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

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

Syllabus subject to change • week 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Materials Handout containing texts by Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, the editors of Blast!, Mina Loy, and images by Marcel Duchamp. § Log Introduction to course and to one another. Dimensions of analysis: the semiotics of gender, the politics of gender, the phenomenology of gender. History. The body. First attempt at reading Man Ray's portrait of Rsose Sélavy. Those fingers, that patch of hair. Audiotext of Stein reading excerpt from The Making of Americans. Incoherence of the patriarch. In-class voicing of Stein's "Ada." Trembling and telling. Audiotext of Stein reading "If I Told Him." Audiotext of Williams reading "To Daphne and Virginia." A loophole for the non-misogynistic, though sexist, male. More penetrant. That goose.

Materials Handout from 10 January. Shared Article Scott, Joan. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." 1986. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 81-100. § Log A patient working through of Scott's article occupied us for the better part of this seminar meeting. Patriarchy theories, Marxist theories, and psychoanalytical theories presented and critiqued. Essentialism and constructivism. Scott's major claims: (1) "gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes" and (2) "gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power" (94). The four subsets to the first claim: (1a) culturally-available symbols, (1b) normative concepts setting forth interpretations of the symbols, (1c) politics and reference to social institutions and organizations, including kinship systems, labor markets, education, the polity, and (1d) subjective identity. Restatement of claim (2): "gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated" (95). Brief mention of Louis Althusser's theory of "ideological" and "repressive" state apparatuses (ISAs and RSAs).

Web resources Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Althusser: On Ideological State Apparatuses." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. link

Shared Reading Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (begin). § Log Revisiting the terms of Scott's argument from last week. Close reading of each proposition in Mina Loy's unpublished "Feminist Manifesto" of 1914. Remarks on avant-gardism and the manifesto form. Loy's rejection of "equality" politics. Parasitism, prostitution, negation. Mothers and mistresses. Unconditional surgical destruction of virginity at puberty. Constituting a feminist polity ("first self-enforced law"). Rights to maternity and sexuality delinked from monogamous heterosexual marriage. The "race-responsibility" of "superior" women. "Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved." Contrast between Loy's utopic projections and Stein's in "Ada" (handout from first meeting). § Open discussion of Stein's Autobiography. Stein, the brand. "Composition as Explanation" (1926). From outlaw to classic. Conceited? Working with the "culturally-available symbols" related to authorship. Strategies of impersonation. Portraiture from the skin out. Gossip and "remarks." Terms of reception (sampled by Robin Brox). Texts referred to Bob Perelman's The Trouble with Genius. Lillian Faderman's work on lesbian couples in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America and elsewhere.

Web resources Mina Loy Page

Shared Reading Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (finish) | Stein, "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans" and excerpt from The Making of Americans. Topic Some theories of the avant-garde: Peter Bürger, Renato Poggioli, and Raymond Williams (postponed from last week; handouts available from graduate secretary). § Log Beginning with Bürger. Genesis of autonomous spheres within bourgeois society. The avant-garde as the self-criticism of bourgeois aestheticism. Dissident fractions of the dominant class. Bürger's Hegelianism (and Adorno's before him). The owl of Minerva flies at twilight (i.e. complex social phenomena are known not at their moment of emergence but only after achieving a certain elaborated state). The logic of diremption (splitting) and sublation (aufhebung). Sublation as cancelling, preserving, and kicking to the next dialectical level. Avant gardes movements as collective forms of agency producing distinctive effects in the field. Military etymology of "avant garde" metaphor: the unsurvivable advanced position. The category of novelty or "the new." Poggioli on the difference between the medieval school and the modern movement or tendency. Raymond Williams's typology of "formations" according to their internal organization (a spectrum from formal and codified to informal and affinall) and the relations they maintain toward extra- or non-aesthetic world (specializing, alternative, oppositional). Clement Greenberg and "kitsch" (as false sublation of art/life diremption).

Web resources A (very partial) Stein gallery

Shared Reading Stein, "Melanctha" | Stein, Portraits: Ada (handout), Cezanne, Picasso (both the one in the book and the one in our first day handout), Matisse, Mabel Dodge, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene Topic This class will be more discussion based than last week. Please organize the impressions you've formed of the Stein material we've been reading and come ready to make and debate claims about that work. There will also be time to make a brief presentation on your research and annotations. § Log Stein and temporality. American spaces of time, filled with movement. Cinematic time and the time of serial production (the Fordist production line). Rhemes (quanta of new information in a message) and themes (quanta of redunant or carried over information). The cinematic frame and the paragraph. The time of composition itself. Stein the patriotic expat. From the typologizing essentialism of "bottom nature" to the existentialist project of recording singularities (portraits). Narratological distinction between "plot" or récit (manifest text) and "story" or histoire (world imagined on basis of cues in manifest text). Small lesson on the canonical narrative tempos: ellipsis (unnarrated story time) - summary (plot < story) - scene (plot = story) - stretch (plot > story) - pause (plot moves, story is still). "Melanctha" and the art of narrative "stretch." Dialog and the small difference. The critique of Jefferson. What turned him? The politics of race and representation in "Melanctha." Jefferson and the phallus (qua tenuous professional identity). Melanctha's "wanderings." Narrative strategies of displacement and euphemism. The "three lives" as "case histories" (medical, forensic). Stein contra Freud? The genius as one who listens and talks. Self-identify and self-simultaneity. Disruption of the circuitry of the talking cure, where analysand talks without knowing her meaning and the analyst assigns that meaning from a position of invulnerable silence. Wo es war, soll ich werden: Where "it" (the unconscious) was, so "I" (the ego) will come to be. But not for Stein. Resources Henry Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," from The Education of Henry Adams. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918.

Shared Reading Stein, Tender Buttons (begin) | Loy, pages 3-50 (poems 1914-1920) | First set of Duchamp slides (in class) § Log The seminar was devoted almost entirely to the discussion of Duchamp's work. A list of the slides shown can be found here. First group: the paintings from 1910 to 1913 or so. Rapid passage through fauvism, cubism, futurism. Second group: the Large Glass (definitively abandoned 1923) and works preparatory to it. Third group: the readymades, installations, interventions. Fourth group: Etant Donnés and works preparatory to it. For a simulation of viewing experience, click here. The bachelor ("celibitaire") and his sad malish band; the virgin, the bride, the widow. Web Resources Tout Fait: Marcel Duchamp Studies Online • Fresh Widow 3000

Shared Reading Stein, Tender Buttons | Williams, Kora in Hell (including original preface) | Loy, pages 3-50 (poems 1914-1920)

Shared Reading Loy, "Love Songs for Joannes" (1917 & 1923 versions) | Williams, Spring & All

Shared Reading Loy's "Love Songs for Joannes (cont'd). | Duchamp, "The Bride's Veil" (Writings 13-101).

Shared focus Duchamp's Large Glass and "The Bride's Veil" (Writings 13-101)

Shared focus Continuing discussion of Duchamp and the Large Glass. | First two books of Williams's Paterson. | Informal presentations on research findings.

Shared focus Books 3-5 of Williams's Paterson. | Informal presentations on research findings.

Shared focus Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts." | Informal presentations on research findings.

In lieu of conclusions Some definitive unachievements. | Informal presentations on research findings.

Printed copies of seminar papers must be submitted by 4 May at 4:30pm. No extensions beyond this date can be granted. Petitions for "Incomplete" grades should be made in person well in advance of the final due date.