scholarly journals The Status of William Carlos Williams in American Modernism

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-63
Author(s):  
Laleh Atashi
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
American Poet ◽  
The Status ◽  
Poetic Diction

Abstract William Carlos Williams was an American poet who renounced poetic diction in favor of the unpoetic, establishing himself in American Modernism as a powerful voice distinct from such canonical contemporaries as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His attitude towards literary production was different from many of his contemporaries in that he believed ‘the idea is in the thing’ and therefore the presence of objects rather than abstractions is strongly felt in his poems. A critical survey of Williams’ poems indicates that the poet/physician observes, describes and levels criticism at his society where modernism has transformed the American identity in significant ways. In this article, American icons and popular culture are retraced in the poetry of William Carlos Williams in an effort to explain the seeming opacity of his poems.

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

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.

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.

scholarly journals «Roundabout I-VI» de Martín Gubbins o dos lecturas de lo ilegible

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-351
Author(s):  
Alethia Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
British Poetry

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.

scholarly journals Leaning Out in higher education: A structural, postcolonial perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Economic Sphere ◽  
The Status

A new kind of gender equality ideology is rising in popularity in Western societies. While emphasising gender equality for the next generation, this new ideology sees feminism in a pragmatic and simplistic way, as nonthreatening to the status quo, in politics, popular culture, and economy. In the economic sphere, Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” has become well known for aiming to guide women to succeed alongside men in the workplace by changing their behaviours and attitudes. Its recommendations for women have impacted perspectives in the non- rofit and start-up worlds, arts, and more. However, there are some limitations to the kind of feminist thinking exemplified by Lean In. This article critically examines Lean In as a discourse or ideology in relation to higher education within and outside Western societies. I argue first that such ideology employs a deficiency model of gender equality that makes women accountable for sexism by focusing on internal rather than external change. Second, I argue that such discourses essentialize gender. Third, I argue that it is not easy to translate the advice given to women across international contexts, as Lean In reflects cultural conceptions of the workplace.

Cutting-Edge Poetics: Roy Fisher's 'Language Book'

2000 ◽  
pp. 149-172
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Language Form ◽  
British Poetry ◽  
American Poet

Chapter six, written by Marjorie Perloff, focuses on the patterns in language, form and structure found in Fisher’s The Cut Pages. Perloff describes the uniqueness of the collection and defines its status as ahead of its time within both the American and British poetry sphere. Perloff additionally points out the potential insularity of Fisher’s poetry and outlines the difficulties he faced when attempting to bring in an American audience. The chapter also comments on Fisher’s prose and makes comparison to the American poet, William Carlos Williams.

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-213
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Great Depression

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.

White Rooms, Red Scare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Kosstrin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New Left ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Old Left ◽  
The Status ◽  
Concert Dance

Anna Sokolow’s early Cold War choreography cloaked social(ist) challenges to the status quo under the façade of American modernism. Lyric Suite (1953) laid bare sexual discontent in the guise of universal abstraction; Rooms (1954) portrayed gay people’s and Jews’ experiences among those of society’s untouchables in tenement houses; and the Opus series (1958–1965) cemented the political significance of the Old Left meeting the New Left through ironic uses of musical and movement elements drawn from jazz, as Africanist elements like these signaled a generalized Americanness. Sokolow’s assimilation into concert dance whiteness through these works’ critical reception and Israeli Bonds festivals reflected the American Jewish community’s postwar assimilation from racially marked to Caucasian. Sokolow’s work evidences roles played by leftist Jews in crafting definitive images of midcentury Americana as they publicly rewrote their 1930s leftist actions into normative postwar American activities in the wake of the Second Red Scare.

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