Transatlantic Topographies

This first chapter explores the geographical and historical sweep of the modernist vertical imagination in both Europe and the Americas. It begins with comparisons between Franz Kafka’s imagined Amerika and Max Weber’s writings on the “spirit of capitalism” after traveling to the United States, as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptions of racial stratification and uplift after studying in Germany. From here, it considers the rise of American empire and capitalist culture in terms of industrial scale, vertical elevation, and the “technological sublime.” Key examples include Eugene Jolas’ Verticalist movement in relation to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in relation to the rise of New York City; major writings by Vicente Huidobro, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, George Oppen, and Claude McKay; and conceptions of racial stratification, uplift, and solidarity in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

Dictionary Poetics

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

Industrial Civilization for the Last Time: Class Relations

This chapter analyses in detail Straub-Huillet’s Kafka adaptation Class Relations, with special attention paid to language and power in the film and the filmmakers’ use of space, as this was their first film from which each scene was filmed from only one camera position. What this choice does to the place of the spectator in relation to the film’s protagonist is related to the poems George Oppen wrote in his Discrete Series, especially in his effacing the role of an “I” narrator.

Objectivity and Objectivities

This chapter defines what the concept of “objectivity” meant for Straub and Huillet and the history and recurrence of the term in modern literature. It details the history of the Objectivists, a group of formally radical, leftist, and mainly Jewish poets who emerged in 1930s America under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and whose major representatives include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. They received little attention in their time and only marginal attention decades later, but their working methods and philosophies are strikingly similar to the cinematic practices of Huillet and Straub.

The Objectivists

The Objectivist poets were a group of first- and second-generation modernist writers who emerged in the USA during the 1930s. The writers most commonly associated with the movement are Louis Zukofsky (who first used the term ‘objectivist’ to describe poetry), Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Charles Rakosi, the British poet Basil Bunting, and Lorine Niedecker (other poets, such as William Carlos Williams, however, were published under the banner of ‘objectivist’). Most objectivist writing was characterized by an attention to specific particulars and the belief that poems could be material or social objects. Beyond these broad tendencies, however, each writer associated with the movement offered different definitions of ‘objectivist,’ and developed divergent writing practices. Consequently, the term has historical, critical, and evolutionary implications, referring both to specific literary publications, a core of poets whose relationships and affinities continued beyond the early 1930s, and the many subsequent attempts by poets and critics to use ‘objectivist’ as a critical concept.