‘Which is the American?’: Themes, Techniques, and Meaning in William Carlos Williams's Three Novels

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
John C. Davies

In 1928 Ezra Pound described William Carlos Williams as an ‘observant foreigner’ who ‘starts where an European would start if an European were about to write of America: sic: America is a subject of interest, one must inspect it, analyse it, and treat it as subject.’ If Pound was right, Williams was a native-born outsider, a life-long resident alien giving America the serious attention of his life's work. The detachment and close attention noted by Pound as originating in Williams's sense of his own ‘foreignness’ (a sense which Williams obliquely admitted by his insertion of a relevant letter of Pound in the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell), are constants in Williams's work. Both the Imagist and Objectivist phases of his career show his determination to capture in words ‘the local fully realized’ – Williams's definition of ‘the classic’. In his trilogy of novels, his exploration of ‘the local’, ‘the only thing that is universal’ is shown both in theme and technique.

Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 86 (5) ◽  
pp. 806-807
Author(s):  
CHRIS MULFORD

To the Editor.— I read with interest the article "Relationship Between Infant Feeding and Infectious Illness: A Prospective Study of Infants During the First Year of Life" by Rubin et al in the April issue.1 Two things puzzle me. The first is that, despite the authors' stated goal of paying close attention to methodology, their definition of breast-feeding fails to meet the standards set forth by most experts on lactation. The second is that, given their substantial investment of time and money in obtaining detailed data on 500 babies for a full year, the authors chose to ask their particular research question.


Author(s):  
Alethia Alfonso

En este artículo planteo la relación que existe entre algunos postulados de Eric Mottram, uno de los iniciadores de British Poetry Revival, con la poesía de Martín Gubbins. Abogo por abrir las posibilidades de influencia anglosajona más allá de los conocidos Ezra Pound y William Carlos Williams. Además, busco entender qué sucede con el sujeto en poéticas contemporáneas predominantemente visuales y performativas. Por último, esbozo una noción de la relación que poemas como «Roundabout I-VI» de Gubbins tienen con la (in)estética según Alain Badiou.


Author(s):  
Eric B. White

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Talia Dan-Cohen

This chapter focuses on ambiguous experimental results, paying close attention to experimental processes and tracking the ways that practitioners tackle, reason, and think through puzzling experimental results. It investigates the context of experiments with modified life-forms and experimental results that take the form of a vast array of biotic not-quites. It also highlights organismic by-products that point in various directions when it comes to figuring out how much control synthetic biologists have over their designs and what steps should be taken as correctives. The chapter explains how experiments often come packaged together with the choices, standards, and observational skills of others. It discusses the problem of the definition of growth that was deferred through the delineation of a category for the indeterminate results.


Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb

This chapter examines how the experimental verse of Others, the quintessential aestheticist-modernist little magazine of American poetry, emerges from and responds to the climate of metropolitan activism that links it to The Masses. Others, published between July 1915 and July 1919 by Alfred Kreymborg and various friends, published works by such distinguished poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter argues that Others's commitment to stylistic experimentalism possessed a strong social dimension by showing how its verses addressed the conditions of urban-industrial modernity. It also describes the magazine's poetics of modernity as it extends across three interdependent registers: formal, thematic, and metapoetic. Finally, it discusses Others's contribution to the expansion of modern poetic form by cultivating a distinctive innovation, the vers libre variation sequence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Artur I. Giniyatov

The paper discusses some issues that may arise in the formation of the regulatory framework for the creation and maintenance of a three-dimensional real estate cadastre in Russia. An analytical review of the prerequisites for the creation of a three-dimensional real estate cadastre in Russia has been carried out. The priorities of interaction between urban planning and cadastral activities are considered, as well as the definition of scientifically grounded requirements for the accuracy of cadastral work, taking into account the introduction of the third, high-altitude coordinate H. Close attention is paid to the expansion of the requirements for the technical plan, in the transition to a 3D cadastre, the general availability of information about real estate objects on the public cadastral map.


Author(s):  
Claude Calame

This chapter examines two major trends in the contemporary study of religion—cognitive science and cultural anthropology. While the former seeks a universal, naturalist, evolutionary explanation for religion, the latter emphasizes cultural relativism, variability, and local context. After interrogating the weakness of both, the chapter suggests that Bruce Lincoln’s more critical, reflexive, and ideologically sensitive approach offers one of the best ways to move forward in the study of religion today. While recognizing the limitations and provisional nature of any definition of religion, Lincoln’s approach offers for a broad comparative method while also paying close attention to history, politics, and social change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-497
Author(s):  
Chris Mourant

The inclusion of Rebecca West's short story ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ in the first issue of BLAST (1914) has much to tell us about the intellectual debts the Vorticist movement owed to West and to the feminist periodical culture with which she was associated. West composed her story in 1912–13, years when she was highly active as both contributor to and literary editor of Dora Marsden's The Freewoman (1911–12) and The New Freewoman (1913). In this article, I examine how the ‘energy’ promoted across BLAST aligned with feminist political conceptions of energy in Marsden's journals, and how these ideas were also shaped by early twentieth-century understandings of the universe, including theories of vortex motion, the ether, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. By paying close attention to the theme and metaphor of energy in ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, this article traces patterns of influence between West, Marsden, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis that reveal intersections between avant-guerre feminism and the Vorticist avant-garde.


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