Renaissance of the Archaic

2020 ◽  
pp. 354-397
Author(s):  
Jed Rasula
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Human Hand ◽  
Indigenous Art ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Finnegans Wake

The wartime scene in New York continues with Finnegans Wake once again setting a precedent, this time for the Abstract Expressionists. It was a moment when they—like the European exiles among them—were exploring the indigenous art of the Americas and the unfathomable scope of the archaic revealed by successive discoveries in Europe of Paleolithic caves, from Altamira to Lascaux. They—along with the European exiles—found these discoveries existentially chastening, inspiring the insistence of poet Charles Olson on the “post-modern” urgency of a post-humanist outlook, recoverable in prehistory. As figuration receded from art, the aura of the symbol was invested in the titles of paintings, which were abuzz with terms like “night” and “archaic.” But a palpable symbol did emerge, not as artifice but as semiotic index in the form of the human hand.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

Performing Issy

At Fault ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
Sebastian D.G. Knowles
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Baseball Game ◽  
Boston Red Sox

The pedagogy of “outlaw teaching” is presented as a way of bringing risk into the classroom, as Joyce encourages us to do. Reading Ulysses aloud is one way of getting students to become familiar with risk-taking, and some tongue-in-cheek guidelines for such a reading are presented. An extended example of the benefits of such an approach is given with a reading of the “Night Lessons” chapter of Finnegans Wake, as a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, sometime prior to the selling of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Issy, the writer of the footnotes in this chapter, is rearticulated through narrative voicing as a baseball announcer, and the section takes on new life through the admittedly strained analogy of an inning-by-inning analysis of 20 pages of Finnegans Wake. The value of the enterprise is in its method: the author is modeling an approach to centrifugal reading that transforms the Wake into a reading game.

James Joyce's “Tilly”

PMLA ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-298
Author(s):  
Chester G. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Dim Light

In the introduction to his definitive edition of Chamber Music (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954) William York Tindall has shown us clearly that Joyce's poems are not so clear nor so “slight” as we once thought they were. One of the most enigmatic is “Tilly,” the opening poem of Pomes Penyeach. The best poem in that disappointing book, it has, like the rest of Joyce's work, one of its sources in Joyce's biography; and in part we can recover this source from Stephen Hero, the first attempt at A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Ruminants,” a hitherto unprinted early version of the poem, provides interesting insights into Joyce's technique as a versifier, and a study of the meaning of “Tilly” in relation to the Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake is fascinating for the dim light it throws on Joyce's progressively indirect and intricate handling of his themes.

The Last Years, 1967–1981

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 504-553
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Choral Works ◽  
Short Forms ◽  
Metropolitan Opera

During the last fifteen years of his life, Barber struggled with depression, alcoholism, and creative blocks. His publisher believed this was due to the reception of Antony and Cleopatra, but Barber’s annual pilgrimages to Europe had begun much earlier, and it was more likely that the forced sale of Capricorn, the home he and Menotti had shared for three decades, contributed to his low morale. The upheaval was equivalent to the dissolution of a marriage. Money from the Metropolitan Opera commission enabled him to build a chalet in Santa Cristina, where he spent most of his time. He did not withdraw from composing but turned to what had been most gratifying: writing vocal music in short forms, choosing biographically pointed texts reflecting a preoccupation with dark and quasi-religious themes. He produced the song cycle Despite and Still, two choral works, and Mutations from Bach for brass. He wrote Chorale for Ascension Day for the Washington National Cathedral and an elaborate work for chorus, vocal solos, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Lovers. A commission for the new Alcoa Hall in Pittsburgh resulted in Fadograph of a Yestern Scene, an orchestral piece inspired by a passage in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Barber composed Three Songs, op. 45, and in 1974 wrote a piano piece, Ballade. That commission allowed him to purchase an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. In the summer of 1978, he began a concerto for oboe and orchestra, but as his health worsened, he realized he would not be able to complete it and titled the single movement Canzonetta for Oboe and String Orchestra. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and in spite of chemotherapy, Barber died on January 23, 1981.

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