine) rather than to the lineage of Futurism, he also argues for Marinetti’s importance as a poet, which can be established by the fact that he is the only Futurist considered not as a “Futurist Poet” but as a poet who was also a Futurist.

Valesio describes Marinetti as a “lyricist” but asserts that he also subverts lyricism by writing in a variety of forms which are not traditionally lyrical and sometimes are prose rather than poetry. Valesio is especially impressed by Marinetti’s subversion of forms. Marinetti blurs the boundaries of form by using poetic language in essays, and sociological tracts or manifestos. The article closes with a brief discussion of the way that certain images, such as stars, cross the borders between Marinetti’s poetry and his prose, and it also reinforces the notion that Marinetti’s greatness stems from his ability to work comfortably in a variety of forms.

Despite the title of this article, we do not reach a discussion of Marinetti’s poems until a few pages from the end of the article, which, although sometimes one-sided and propagandist, would be useful for those who wish to have an understanding of how Futurism emerged historically and what the basic tenets of Futurism might be.

Watten, Barrett. “An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans.” Modernism/Modernity 5.2 (1998): 95-121. Annotated by Kristin Stelmok.

This article is an examination of the “horizon shifts” of developmental narrative in Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In Watten’s analysis, The Making of Americans moves from a rejection of the repetition of the authorizing patriarchal myth of Oedipus, to a dissembling of the characteristics of the father/phallus figure of the typical American family, to a reincorporating of the mother into a social matrix beyond that of the family. According to Watten, all of this results in “not only Stein’s famous style of metalinguistic repetition but also a poetics of identity as a construction in which, as in her title, Americans are made” (96).

Watten begins by focusing on the first two paragraphs of The Making of Americans where Stein first employs a “pseudo-epic invocation” of the “authorizing Oedipal myth of patriarchy” then rejects it in the next paragraph, insisting on the importance of embracing our sins as we see them in others rather than reacting against them with violence as exhibited in the myth of Oedipus. Instead of reverting back to that kind of repetition, Stein plans with her own kind of material textuality to build a matrix of society in which Americans might be made outside of patriarchal repetition.

Watten moves to a largely Lacanian discussion of the character of David Hersland, the phallic patriarch of the seemingly typical middle-class family. Watten examines “two registers of identification” in Hersland: he is both everyone at once and estranged as the “other.” Ultimately, Watten argues that this dissociation within the character of Hersland is the very definition of his “queerness.” Hersland’s children finally assimilate their father’s queerness for themselves, and thus are made as singular Americans.

Watten’s discussion continues with an examination of Fanny Hersland, who develops her individuality as she moves away from her family into a larger social matrix. This shift releases Fanny from her role as the repudiated mother of the Oedipal myth. Once again, according to Watten, Stein has rewritten the narrative repetition of loss into a making – a making of a new kind of American, outside the confines of a patriarchic myth.

Ultimately, Watten seems most interested in the way in which Gertrude Stein, through her use of unique “metalinguistic repetition” re-makes the American social fabric, deconstructing patriarchal lineage in favor of a wider web of social bonds, which she might understand as the true structure of the American middle class. This project is reflected in her stylistic techniques (the abandonment of realism in favor of abstraction [115]), but is best understood, according to Watten, by examining The Making of Americans as a “social text.”

The first part of this article is the most convincing and readable. After that, Watten often leaves the reader confused, as he does not always define his terms and frequently seems to argue two different things at once, without developing either argument to its fullest potential. Despite this, Watten’s article might be of use to anyone interested in the question of the performative nature of the text: how successfully does Stein actually do what she says in the title? Also, Watten provides a compelling argument for the destruction of masculine authority in Stein’s “masterpiece,” so anyone interested in the politics of gender in modernism might find this article rather useful. While this article does offer a great deal of valuable insight, I hope that the book length version will answer more completely some of the questions Watten seems to leave the reader with in this article-length excerpt.