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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adamson, Walter L. "Futurism, Mass Culture, and Women: The Reshaping of the Artistic Vocation, 1909-1920." Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997): 89-114. Annotated by Taryn Norman.

Adamson outlines the aims for his article clearly in his introduction and proceeds to explore each of these under section headings. He argues his aims are "to clarify" the relationship of Futurism to modernism and mass culture, to explore how this interplays with our understanding of Futurism and gender, and finally, examine how F.T. Marinetti and fellow Futurists' art interacted with the mass market (90).

The article is careful to draw distinctions between the movements with which Adamson is concerned with – modernism, avant-garde and Futurism – thereby engaging this subject in a manner accessible to even the uninformed reader. He argues that whilst modernism "is committed to the autonomy of art…the avant-gardes are concerned with the aestheticization of life…drawing on mass-cultural elements" (90-91). Futurists intertwine themselves between these two concepts through their insistence on artistic autonomy which is centered in mass culture. Adamson offers the example of what he views as Marinetti's awareness that he need to cultivate a marketable public image, whilst not allowing his art to be reduced purely to its marketable value. Adamson argues that what Futurist's really desired was to "have matters both ways" (93-94) – a place and a market for their art, but one that was not considered to be "the arbiter of taste" (93) or that would prevent their art from critiquing bourgeois culture. Essentially, Futurists desired to redefine art and the artist within a consumer market they would control. Marinetti's attempt at this was in his move to "raise kitsch to art or, perhaps more accurately, to blend kitsch and art" so that both the artist and the consumer market would be satisfied (95).

Fundamental to Adamson's article is his exploration of the apparently contradictory relationship between Futurism and women. Futurism is associated with the masculine through its condolence of Fascism, yet it was a popular artistic form for women. Adamson states that this relationship is only traditionally considered contradictory due to a lack of critical attention that has persistently reduced Futurism's relationship to Fascism as telling of its misogyny. Through the example, again of Marinetti, Adamson challenges this claim by highlighting Marinetti's support of female emancipation. In a statement that is familiar to Mina Loy's words in Feminist Manifesto, Marinetti argues, in Mafarka le futurists, that he "want[s] to conquer the tyranny of love, the obsession with the unique woman, the romantic moonshine that baths the façade of the bordello" (103). Futurism's relationship with mass culture (typically "gendered as feminine") allowed for the opportunity to move the traditionally defined female away from sentimentalist connotations (89).

Although Adamson concludes by recognizing Futurism's failure to "reinvent mass culture in its own image and dominate it," he does pay credit to the mark it has left on modern culture. Marinetti's personal aim to redefine art and the artist was achieved, in Adamson's opinion, by its inclusion of women and subsequent validation of the worth of the female artist.

Blair, Sara. “Home Truths: Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant-Garde.” American Literary History 12.3 (2000 Fall): 417-37. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

De la part de qui venez-vous?

In her essay, “Home Truths: Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant-Garde,” Sara Blair attempts to explain how the physicality of space, particularly 27 Rue de Fleurus, influenced not only Stein’s work “If You Had Three Husbands,” but also the avant-garde or modernist movement as a whole. Blair posits that because 27 Rue de Fleurus was both a private, domestic space and a highly-social public space, a mecca where artists, bohemians, writers, friends and strangers gathered to exchange ideas or view art, the place itself should be considered a modernist object in which the avant-garde movement was, literally, given room to take shape.

The argument unfolds in three parts. First, Blair explores what it means to write “to” the imaginative and social space in which the act of writing or literary production takes place. She notes that Stein’s key insight as manifested in “Three Husbands” is the idea that the “sociotemporality of home,” or “bourgeois domesticity,” in both the private and public sense, is inherently linked to consumer culture, production, marketing and display. Second, Blair questions how to read the particularities and uniqueness of 27 Rue de Fleurus as a social forum in relation to other spaces of avant-garde cultural production, and in turn, how Stein participates in the revitalization or revision of “the salon.” In this way, Blair relates how Stein’s “Three Husbands,” “insists on the space of domestic modernity, where tissues of association, desire, and social promise swirl and coalesce,” thus blurring the distinctions between consumption and production or “domesticity and the public world of culture making.” Blair concludes her argument likening 27 Rue de Fleurus and Stein’s “Three Husbands” to the larger, cultural circuits of production and reception by critiquing the journal Broom, which the work was first published. Blair insinuates that both Stein’s writing and the intensions of the publication Broom itself strove to imagine the home as a place constantly reinvented and made new, creating a distinctive “site of experience” which allowed the avant-garde movement to flourish.

Although Blair’s article focuses specifically on 27 Rue de Fleurus, its subsequent relation to Stein’s “If You Had Three Husbands,” and the modernist movement overall, the article can be useful to those wishing to better understand how the geography and social significance of any place influences the production of cultural artifacts. I found Blair’s analysis intriguing, especially the idea that 27 Rue de Fleurus was, essentially, a private space in which public consumption was made visible, thereby creating a domestic space that not only nurtured social networking and exchange, but also marketing and consumerism. One could extend Blair’s argument into her/his thinking of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, if one wanted to further explore the significance of 27 Rue de Fleurus as both social and private space, or if one wanted to trace the possibility of The Autobiography as an advertisement for 27 Rue de Fleurus, Stein, her contemporaries and the whole of the avant-garde movement.

Blau, Amy. “The Artist in Word and Image in Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36: 2 (2003 June):129-44. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Self As Artist As Self

Amy Blau’s essay entitled, “The Artist in Word and Image in Gertrude Stein’s Dix Portraits,” explores how Stein constructs herself, as author, into the narrative of her livres d’artise, or literary portraits, to create a sense of immediate present in which she is both the observer and creator. In this way, Stein’s “Dix Portraits,” a collection of ten literary portraits and ten illustrations, including portraits by Stein and self-portraits by some of Stein’s subjects, not only calls attention to the presence of her subject as she “experiences” him, but also to Stein’s own process of understanding, writing and experiencing. Blau does note that Stein’s “Dix Portraits,” an interdisciplinary relation of the portrait in text and image, and Stein’s own self-presentation within her livres d’artise, has received little critical attention.

Blau unfolds her thoughts mainly through a critical analysis of Stein’s, “If I told him / a completed portrait of Picasso,” “Kristians Tonny,” and “More Grammar Genia Berman.” Yet underlying Blair’s critique is the notion that both the visual and literary portraits are self-referential in some way, and thereby call attention to the artistic process of creation and the artist’s role in his/her own process of understanding. In Stein’s portrait of Picasso, Blau reveals that Stein intentionally meant to assert herself as Picasso’s creative equal—that both Stein and Picasso were geniuses of the same caliber, able to bring meaning to matter, although working in different artist mediums—in order to position herself within her own writing of Picasso. Stein explores a different set of ideas in “Kristians Tommy.” As Blau relates, both in Stein’s literary portrait of Tonny and Tonny’s own self portrait, the subject is de-centered and fragmented thereby eliminating the notion of a main figure or subject altogether. Stein’s portrait of Berman, Blau surmises, investigates the difficult relationship between words and image. By this Blau means to assert Stein’s understanding that some things cannot be created in words.

This article is very insightful and quite a pleasure to read, as Blau attempts to correlate both the visual and literary art movements to create an interdisciplinary dialogue. Though Blau centers her discussion on Stein’s work, “Dix Portraits,” the essay would be useful to anyone wishing to explore aspects of Stein’s genius, such as her narrative technique, her connection to visual imagery or her role as facilitator to an inter-arts dialogue. The article would also help those wishing to further understand or research Stein’s relationships to Picasso, Genia Berman and Kristians Tonny, not to mention Stein’s own image of herself as a writer.

Bloom, Lynn Z. “Gertrude Is Alice Is Everybody: Innovation and Point of View in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiographies.” Twentieth Century Literature 24.1 (1978): 81-93. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

Bloom endeavors to explain the presentation of Gertrude Stein through Stein’s writing of Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography. The article explains some of the narrative consequences that result from telling one’s life story through the filter of another person in a non-fiction text. Bloom’s work would be useful to anyone interested in point of view in Stein’s writing or, more generally, in issues of narrative perspective in modern literature.

Bloom argues that there are three primary ways in which Stein’s point of view works in The Autobiography. Stein’s narration of Toklas’s perception of Stein effects an illusory minimalization of Stein’s ego. Since Stein uses Toklas “vantriloquistically,” as Bloom would say, Stein is free to control what Toklas would say about her; thus, Stein can present herself exactly as she wants, simultaneously satisfying her ego and making her role in her presentation appear nonexistent. This displacement of the narrator’s ego marks a change from traditional autobiography, where ego is very overt—after all, the subject normally discourses on him or herself for the length of the text. According to Bloom, Stein’s ego is apparently further lessened, perhaps surprisingly, by Stein’s use of her full name where the pronoun “I” would normally appear in a standard autobiography. While the reader is inundated by the appearance of the name “Gertrude Stein,” the use of Stein’s full name objectifies her, thereby distancing her from the side of narration in the work.

The second significant result of Stein’s use of Toklas’s perspective, according to Bloom, is that we see Toklas apparently “interpreting” Stein. This interpretation is how countless of Stein’s value judgments, mindsets, and opinions make their way into The Autobiography. Since it is ostensibly Toklas interpreting Stein in the text, the reader is not alienated by the dominating presence of the autobiographical subject and feels able to accept Toklas’s perspectives.

The third major effect of the unique point of view in The Autobiography is the multi-faceted objectification of Stein. Were Stein writing her own autobiography, she could not be as selective with events in her life and as deliberately unimpassioned about certain experiences as she can by narrating through Toklas. Typical autobiographers are compelled, for a variety of reasons, to share issues with the reader that they may rather not share, but Stein can avoids autobiographical convention because she doesn’t establish a genre-based contract with the reader. We can assume that Toklas doesn’t know Stein as well as Stein knows herself, so we don’t question the fact that there are generalizations made about Stein at times—these vague spots, though, are where Stein skirts certain issues.
Bloom’s very readable article provides a rich starting point for the scholar considering questions of narrativity in Stein’s work. While Bloom focuses on the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she also mentions Stein’s other autobiographies and the similarities and differences among them. Bloom’s discussion does not feel like it resolves any textual questions, but it does offer an accessible means of approaching The Autobiography.

Castronuovo, Antonio. “Rrose Selavy and the Erotic Gnosis.” Tout-fait 2.5 (April 2003).
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/castronuovo/castronuovo.html. Annotated by Christopher Fritton.

Castronuovo begins the article with a short chronology of works by Marcel Duchamp that (at the direction of the artist) were attributed to Rrose Selavy. Anemic Cinema is the most important of these pieces; it is a series of nine black disks inscribed with spiralling white words. These disks were filmed by Man Ray as they spun – the phrases of Rrose Selavy came to life in a sensual pirouette, one that included bon-mots, senseless phrases that were constructed to sound peculiarly suggestive and explicit. Castronuovo goes on to give a thorough account of the origins of Rrose, even pinpointing the moment in 1920 when Duchamp signed a Picabia painting as the instant “Rose” was transformed into “Rrose.” Initially, the transformation is seen simply as the addition of another “I,” a femalian artist that would facilitate a different mode of production, a counterpart to Duchamp’s masculine sensibilities. It plays with the notion that a linguistic shift could cause a modal shift, but the result Castronuovo notices is quite different. For Duchamp, the creation of Rrose was “a safety net” allowing him to “pass through all mirrors,” however, the shift that took place in the perspective of the observer revealed that “only woman can make herself understood without recourse to meaning, as in Rrose’s aphorisms.” Rrose was allowed freedoms that Duchamp may not have been – but they weren’t freedoms that transformed production, they were freedoms that allowed art to escape the scrutiny inherent in consumption.
There is a paradox, however, in Rrose, and it issues from androgyny. Her phrases, bon-mots especially, are impregnable, but she is not. Meaning can germinate within her language, but not within her. So she provides linguistic possibility but reproductive sterility. Castronuovo regards this sterility disparagingly, because Duchamp feared repetition – if Rrose’s phrases are impregnable, but she, as a mode of production is sterile, she is doomed to repeat herself, reproduce herself linguistically. Duchamp reportedly quit painting for this very reason, “when he was questioned about it, he always replied in the same way.” It must be noted that this sterility is not the same sterility envisioned by Leotard in his essay Acinema, “a simple sterile difference in an audiovisual field” (Lyotard 170). This a necessary sterility, the kind that makes all visual contrast possible, therefore, all vision. Castronuovo continues on, comparing the “sterile celibacy of Rrose’s sayings” with Giordano Bruno (to no avail). Finally, Duchamp’s choice to remain sterile is recognized by Castronuovo as a free choice, “he elects to be sterile and leaves the multiplication of nothing to be performed by the fertile…others.”

Castronuovo concludes the article by introducing the notion of gnostic optics, or optical gnosticism, and then tries to expand this into the concept of erotic gnosis, or erotic gnosticism. Beyond catch phrases, these ideas are given a superficial glossing which is heightened by Castronuovo’s constant references to the phrases of Rrose Selavy, because throughout the course of the article he doesn’t provide a single example.

This article would be particularly useful for those interested in theories of reproduction, sterility, androgyny, and how they relate to cultural production. It is often digressive and the argumentation and analysis are insubstantial, but in its defense it incorporates interesting bits of anecdotal history that can be useful as a springboard for further discussion.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1980. 245-264. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

In this manifesto, Cixous implores women to write. The essay demands attention because of its sincerity, because it is concerned only with writing’s role in feminism and suggesting that through writing, women can erode some of the world’s most enduring and complicated patriarchal systems. Cixous aligns herself in this essay with “radical” French feminism, in the sense that she is committed to a socialist project of working out feminist problems from a theoretical standpoint. Her work is both provocative and exciting to read, but it is conceivable that the reader unfamiliar with the history of French feminism would resist the essay’s bold commands and often intangible theoretical arguments.
Cixous argues that women’s writing has historically been done in private. Women have written for themselves only to “take the edge off,” just as one would masturbate to release tension, she asserts. Cixous feels that woman must write woman and man should write man (247). She is adamant that women writers have been repressed by male political economies, indicating that woman has never been able to truly express herself, and women’s writing has been “marked” by this systematic repression. Cixous admits that some men have, in good faith, tried to represent non-repressed woman in writing, but these efforts have failed because non-repressed woman cannot exist in actual social systems; thus it happens that Cixous makes the following fragmented argument: “Only the poets—not the novelists, allies of representationalism” (250). She continues by stating that poetry works through the unconscious, where the repressed can survive. Here we understand that if woman begins to write herself—her body—into existence, she will end her repression and supplant established pallocentric symbolic systems.

While Cixous is quick to reveal a variety of problems with the patriarchal tradition of writing, her argument doesn’t always seem fully developed, which suggests a sense of impulsiveness in her work. We see this, for example, when she asserts that “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing” but concedes that feminine writing will always be characterized by circumnavigation of phallocentric linguistic systems (253). We learn that Cixous wants to abandon conventional syntax because it’s a male creation—so if this happens, feminine writing is occurring. This argument denies the possibility of a male who discards syntax, but Cixous would likely argue that when a woman breaks syntax, she is writing with her body, and if a male breaks syntax, he is still working with his phallus, simply reorienting language and creating new boundaries with his penis, or “centralized body” (259).
As she approaches the end of her essay, Cixous becomes explicitly dialogical, and it is increasingly evident that her writing performs the very type of syntactic breach she champions. For example, Cixous starts each paragraph—each micro-argument, really—almost in medias res. Stylistically, this technique brings a sense of urgency to both the work and the cause for which Cixous is writing.

Dunn, Susan E. “Fashion Victims: Mina Loy’s Travesties.” Stanford Humanities Review 7.1 (1999): 101-17. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

Mina Loy’s Fashion Poems

Dunn’s essay presents close readings of Mina Loy’s poems tiled, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-1925), “Mass Production on 14th Street” (1942), “On Third Avenue” (1942), and “Chiffon Velours” (1947) as each relates to the industrial world of fashion and the concept of “travesty” or the “parodic imitation of disguise” (a recurring theme in Loy’s work). Loy believed fashion was a medium that could be used to cross boundaries, not just of gender but of aesthetics and was thus an important aspect of her work (101). Building on Duchamp’s idea of the “ready-made” both in her poetry and personal aesthetic, Loy designed her own articles of clothing and accessories—which suggested incongruity, deceit therefore travesty—the most famous being an earring fashioned from a store-bought thermometer.

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

In this poem, Dunn suggests that Loy uses fashion to explore the ways in which subjects can be hemmed in by cultural patterns of femininity, masculinity, and bourgeois gentility (102). Loy posits that one dresses in a particular way to assume an identity formed by the culture at large. Therefore, the fashion industry uses the human body to construct “useful” subject positions as one must literally “purchase” the identity she or he wishes to assimilate; clothing becomes an economy of desire (103). The body is clothed in such as way as to disguise itself; thus, the body is a part of fashion’s constructions (102-3).

Mass Production on 14th Street

Dunn describes this poem as focusing on commodities and the shoppers who are lured into consumption by department store window displays. Loy uses the city as metaphor for the Garden of Eden, with items appearing in window displays akin to Eve’s forbidden fruit subsequently leading women into temptation and robotic dispositions. Juxtaposing industrialization and nature in this way, Loy is able to make a clear distinction between “the worker” and the “resulting product.” However, the “window-shoppers” in Loy’s poem look but do not buy anything; therefore, inhabiting the city, for Loy, is less about avoidance (non-consumption) than it is about how to become an effective consumer. Thus, one must take in all aspects of the economy (107); one must be aware of the patriarchal structures of the fashion industry—sweat-shop labor—while also being abreast of the latest creations from designers (107).

On Third Avenue

Loy’s “On Third Avenue” is an elegy divided into two parts and examines the salvages of the garment industry, what was left over or otherwise discarded (107). She depicts Third Avenue as an “inferno of neon red light and walking dead (108),” insinuating that the garment district has turned into a wasteland of sorts, and thus she uses it as a metaphor for anti-productivity (108).

Chiffon Velours

Dunn writes, “Chiffon Velours becomes ones of Loy’s most hopeful poems by presenting the image of an old woman as the symbol of the dynamic interplay between oppression and subversion in fashion (109).” The old woman, dressed in youth, resists her body’s connection to age and death. Loy creates a dialogue between the fashion institution and the body of the aging woman (110). Yet the woman is dressed in garments she made herself from purchased fabric, and in this way she models a “ready-made” creation, thus demonstrating how for Loy fashion can be a tactical maneuver in the practices of everyday life (110).

This article was great to read, although the focus was more on Loy’s use of fashion and the fashion industry in the aforementioned poems rather that how she, herself, utilized clothing to construct her own identity (which, of course would have been juicier). As Dunn’s essay is a close reading of specific Loy poems, it would be useful to anyone wanting to study the particular poems in greater detail. The article would also help anyone wishing to understand how Loy put Duchamp’s concept of the “ready-made” into both her poetic and artistic practice. Perhaps the essay would be enlightening to those who would like to research Mina Loy’s commentary on industrialization, capitalism, and social injustices, especially as pertaining to women and immigrant workers.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Sub Rrosa.” The Pink Guitar. New York: Routledge, 1990. 68-82. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s chapter entitled “Sub Rrosa” from her book The Pink Guitar is a provocative read for an avid fan of Duchamp or anyone interested in an analysis of the viewer/subject relationship or feminist discourse. The structure of the “essay” is nontraditional, and in her “Acknowledgments” section at the beginning of the book, DuPlessis explains that her goal in writing these essays, particularly with consideration to feminist thought, is to make her writing “non-objective, polyvocal... most speculative and most uncontainable, most meditative and most passionate... colloquial and yet intense” (vii). She insists on an experimental medium because a more conventional one would reinforce patriarchal thought. In other words, she utilizes an innovative mode of writing in order to break new ground (like Duchamp).

As a result, the essay reads differently from an orthodox critical essay, yet accomplishes the same goals and includes an added element of poetic, authorial voice. Abandoning conventional syntax, the essay is peppered with fragments, and she poses as many questions as she answers. She also includes pieces of poems between discussions of Duchamp’s piece, weaving her own response to the work in and out of her essay, embracing subjectivity.

The essay itself describes in detail and discusses Duchamp’s installation piece entitled Etant Donne, as seen in the Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum. Briefly said, the piece involves the viewer walking into a dark room off the main gallery and finding a heavy barn door built into the wall (with no hinges) at the end of the room. As the viewer approaches the door, there are two peepholes that look into a diorama comprising of an idyllic scene with a mood lighting, a waterfall, and in the foreground a lump of wax resembling a naked woman holding a lamp with gender icons: one breast, legs open, and a clump of blonde hair. DePlessis contends that in this piece Duchamp defies the park structure of the museum and renegotiates the power dynamic of spectator/voyeur and subject, voyeur because the viewer inevitably feels in violation of privacy.

She also claims that Duchamp challenges our spurious possessiveness of art as the audience because we cannot enter the piece, even through the door frames it. Yet a powerful paradox exists here in that the spectator is both powerful, instinctively objectifying the woman, and powerless, a humiliated Peeping Tom of erotica. Besides covering the multiple cultural and allusive icons that this piece invokes , she focuses on the asymmetrical, curved gash signifying a vulva because it assaults the viewer’s glance immediately. Through a series of questions, opinions, and poems, she asks whether or not a spectator can approach this piece as a female and how a piece can be at once erotic, sacrificial and punitive. Overall, this was a worthwhile piece to read with a novel mix of poetic and analytic response. Although DuPlessis focuses entirely on one piece of artwork, she raises many integral questions relevant to the domains of art and feminist theory.

Dydo, Ulla E. “The Voice of Gertrude Stein.” Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003. 11-22. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Ulla E. Dydo’s chapter entitled “The Voice of Gertrude Stein” from her larger work Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises is an impressive introduction to the complicated language of Stein. Covering some of the most important, basic elements of Stein’s writing, she breaks it down into sections on publication, her use of “naked words,” and both the contextualization and decontextualization of her works.
She starts out showering us with many common questions about Stein’s work, assuming that the reader has had at least nominal exposure to some of it. Immediately she establishes that although most readers have a difficult time fitting Stein into their definitions of genres, Stein saw herself as a poet, playwright and novelist. As a result, Stein challenges our notions of genre as well as grammatical structure. The outrage readers expressed upon reading Stein, blaming her for their incomprehension, bestows us with great insight into our reliance on normative structures cemented over hundreds of years of readership that Stein attempts to shatter with relentless ventures to publish nearly ever piece she ever produced.

Dydo goes on to outline Stein’s project in greater detail. She contends that Stein’s greatest nemesis was writers using words carelessly in the same way without cognizance of their precise meanings, which lead to lack of perception. Stein attacks this lackluster relationship with words with her new compositional form. As Dydo writes, “For her, questioning the forms of perception went with questioning the forms of language” (15). Stein accomplishes this, Dydo explains, through a persistent repetition of words that eventually releases the word from its reference and makes it an entity unto itself. However, Stein did not create a new vocabulary, but rather break down words to launch new grammatical structures, such as “disappoint meant.” By deconstructing words, repeating them, and punning them she refuses to let language settle down and “for Stein, every word is a repository of ideas and unexpected possibilities” (17).

After Stein strips the words down, Dydo maintains, she employs them in dissettling, unfamiliar ways, making and remaking the meanings of words. As a result, Stein erects a new language of democracy, rebelling against the patriarchal, hierarchical, prescriptive form. The focus is on essence rather than detail, leaving out proper names, a testament to our assigning such importance on names. With the intentional absence of details, Dydo states, Stein is not concealing but rather “constructive,” as the composition determines the subject, not the other way around (18). The final point Dydo makes regarding Stein’s writing involves the interesting tension formed as the reader is compelled to both gaze outwardly through her frequent referencing and inwardly at the design with its immediacy in construction.

This chapter reads easily for a novice reader of Stein, and covers many important premises and goals of her writing. It projects her writing through the feminist lens, and covers the significant arenas of grammar, internal/external friction, and compositional form. On the other hand, for a more learned Stein scholar, it would appear far too perfunctory in nature.

Galvin, Mary E. “‘This shows it all’: Gertrude Stein and the Reader’s Role in the Creation of Significance.” Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport: Praeger, 1999. 37-50. Annotated by Kristin Stelmok

After a curt dismissal of outdated “heterosexist” interpretations of Stein’s oeuvre at the beginning of this chapter, Mary Galvin quickly shifts her position to a seemingly paradoxical dismissal of lesbian readings of Stein. The most common of these readings, which interprets Stein’s writing as filled with encrypted messages to her lover, Alice B. Toklas, is, according to Galvin, also the most hostile to Stein’s actual poetic endeavor:

… the major shortcoming of this [the lesbian hermeneutical] method is that it rests on principles that are antithetical not only to Stein’s approach to composition, but also to her articulation of a nonhierarchically based lesbian existence. (39)

Galvin argues that a consideration of Stein’s antihierarchical project would instead suggest that Stein invites the reader into her writing and even into her relationship. Galvin supports her argument in two ways: first, by emphasizing the different ways in which Stein subverts the patriarchal and hierarchical literary traditions, largely through her disobedience to/of grammatical conventions; and second, by using a specific example of Stein’s work to illuminate just how Stein discourages an encoded interpretation and instead encourages an “intersubjectivity” between the reader, the text, and the lesbian couple themselves. It is through this intersubjectivity, Galvin argues, that Stein breaks down the traditionally hierarchical separation between author and reader, thereby creating a truly “democratic” text.

Galvin’s argument begins with her denial that Stein employs any kind of “coding.” Such writing is what the reader expects, as a part of our literary tradition, and, according to Galvin, Stein’s rejection of this structure denies such a hierarchy (which Galvin explains would give the author a “mastery” of the text unavailable to the average reader). Galvin identifies Stein’s abandonment of such literary techniques as linear temporality, complex diction, and dependence on nouns and adjectives, indeed, an abandonment of “representationality” itself as evidence that “Stein also sought to establish a nonhierarchical relation to her readers” (44). In abandoning these overly literate conventions that might alienate the less sophisticated reader, “Stein considered her writing to be accessible to anyone who would listen” (42).

This Galvin proves rather successfully in an examination of what she argues is Stein’s most overtly lesbian poem, “Lifting Belly.” Galvin chooses this, a very public poem about the relationship between Alice and Gertrude to prove that it is not Stein’s intention to alienate her readers from her writing or her relationship (after all, Galvin reminds us that “[i]n her personal life, Stein was not ‘in the closet.’… There is little reason to assume she was closeted in her writing” [42]). Instead, “Lifting Belly,” both in its subject matter and in its decidedly nonhierarchical poetic structure, invites a very democratic reading. “Throughout “Lifting Belly,” Stein is not trying to exclude the reader, but to create a shared linguistic space” (48 – my italics).

This article offers a convincing and well-constructed argument against a complacent of reading of Stein as an unwitting defender of the patriarchical literary tradition. It would be useful to any scholar of the postpatriarchal tradition in postmodernism.

Graham, Theodora R. “ ‘Her Heigh Compleynte’: The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.” Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983. 164–193. Annotated by Kevin Davies.

Graham’s paper is concerned with Williams’s use, in books I and II of Paterson, of letters he received in 1942 and ’43 from the poet Marcia Nardi (1904–1990), the ways in which the original letters differ from Williams’s use of them, and what Williams’s quotations and revisions reveal about his view of women in general and Nardi in particular. The paper’s appearance predates by eleven years the publication of all surviving letters between Williams and Nardi (Elizabeth Murrie O’Neil, ed., The Last Word: Letters between Marcia Nardi and William Carlos Williams, U of Iowa P, 1994); Graham conducted her research in three different archives and interviewed the elderly Nardi.

Graham shows persuasively that both Nardi herself and the use Williams made of her letters were crucially important to Williams’s conception of the poem, and that Williams’s ambivalence to Nardi is similar to his ambivalence to women in general. Additionally, many parts of Nardi’s letters reveal a strong feminist analysis not acknowledged as such. Graham’s close reading of the omissions Williams made of parts of Nardi’s letters shows that these omissions serve to alter the letters’ tone and make it appear that Nardi has a less than sure grasp of reality. The results of Williams’s deletions include: the diminishing of his own involvement with Nardi; significant oversimplification of Nardi’s ideas; and a more whiny and unreasonable cast to the character “Cress” than is evident in the character that emerges from the original letters. Furthermore, what Graham characterizes as the “interesting continuity” of one letter is destroyed by Williams’s editing, which, furthermore, dilutes Nardi’s contrast of male writers’ relative privilege to her own situation. Also, additions to this same letter — “references to sex appeal and the right set” (181) — appear to completely alter the character of the letter writer, tending to “weaken” the character that emerges in his poem; Graham asserts, as well, that this weakening is thematically related to certain aspects of Paterson. In particular, Nardi’s original letters note Williams’s relative social (petit-bourgeois) insulation and highlight his conflicted relation to “bohemia.” Graham also notes that in the same issue of the New Directions Annual in which Nardi’s (Williams-sponsored) poems appear, Williams reviews Anais Nin’s Winter of Artifice, wherein he argues (more than a little incoherently) that there are different subject matters appropriate to men and women due to their differing roles in the reproductive cycle. Graham further argues that despite Williams’s changes to the letters, and despite the greatly differing critical response to his inclusion of them in Paterson, “the final arrangement [. . .] represents one of the most tenuous balances between art and life in modern poetry” (187); the reader is left to infer that this fact alone makes the issue appropriate for further scholarly analysis and debate.

This paper will be of crucial interest to Paterson scholars and to Williams scholars generally, as well as to the tiny tribe of Nardi scholars. Feminist scholars and students of women’s social history might find this a useful introduction to Nardi’s complete letters. Anais Nin scholars might find Graham’s discussion of Williams’s review worth a footnote.

Gregory, Elizabeth. “Figures of Williams’s Modernist Ambivalence: Poetic Lineage and Lesbians in Paterson.” William Carlos Williams Review 21:2 (1995): 37-58. Annotated by Brent Griffin.

In response to a conceived trend in Williams studies crediting him with “an enlightened relativism” in relation to all centralized systems of authority, Gregory attempts to qualify Williams’s challenge specific to gender hierarchies. Arguing Williams’s relativism is both interested and ambivalent, Gregory examines Williams’s Paterson to illuminate the ways in which “his choice of poetic heirs…and the lesbian figures that Williams introduces into the poem serve as representatives of his ambivalence."

After first laying out the claim that Williams’s relativist position grew out of his position as a post-Romantic, an American, and a modern, Gregory moves to argue that his works betrays a commitment to denying the relevance of hierarchies in which the notion of the ‘secondary’ is implicit (i.e. cultural, gender, and aesthetic hierarchies where the secondary is of ‘less value’ than the primary). As the Romantics valued artistic originality, Williams, Gregory argues, moves to an aesthetic of “pointed unoriginality”, explicitly demonstrated by his use of quotations in Paterson; the quotation being both an attempt at rejecting the hierarchy of originality and a revaluing of the secondary. The effort being, Gregory claims, is not Williams’s desire to create a new Williamsian hierarchy but to call an entire set of related hierarchic structures into question.

Despite Williams’s noted effort to “undo” hierarchy, Gregory’s major claim throughout is that Paterson betrays ambivalence in relation to traditional hierarchies and a new system. In other words, in Paterson Gregory claims to detect a reluctance on Williams’s part to abandon the notion of hierarchies particularly as sources of value. Williams was privy to specific pleasures and privileges of certain hierarchies (i.e. as a male within a traditional gender structure, aesthetic aspirations to originality, and cultural identification), and the challenge to hierarchy meant he was faced with a threat “to all that is familiar along with all that offends.” For Gregory, Williams’s ambivalence in relation to changes to traditional hierarchies is most prevalent in his treatment of gender in Paterson.

That Williams moves in Paterson to overturn gender hierarchies by granting a voice to women writers, is nonetheless problematized to the extent that Williams still judges within the traditional framework that views the feminine as secondary. Williams is capable of locating the value of the feminine in the male, but apparently cannot or does not locate the value of the masculine within the female. For Gregory, Paterson’s poetic filiation, namely its representation of a pattern of succession, demonstrating a shift from female heir to male heir (i.e. Nardi to Ginsburg) betrays an ambivalence toward authority (Williams removes all parental models beside himself) and gender dehierarchization—an ambivalence that manifests itself further through the appearance of lesbians in the poem which complicates patterns of sexual relations and inheritance; working, Gregory argues, to balance the “insistent macho stance adopted at other points in the poem.”

While most of Gregory’s article carefully lays out her notion of ambivalence and its manifestations in Williams’s Paterson, her discussion of lesbians as examples of Williams’s ambivalence toward the transformations he proposes is much less clear. Instead, her discussion of lesbian figures points primarily to their significance in challenging traditional gender distinctions—the ambivalence on Williams’s part is hard to locate in her argument. Furthermore, Gregory assumes Dr. Paterson’s position is representative of Williams’s own which certainly demands a bit of skepticism. In the end, Gregory presents a fairly convincing and compelling argument that suggests the difficulty Williams seems to have found with the complications of destroying hierarchical systems and the way a new system would be able to argue for its own value without implying the notion of the secondary. This would be a valuable source to anyone working on a close reading Paterson, or anyone working on exploring the implications behind relativist positions and dehierarchization.

Hopkins, David. “Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity.” Art History 21.3 (1998 September): 303-23. Annotated by Silvana Costa.

_O__IM/MIRROR

The essay entitled, “Men before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity,” examines the ways in which Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray construct and subsequently blur gendered identity in both their respective and collaborative works of art. Hopkins focuses his critique primarily on the ‘readymade’ titled Men Before the Mirror (1934), a book created by Duchamp (and his feminine counter-identity Rrose Sélavy) to showcase Man Ray’s Photographs by Man Ray 1920, as well as short texts crafted by various Dadaist or Surrealist writers such as André Breton and Paul Eluard. However, Hopkins also devotes particular critical attention to certain thematic links of male subjectivity underpinning Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), and his L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) in an attempt to trace how and why Duchamp encodes “gendered reversals” in his artistic practice overall.

The article begins with a Freudian analysis of both Duchamp’s Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. as “bi-gendered” or hermaphroditic works of art, as a way to introduce Hopkins’ larger argument. Hopkins notes that while the urinal, Fountain, clearly addresses “male needs,” it also evokes forms of the Holy Virgin or the female vulva, and in this way “castrates” the object’s masculinity. Hopkins' analysis of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, the Mona Lisa as transvestite, makes reference to a similar idea. Hopkins writes that the L.H.O.O.Q., “characterizes a particular fetishistic/homosexual formation of male-gendered sexual identity vis-à-vis its castrated ‘other’ (femininity) at the Oedipal moment” (306). In this way, Hopkins posits that the idea of the phallus is always present in Duchamp’s works, even if the phallus is not overtly referenced or becomes sublimated by the work of art itself; therefore, Hopkins claims that the notion of male subjectivity underlies Duchamp’s artistic creations and “gendered reversals.”

Building on his earlier claims, Hopkins’ critique of Men Before the Mirror begins with a discussion of “authorial duplicity.” Hopkins states that because Duchamp implicitly blurs the gender of the author of the work—from Duchamp, himself, to Rrose Sélavy—readers are prevented from having a secure position from which to determine the author’s “authority.” It can be inferred, then, that the photographic images and written text presented in the book also encode a similar type of gender reversal, albeit at the “submerged level.” This is most apparent, Hopkins notes, in Man Ray’s photograph of Gertrude Stein—the last photograph in a series of photographs of women—which appears opposite to the written text titled “Men Before the Mirror.” Stein’s photograph is significant in that it is “mannish” and thus initiates the shift from female to male gendered identity in the book. A photograph of Barbette, a female impersonator of the 1920’s, is equally significant in that it initiates the other end of the gender reversal process, this time moving from male to female gendered identity. Hopkins reveals that Duchamp and Man Ray’s play on gender produces a “mirrored effect” in which gender identity becomes altogether reversed and therefore blurred.

This article was complex, but insightful. Hopkins, it appears, utilizes the psychoanalytic method of critique and this works well given his subject matter. Although Hopkins’ thesis anchors itself in the fact that “male subjectivity” pervades Duchamp’s work, the article ends by stating that there may, after all, “be a (kind of) woman in this [Men Before the Mirror] text” (319). What I think he means by this, as made clear in an earlier paragraph, is that the structural order of photographs and text as they appear in Men Before the Mirror favors the female who “secretly possesses the phallus” (319); thus Hopkins’ original claim that “male subjectivity” underpins Duchamp’s work would hold “true.” Hopkins’ makes many side arguments concerning Duchamp’s “rayographs,” his obsession with secondary sex characteristics—as in bodily hair removal and transplantation—and his somewhat tumultuous feelings about Gertrude Stein, which I could not include in my annotation. The article would be useful to anyone interested in further exploring the idea of gender reversal or blurring, Freudian analysis of Duchamp and Man Ray’s works of art, and Duchamp’s use of anonymity—as both artist and author.

Johnson, Bob. “A Whole Synthesis of His Time: Political Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William Carlos Williams, 1929-1939.” American Quarterly 54.2 (2002): 179- 215. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

Bob Johnson, primarily a historian, gives an overview of the political, social and aesthetic positions of William Carlos Williams during the Depression era. Although predominantly historical in nature, this 36 page article does discuss at some length WCW’s writing as a product in light of his political and cultural ideologies in the context of the Great Depression. The modern artist, Johnson purports, was faced with a new task in the 30s; “having promulgated a rhetoric of aesthetic revolution throughout the 1920s, the modernist moving into the Depression found him or herself being challenged to adapt that rhetoric to the context of economic scarcity and radical politics” (180). Writers were forced by the public and their own to be more overtly political, and as a result Johnson claims that the Depression diversified, rather than dampened, modern art.

Although WCW was clear in his writing practices, such as diction and enjambment choices, he was mostly equivocal in his political and social stances. But this notion buttresses Johnson’s principal thesis, that “[t]his characteristic of William’s work in the 1930s reveals more about American political consciousness and culture during the Depression than can be explained by standing histories of the culture and politics of the period” (181). By outlining many of WCW’s short stories, political and medical articles, poems, and even an operetta, Johnson comphrehensively reveals the eclectic nature of WCW’s social and political responses to the time period, manifested in subjects such as inter-racial consummation, transvestites, homosexuals, and the severely impoverished as well as in techniques such as linguistic, psychological and cultural stream-of-consciousness.

Johnson offers some insightful theories regarding the drastic changes going on at the time, stating that “radical politics shifted the focus of modern art away from ontological alienation and formal innovation and toward the documentation and inscription of a constellation of images that Williams would have termed ‘the low’ (184). Williams and others could not ignore the segmentation and diversity of America at this time of crisis, and Williams found himself often torn between two polarities. Also, Johnson contends, during the Depression the role of the writer/artist was extremely important and this high status served as a rejuvenation for modernist writers, propelling them beyond their threadbare innovations with an incitement of political consciousness and a defamiliarization of language to appear exotic and revelatory.

Johnson details some of WCW political alliances, but also targets the important changes in his writing. Although WCW developed sensibilities for “the low” in life, his intention changed from testing the bourgeois palate to creating a heightened social and political awareness. Concluding on an important note, Johnson maintains that one of the most significant contributions WCW made at this time was his inability to synthesize the American experience, and it is precisely through techniques such as his collages, fragments, juxtapositions, and “constellations of images” that we are able to view the multifarious picture of the time. This article was useful in contextualizing some of WCW’s works, and though history-heavy was quite relevant to the issues of writers at the time. He gives a thorough portrait of a specific time, covering all genres of WCW’s work in the 1930s.

Johnston, Georgia. “Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996): 590-606. Annotated by Lucas Hardy.

Johnston’s argument suggests that the reader can relate to The Autobiography in two ways. One possibility is that the reader finds the narrative extending itself beyond the borders traditionally established by autobiography through the exploration of intertextual references. This act leads to reading what Johnston calls “the intimate text.” This event occurs as Stein’s references to other texts and artworks introduce additional narratives, proposing a vast number of narrative combinations that inhibit textual unification. The Autobiography is intimate in the sense that thoroughly considering and ultimately understanding these outside references will yield a reading similar to one that Stein or Toklas would experience; this notion is what sets an intertextual reading of The Autobiography apart from intertextual readings of other works void of personal reference.

Johnston also argues, conversely, that The Autobiography can be read as a “text for strangers,” where intertextuality is not considered and the reader stays within the boundaries of the provided text. The stranger’s text makes the reader “consumed while perceiving him- or herself as controlling the permutations of the unified text” (592). The “stranger” feels that he can locate and understand all possible narrative combinations and reach a unified whole by working with a limited textual economy.
One complicated component of the argument is the presentation of “oedipal reading,” a reading in which, according to Johnston, a subject masters an unknowing object. She says that “In The Autobiography, mastery exists on the level of generic production” (595). It’s unclear, though, whether this is a mastery of the autobiography itself by the reader or rather a mastery of Toklas by Stein, which gives the text its genre.

There is further complication of the oedipal reading concept when Johnston presents the possibility of a “male text,” or a work that “binds, masters, delays, services, and discharges,” against the oedipal text that finds resolution through “a return to origin.” The relationship of the oedipal text to the male text is unclear; it is difficult to determine whether the two types of reading stand in binary opposition to one another or whether these are only two among several gender-oriented reading possibilities. But regardless of this confusion, Johnston explicitly says that an oedipal reading will not yield the intimate text, since the oedipal reading seeks resolution from within the text. Johnson seemingly feels compelled to introduce the oedipal reading possibility to give her propositions credibility, but she only renames her concept of the “reading for strangers.”

Johnston, Georgia. “Narratologies of Pleasure: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 42:3 (1996 Fall), 590-606. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Johnston’s article explores the operation of “a new economy of reading” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (hereafter cited as AABT), an economy that produces a doubling of reading positions. Stein presents a text that “can be read as if unified and bounded by its textual frame and a text that can be read as if it were the origin of a web of other readings” extending beyond the boundary of AABT (591). Johnston identifies the first type of reading as one in which the reader is a “stranger” and the second position as a more “intimate” one, echoing Stein’s assertion that she writes “for myself and strangers” (AABT 66). The narrative written for strangers conforms to conventional expectations of narrative progression and closure, engaging readers in a linear movement from beginning to end and producing a sense of mastery and coherence. Beyond the boundaries of the narrative-for-strangers, an alternative reading practice emerges through the use of multiple perspectives that “traverse temporal and spatial gaps” (594). Toklas’ narratives move back and forth in time and are continually interrupted/fragmented by digressions and repetition. This digressive mode does not present an account of the formation of the autobiographical subject but focuses on the “effects of that ‘I’” (595). Stein, for example, is presented as “always reading” and as having particular habits and likes (such as walking around Paris). Johnston finds in this narrative presentation of subjective agency an invitation for the reader: “the reader does not need to be formed by this text (as Stein is not formed by this text)…[but] may control the reading” (595).

Presenting Toklas as the author of the text, Stein subverts autobiographical conventions, as well as the traditional separation of subject and object and its promotion of mastery. The narrative strategy of switching/merging “I’s” produces a coupling that is no longer a traditional relationship between separate individuals and proposes a different, more intimate mode of reading: Toklas-as-narrator becomes a “conduit through which readers move from the autobiography to other texts” (596). As she constantly refers to other texts without presenting/including them in her narrative, she invites the reader to read beyond the boundaries of the autobiography. In order to be other than a stranger--to enter into the private, intertextual reading practice that the autobiography both articulates and withholds--the reader needs to go beyond the autobiography itself, to read what Toklas and Stein read, what Stein/“Toklas” writes.

Johnston moves beyond the text to read “Ada” as a doubling of AABT. Through helpful and fairly extensive notes, she connects her article with other critical readings of Stein’s work. Her analysis of Stein’s alternative construction of the narrating subject in AABT intersects the work of Leigh Gilmore and others who focus on the articulation of a lesbian subject position. Like Stein’s, Johnson’s narrative moves involve both “listening” and “telling”: the alternate/intimate reading practice she perceptively presents and enacts is not defined in terms of a text but in terms of an “other, who is loving while telling and listening” (600).

Kern, Robert. "Williams, Brautigan, and the Poetics of Primitivism." Chicago Review 27.1 (1975): 47-57. Annotated by Eric York.

Robert Kern presents an argument for an American aesthetic primitivism that is at odds with the traditional notions of it, and includes Williams with others as participants in a tradition of no tradition. This is the most useful fact for us: the establishment of a distinction between European modernism’s and American modernism’s relation to notions of tradition, the former based on aggressive rebellion and the latter on ignorance or innocence of tradition, and Kern’s placement of Williams’s poetic firmly in the American camp. Less useful is the secondary thrust of the article which focuses on primitivism in American post-modernism and uses Richard Brautigan as a prime example.

Primitivism first appeared in England in the eighteenth century with the ideal of the noble savage and a doctrine which stated that “the best poetry should be natural or instinctive”. (From: Holman, C. Hugh and Harmon, William; A Handbook to Literature: Seventh Edition; Prentice Hall; Upper Saddle River, NJ; 1996; pp 407-8). This led to the fashion of the search for the “inspired peasant” who wrote without the long tutelage of conventions, but straight from the heart.

Different from this, the later, nineteenth century American idea of primitivism was based on moving backward culturally, not simply finding an innocent untouched by tradition. This leads to the highlight of a distinction between cultural primitivism on the one hand, which is a preference for the natural to the artificial, the instinctive to the consciously worked; and chronological primitivism on the other hand, which naively looks back toward a “. . .’Golden Age’ and sees our present sad state as the product of what culture and society have done. . .”. (Handbook, 408.). Though these terms are not mutually exclusive, Robert Kern decidedly puts Williams with the former, cultural primitivists.

Kern argues that for Williams, primitivism formed the foundation of his modernism, indeed, that American modernism and post-modernism are forms of aesthetic primitivism pioneered by Williams. This would become for Williams: “an ignorance, acquired or real, of the history and rules of art, culture and civilization, of manners, conventions and established norms, particularly those associated with Europe.”(Kern, 48). I find it interesting to note here, though Kern does not, that even the idea of primitivism as it came to America from England was changed, a kind of meta-working of the concept upon itself.

In any case, Kern goes on to form an important distinction between American primitivism as innocence or naiveté, and the aggressive and rebellious European avant-gardism of the dadaists and surrealists which attacked history itself. Instead, Kern says, working with Hugh Kenner, American primitivism sought to rewrite whole cloth, “from scratch”, and “homemade. . . its own world in the absence of knowledge of the past”.(Kern, 48). The main thrust of the article, however, seeks to place Williams firmly, along with Whitman and Richard Brautigan, on the American side of things.

Here there is a major gap in Kern’s work, and that is that he fails to make any account of Pound, and Pound’s relation to American primitivism. Instead, Kern focuses on Williams’s In the American Grain as a “literary manifesto in Williams’s campaign as a stay-at-home against the expatriates Pound and Eliot.” Kern goes on to say that: “What Williams finds, like Whitman before him, is that to be an American is an opportunity to be fully modern, and to be modern is not to be in the vanguard of history, but to be permanently at the beginning of history, to be pre-historic. . .”(49).

In this article, there is also a very cogent presentation of “Red Wheelbarrow” as prima facia evidence of primitivism for Williams. It is not just rejection of conventions, but that it is so stripped of literary-ness that it achieves a state of “novelty that will not stale”(52), a particularly modern idea. Let me present the poem: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens” (51).

Kern outlines the basics of this poem’s importance to Williams’s development, and moves on to discuss the poem in terms of its absolute unadorned and unliterary presentation of the central object. He says: “. . . in concentrating so steadily on the absolute presence of things in external reality (to the exclusion of just about everything else a poem might contain), the poem is released from the temporal and spatial limits that a more subjective or self-conscious discourse would impose. It is both particular and unlimited. . .” (52). Thus, Williams’s poetic of a particularly American notion modernism is achieved in the practice that is the poem.

Then Kern moves on into territory that is much less useful to us, though very interesting. He sees this American primitivism taken up by a figure of post-modernism, extended to the extreme in the poetry and prose of Richard Brautigan. What is important to us post-patriarchalists is Williams’s belonging to an American tradition of un-tradition.

Kouidis, Virginia M. "The Female Self.” Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana UP, 1980. 26-48. Annotation by Monica Fauble.

Kouidis begins this article by discussing Futurism’s invocation of Whitman’s interests in science, technology, and progress; she notes that Loy, who also references Whitman, is more interested in Whitman’s statement of the importance of the self and sexuality. This assertion that sexual completion and freedom allows for a fully embodied selfhood is, according to Kouidis, a central theme in Loy’s work.
Kouidis first offers us a reading of the then-unpublished “Feminist Manifesto” highlighting its debt to Futurism but also stating that it differs in its assertion that independence is gained through sexual freedom. She also inverts the most obviously Feminist reading of the Manifesto by stating that Loy’s assertion that women are not equal to men is actually meant to be read in a way that suggests men are superior, “more intellectual, physically braver, and able to bear pain” (28). This conclusion is drawn from Kouidis’ understanding of Loy’s letters, and I am not certain that such is relevant in the context of the Manifesto.

Although Kouidis later asserts that irony is a central feature of Loy’s work, she often provides readings of Loy’s work that fail to take irony into account. In a reading of “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” Kouidis asserts that the men’s ability to “look into things” suggests that the men have an “attainment of selfhood, of ‘infinity’” (32). But, I argue, this poem never suggests that the men in the poem have a more advanced intellect or understanding than the virgins, only that they have more freedom and agency. It seems that Kouidis is here equating agency and selfhood.

The theme of vision comes up again in other readings of Loy’s poems, such as “Magasins du Louvre” (from “Three Moments in Paris”) in which Loy equates the ability to see with selfhood; the virgin eyes in this poem see “nothing,” and thus, says Kouidis, have no hope of independent selfhood. This reading seems more stable, mostly because this poem itself is more emphatic in its statements.
Continuing with the theme of the feminine, Loy uses the image of a door as an image of the entrance to the female body in several poems. Often, the door is “passable” as in “The Effectual Marriage,” but this image of entrance within Loy’s work often represents the unfulfilled. Such disappointment, along with the effects of sexual repression, are central themes in Loy’s work.

Kouidis offers the possibility that Loy was influenced by Henri Bergson’s idea of the self’s need for a combination of intellect and intuition and a desire to merge with the cosmos. Such is especially apparent in “Parturition” and in Loy’s general emphasis on consciousness and also the impact of women’s maternity and reproductive rhythms.

While this article would be useful for anyone interested in Mina Loy’s emphasis on sexuality, I often found Kouidis’ readings of individual poems to be somewhat limited/limiting. Although Kouidis notes Loy’s use of irony several times as a theme within her work, I found that Kouidis’ readings do not always seem to take ambiguity into account.

Kouidis, Virginia. “Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy.” boundary 2 8.3 (1980): 167-188. Annotation by Robin Brox.

Kouidis begins with a brief summation of Mina Loy’s place in modernist American poetry despite her British citizenship. Loy’s publication history is given, but a salient factor of Kouidis’s presentation of Loy is her reliance on male artists to validate Loy’s artistic merits. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams provide an appreciative framework from which one can approach Loy’s poetry; later poets like Kenneth Rexroth and Jerome Rothenberg continue to support Loy’s importance, though it seems dubious to me that her work needs to be viewed through the lens of established patriarchal poets. Despite my misgivings about such a framing device, Kouidis places Loy in the company of elite modernists, stating “Her poetry aligns itself with that of Stein-Pound-Williams to form a ‘counter-poetics’ that by generating postmodern poetry is emerging as the most vital force in twentieth century American poetry” (Kouidis 168). After an introduction reliant on the praise of canonized poets, Kouidis moves on to the bulk of her article, which “attempts to place Mina Loy in her cultural and literary milieu and, most important, to suggest the achievement of her poetry” (168). Kouidis reads chronologically through Loy’s oeuvre, and supplies examples, often in the form of entire poems, to orient the reader by doing close readings. Given that the article was published in 1980, one explanation for this tactic could be its ability to introduce an unfamiliar readership with the writing of Mina Loy; I believe Kouidis’s attentiveness to Loy’s poetry on its own helps her article remain useful twenty five years later.

The author intersperses her criticism of Loy’s poetics with information about her personal life. Kouidis puts herself in the uncomfortable space between New Criticism and a biographical approach to poetry. She cites the influence of art movements like Futurism on Loy’s poetry, and indicates how Loy fit into the modernist landscape of literature. Loy’s early work, according to Kouidis, “was attacking her Victorian heritage which calculated the marriage value of women according to their purity and ignorance, and imprisoned their spiritual vitality in busks as rigid as those which molded and suppressed their bodies. Artistically she was fighting the failure of literature to treat life honestly” (170). Kouidis explains Loy’s poetics in terms of “metaphysical exploration” (172), and engages in a discussion of Loy’s use of the word, “the Bergsonian flux of Being (or consciousness) in language” (174), collage structure, Futurist techniques, and her eventual reliance on “abstract-concrete images that unite intellect and intuition in a clearly crafted moment of vision” (182). Though Loy’s writing up to the Lunar Baedeker is well covered by Kouidis’s careful and useful analysis, the author rather patly dismisses Loy’s later work by stating, “they lack the structural innovations that distinguish her early poetry” (186). I wonder if she does this because no prominent male poet or critic spoke favorable of late Loy; clearly the author’s historical position provides an opportunity for dissatisfaction. Despite her drawbacks, Kouidis writes lucidly about some incredibly difficult poems from Loy’s early works.

Kristeva, Julia. “Préliminaires théoriques,” “Le sujet phénomenologique de l’énonciation.” “La chora sémiotique: ordonnancement des pulsions.” La revolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. 11-30. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Kristeva describes her project as a “theory of signification based on the subject, its formation, and its corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic.” She examines the operations of poetic language in particular works of modern literature (including those of Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Joyce, and Artaud), which constituted a “new phenomenon” in writing, a “spectacular [shattering] of discourse.” By shattering the subject and the ideologies that sustained it, this phenomenon reveals that normalized language is only one way of articulating the interrelationships among the body, social apparatuses, and language itself. This “signifying practice” (signifiance) points to the limits of socially useful discourse and toward the process that exceeds discursive production of the subject: a process of engendering meaning that pervades the body/subject; an unlimited, unbounded operation of drives toward, in and through language and the exchange system. Kristeva points out that these instinctual operations constitute a (signifying) practice “if and only if” they enter into social and linguistic codes of communication (15).

She situates her exploration of this signifying practice in relation to two trends in linguistic research that engage the trans-linguistic “externality” of language. The first relies on Freudian theories of the unconscious and primary processes to present the relation between signifier and signified as motivated (rather than arbitrary), in connection with the operation of the drives. The second trend, represented by Benveniste, introduces a trans-linguistic layer within formalist language theory by positing a subject of enunciation that opens onto the realms of logic, semantics, and intersubjective relationships. Kristeva relates these two theoretical trends to two inseparable modalities within the signifying process, which she defines as “the semiotic” and “the symbolic.”

She connects the semiotic to the signifying modality that Freudian psychoanalysis attributes to the structuring operations of the drives and primary processes. The drives--“energy” charges moving through the body of “one who will later become a subject”--are organized, in the course of the subject’s development, according to social and familial constraints imposed on the body (which is “always already involved in semiosis”). The drives articulate what Kristeva, borrowing the term from Plato, calls a chora: “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (23). Kristeva distinguishes theoretical description of the chora from the operation of the chora itself and notes the fundamental ambiguity of this term, whose preverbal, pre-symbolic functioning, once named, becomes a receptacle for symbolic meaning. She seems to adopt Plato’s coding of the chora as feminine, maternal. The drives in their pre-oedipal semiotic functions connect the body to the body of the mother, which mediates the symbolic order (“established through constraints constituted by biological differences, including sexual differences, and through concrete, historical family structures”). Along with the chora, Kristeva introduces the problematic of how to put this threshold phenomenon into words without ontologizing it. The indeterminate operation of the chora in her theory (as phenomenon/term/“mystery”) participates--potentially--in the grounding error of metaphysics (explored by Heidegger and others), in a fascination with the “feminine” as produced/seen from a perspective that is masculine.

Kristeva’s theoretical categories involve a nuanced, multidimensional account of the biological, linguistic, and socio-historical formation of the subject, which seems well suited to the analysis of avant-garde textual practices. Her presentation of the semiotic chora as a signifying process that is coded as feminine, her focus on the operation of the semiotic in texts written by male authors, and her own practice in writing of avoiding the first-person singular and relying on the gender-neutrality of third-person pronouns and the ambiguously inclusive “we” raise the question of whether the model works as well, or differently, when the subject of enunciation/writing is female. How will this terminology--which, so far, suspends any interrogation of the role of “woman”(-as-mother) in the production of the syntax that assures discursive coherence--work to engage the entry into language of a subject who speaks as a woman?

Kristeva, Julia. “Préliminaires théoriques,” “Le sens hylétique de Husserl: une thèse naturelle commandée par le sujet jugeant,” “Le sens pré-supposé de Hjelmslev,” “Le thétique: rupture et/ou frontière,” “Le miroir et la castration posant le sujet absent du signifiant.” La revolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. 30-49. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

In Part I, Chapters Three through Six, of La revolution du langage poétique, Kristeva locates her definition of the “semiotic” in relation to the work of other theorists (Husserl, Hjemslev, Lacan) and within an overall process of signification that constitutes the subject without reducing it to a transcendental ego and without denying the importance of the “thetic phase” (the separation of the subject from and through its image and its objects) that is the precondition of signification. She begins by distinguishing her project from that of phenomenology and its “linguistic substitutes,” pointing out the usefulness of this recourse to phenomenology for demonstrating “the insurmountable constraint of positing an ego as the single, unique limit that is constitutive of all linguistic acts, as well as all trans-linguistic practices” (40). “Le sens hylétique de Husserl” focuses on two points at which Husserlian phenomenology intersects “current linguistic preoccupations.” One trend in generative grammar regards syntactic competence as the product of an intentional transcendental ego that, as it speaks, simultaneously brackets out everything heterogeneous to its consciousness: the “object” of linguistics is always already intended/apprehended in an operation that posits it as the object of the naming and synthesizing ego. Kristeva notes another moment of Husserlian phenomenology that seems to move away from (syntactic) closure grounded in the intentional subject: the hyle, which (like the Platonic chora) must be grasped through a “difficult reasoning,” which is “lost as soon as it is posited” which is “nothing without this positing” (31). She argues that the hyle is the projection of a positing consciousness, and that the same is true for everything that may appear to be heterogeneous to consciousness, including phenomenological “drives” that belong to the pre-predicative sphere: “within the framework…of the transcendental ego, no heterogeneity in relation to predicative articulation is possible which is not already the projection of the subject’s positionality” (32).

Kristeva works to distinguish her definition of the semiotic (which refers to pre-sign, pre-symbolic signifying operations) from Husserl’s “Meaning” (where the hyle--the “matter” of meaning--is meaningful only to the extent that it “resembles” the intentional) and from the “presupposed” meaning of Hjemslev’s semiotics/glossematics, which similarly posits the existence of a meaning situated beyond the operations of linguistic functions (and thus continues to participate in the “phenomenological universe”). She suggests that we need to look beyond the phenomenological universe, to focus on what the subject produces rather than on the operations of the “I” posited as origin, to ask how the thetic--the positing of the subject--is produced. The perspective she describes would consider the positing of the subject within a signifying process that goes beyond it, shows it as producible, and thus opens the possibility of research into the “semiotic conditions that produce [the subject] while remaining foreign to [it]” (35). The category of the semiotic, she argues, allows us to envisage a heterogeneous functioning within the larger signifying process that embraces it.

In distinguishing the semiotic (the nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their articulations) from a phenomenological signification that is structured as a realm of positions, Kristeva points to the break in the signifying process that structures/produces the positing of signification. She calls this break the “thetic phase” and explains that, “all enunciation, whether it is enunciation of a word or a phrase, is thetic” (41). In Chapter Six, she relies on Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and castration to examine the processes involved in the production of the thetic phase. According to Lacan, the mirror image with which the six-to-eighteen-month-old child identifies becomes the prototype for a world of objects: the positing of an imaged ego permits the positing of objects detached from the semiotic chora, i.e., objects that are separate, signifiable. This positing constitutes the break/cut (coupure) on which signification is established as a “digital system with a double articulation combining discrete elements”(44). Castration completes the process of separation that posits a separate, signifiable subject. The discovery of castration detaches the subject from dependence on the mother, whose “full” body has been the “receptacle and respondent/surety of all demands”: awareness of the “lack”” of castration “makes the phallic…the symbolic function” (45). Thus, as the formation of the thetic phase comes to an end, signification is established in the break (between the specular image and the motility of the drives, between the mother and the demands made upon her)--in what Lacan calls the place of the Other, the place of the signifier. The subject--a wannabe, lacking in the signifier--confers on an “other” the role of maintaining the possibility of signification.

In her critique of the phenomenological subject, Kristeva writes in close proximity to Lacan’s theory, using the concepts and terminology of his description of the subject’s entry into language. Most helpful is her articulation--based on Lacan’s division of the symbolic into signifier and signified--of the production of a “second-degree thetic,” a functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying disposition of language. She calls attention to the heterogeneous functioning of the instinctual semiotic in the position of the signifier and to language as a defensive construction that protects the body from the “attack” of drives by making it the locus of the signifier, the place in which the body can signify itself through positions (47). Poetic “deformations” of the signifying chain can be seen as effects of those drives that the thetic phase was unable to sublate (relever) by linking them as signifier-signified. For the subject firmly positioned through castration, drive attacks against the thetic lead to a second-degree thetic rather than to psychosis. Through textual practice, the subject (and only the subject, for whom the thetic is a position assumed/undergone) can call the thetic into question. It is Kristeva’s focus on this production, on the return of the semiotic in the symbolic position, that allows her to theorize a signifying practice that has a socio-historical dimension, i.e., that is not simply the self-analysis of a subject withdrawn from direct practice. Through her revision of the Lacanian model, Kristeva describes a textual practice that involves social as well as unconscious and subjective relations. However, Kristeva’s rereading of Lacan (unlike Irigaray’s in Ce sexe… and elsewhere) does not question Lacan’s textual practice of inscribing “woman” as the Other who reproduces images of/for the masculine subject. Given her reliance on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva’s theory of signifying practices may be open to further revision when read in relation to the work of women writers who attempt to articulate the intersection of avant-garde textual/linguistic procedures with traditional socio-historical and discursive genderings.

Lénárt-Cheng, Helga. “Autobiography as Advertisement: Why Do Gertrude Stein’s Sentences Get under Our Skin?” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 34.1 (2003): 117-31. Annotated by Sara Speidel.

Helga Lénárt-Cheng considers The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as a self-promotional effort by Gertrude Stein to increase her readership and enhance her literary reputation. HLC describes the “seductive” potential of autobiography in general, as a “convenient means for manipulating pubic opinion,” employing “seemingly innocent marketing strategies” to which readers pay too little attention (117-18). Her examination of Stein’s successful marketing techniques in AABT is limited to a demonstration of the ways in which the autobiography conforms to four rules of good advertising (taken from a 1920 manual on advertising principles). HLC claims that, while critical attention has been paid to the relationship of modernist writers to the marketplace, the role of autobiographical literature in writers’ self-marketing has been overlooked.

She finds numerous examples to support her reading of AABT. Calling attention to the repetition of “Gertrude Stein” (approximately five times per page, more than a thousand times throughout), HLC notes the hypnotic effect of this repetition (rule #4: a good ad is repeated over and over). She seems also to describe a textual process through which Stein’s name is established as a brand or logo, though she doesn’t use these terms. HLC cites name-dropping, repeated references to Stein’s publications and work-in-progress, and the mention of positive responses to Stein’s writing and “genius” as attempts to promote the author and her work. She characterizes these image-enhancing strategies as “indirect,” because the autobiography is written in the third person (rule #3: in a good ad, self-praise is indirect). Regarding Stein’s third-person narrative simply as a clever disguise for asserting her own talents, HLC fails to explore the more complex implications of Stein’s manipulation of generic conventions in AABT.

Her reading seems most limited when she argues that Stein “conceals” her strategies of self-promotion in the text--that her self-advertisement is effective because it’s possible for readers to regard AABT as a gossipy, anecdotal account of the contemporary art scene in Paris rather than a book about Gertrude Stein (rule #1: a good ad conceals its strategy). If Stein’s self-advertising techniques are concealed, they are hidden in plain sight. By focusing only on the pragmatic function of Stein’s narrative strategies, HLC misses the complexity of Stein’s address to her readers. While it’s possible for a reader to enjoy AABT in the way HLC describes, it’s also likely that readers will notice the frequent gestures of self-promotion embedded in the text. The very explicitness of Stein’s “spin”--frequently interrupting the reader’s pleasure in the gossip-narrative--calls attention to his/her position as a literary consumer. This fragmentation of the reader’s locus of identification produces an awareness of different levels of narrative mediation/”packaging” and removes the possibility of any single, “authorized’ approach to reading this text. Finally, the charge of paying too little attention to subtleties of narrative strategy can be leveled at HLC herself. Save your time.

Moore, Patrick. “William Carlos William and the Modernist Attack on Logical Syntax.” ELH 53.4 (1986): 895-916. JSTOR. 30 Jan. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/>. Annotated by Robin Brox.

Moore begins his article with a summation of nineteenth century beliefs surrounding logic and syntax, and he enumerates the attacks, made on philosophical grounds, of the way sentences are constructed. He discusses critiques of the copula, quoting from Bertrand Russell, William James, Ernest Fenollosa, and Alfred Sidgewick. His article proposes that attacks such as these helped William Carlos Williams develop his poetics; according to Moore, he held “attitudes about syntax, logic, the representation of reality, and the dynamic nature of life in some way parallel theirs” (Moore 900). The remainder of the article enumerates five techniques employed by Williams that illustrate the means by which he frees his poetry to reflect the true nature of reality, not by adhering to logic’s use of syntax but by refusing to adhere to grammatical rules which cloud language’s accuracy. The first technique is Williams’s decision to avoid “finite verbs” and use instead “participles in modifying clauses” to “create separate and distinct images;” the second is extensive use of parataxis, which frees grammatical units from syntactic logic; the third is Williams’s frequent use of “copulative verbs, especially ‘to be’” to keep nouns from holding only one meaning; the fourth is Williams’s utilization of exclamations and rhetorical questions “to assert the priority of instinct and feeling over analytic discourse,” and the final technique Moore notes is Williams’s disruption of subject and verb by inserting “dependent phrases and clauses. . . to temporarily suspend closure and meaning” (904-905). Moore illustrates each syntactical device with examples from Williams’s poetry, thus making a clear argument for precisely how Williams is able to subvert traditional logic and syntax to achieve the desired poetic outcome-- “to jam things with significance, but without specifying what exactly the significance is,” leaving that up to a reader’s imagination (909).

Moore deftly shows how these techniques Williams employs allow him to create a representation of reality as it appears to the poet, not as it had been dictated by a logic controlled by grammar. According to Moore, Williams’s “syntax suspended the linear unwinding of time in poetry and helped to break the hold of logical syntax on modern verse” (914). The value of this article lies in its copious examples from Williams’s poetry, since each of the five means by which he liberated language from the confines of formal grammatical construction are explored in detail. It is especially delightful that Moore includes Williams’s praise of Gertrude Stein for “‘tackling the fracture of stupidities bound in our thoughtless phrases, in our calcified grammatical constructions and in the subtle brainlessness of our meter and favorite prose rhythms--which compel words to follow certain others without precision or thought’” (901). Through the examples and thoughtful analysis Moore provides throughout his article Williams’s preoccupation with liberating the language of poetry from the stultifying limits imposed by rules of logic and syntax; Williams espouses the poet’s ability to write outside his confines, since within one “‘there burns a fiery light, too fiery for logical statement’” (901).

Ngai, Sianne. “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 10:2 (2000). Annotated by Brent Griffin.

Article URL http://muse.jhu.edu.prxy4.ursus.maine.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.2ngai.html

In Ngai’s article the work of Gertrude Stein, particularly The Making of Americans, marks a unique literary innovation committed to challenging readers’ “capacity for response” (4). The use of repetition and “long strings” (2) of words combine to defy syntactical and grammatical conventions, and Stein’s work ultimately problematizes a reader’s sense of sense. Confronted by these specific challenges, Ngai argues that readers become “temporarily immobilized” (4), victims of a ‘hermeneutic stupor’ that leaves them either bored or shocked. According to Ngai, this effect was not only deliberate, but it betrays a commitment on Stein’s part to illuminate the ways in which “astonishment [shock] and fatigue [boredom]…come to organize and inform a particular relationship between subjects and language” (4). And, it is this same interest that Ngai argues can be found to occupy the work of Beckett, West, and Poe, along with such contemporary poets and visual artists as Dan Farrell, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Ann Hamilton.

Ngai refers to this kind of aesthetic experience as the ‘stuplime’ (12), in which boredom and astonishment “[are] paradoxically united” (12), where the aesthetic overpowers the observer. For her, the stuplime allows for a new way of “theorizing the negatively affective relationship to stupefying objects previously designated by the older aesthetic notion of the sublime” (12). While notions of the sublime work to elicit a sense of astonishment or awe in the observer through a confrontation with the infinity or limitlessness of concepts, the stuplime “points to the limits of our representational capabilities…through a no less exhaustive confrontation with the discrete and finite in repetition” (12). Furthermore, Ngai argues the sublime has the potential to invoke terror in the observer. As the observer of the sublime becomes forced to surrender to the limitations of one’s “conceptual apparatus” (13), the temporal and emotional consequences become extreme excitement and terror. The sublime becomes an experience of defeat and surrender, according to Ngai, with no encouragement to the observer to attempt to “formulate reformulate new tactics for reading” (13). The stuplime, on the other hand, includes a “series of comic fatigues” (13) that unlike the single, immobilizing blow one sustains from the sublime, forces the reader to continue on in an attempt to ‘read’ the object (13). And, she continues her article by examining a series of contemporary productions that invoke fatigue and astonishment--positing the stuplime as capable of opening up an avenue for critical agency.

While this presents an interesting argument for distinguishing between two aesthetic experiences, certainly a bit of skepticism is called for at this point; especially if one is familiar with Fredric Jameson’s work on utopian politics and the utopian impulse. For Jameson, the utility of a utopian project is that it confronts its reader with the limits of his or her own conceptions. The challenge becomes one of interrogating those limitations in the effort to surmount them. The important point being that an abrupt confrontation with one’s own conceptual limitations does not necessarily immobilize the individual. In fact, as Jameson argues, it is only by this kind of specific confrontation can any formulations and reformulations of ‘reading’ occur. For Ngai, the conceptual limitations one experiences from viewing the sublime and the stuplime are different—the stuplime encourages new tactics of reading while the sublime terrorizes the observer into a hermeneutic stasis. And while Ngai would probably not refer to a utopian text as sublime, or stuplime for that matter, Jameson’s work perhaps cautions us from adopting too quickly the notion that certain confrontations with our conceptual limitations are somehow less conducive to hermeneutic interrogation.

In the end, however, Ngai’s article is quite useful for anyone who has ever felt after reading Stein’s The Making of Americans or Beckett’s How It Is, for example, exhausted, tired, or just downright bored. For gleaning an understanding of the terms necessary to confront such works, her article is as equally useful.

Peppis, Paul. “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes and Sexology.” Modernism/modernity 9.4 (November 2002): 561-579. Annotated by Joanna Crouse.

In his article “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes and Sexology,” Paul Peppis contends that Loy and Stopes do what their feminist contemporaries do not: merge lyrical and scientific language to create a new language of sexuality. Peppis begins by acknowledging the fundamental problem of writing about gender and sexuality with the only available discourse being sexist, and then later illustrates how Loy and Stopes circumvent this paradox. He also contextualizes their writings by describing the polarization of the Women’s Movement at this time -- at one extreme the social purists calling for abstinence, at the other the free-love liberators. His interest lies in how both of these writers collapse this dichotomy using language as the vehicle. For the purposes of our class, I will focus my annotation on the larger Mina Loy section.

Peppin claims that Loy “develop[s] new idioms of female experience by adapting established vocabularies, conjoining in different ways scientific and literary language” (504) and “unite[s] antagonistic, and differently gendered, vocabularies of sentimental love and rationalist science” (506). Although he touches upon the eugenics and free love of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and poem “Parturition,” his main thesis relies on The Love Songs of Joannes which he argues as a later work does a more sophisticated job of expressing the limitations of attempting to metamorphose sexual relations through language. In all of these works, he argues, Loy parallels her advocacy of sexual liberation with the demand for superior female creativity to be realized. But while the two earlier works presents a sanguine attitude toward the possibility of “free love maternalism,” Love Songs points out the failures.
In his analysis of Love Songs, Peppin focuses on the lack or abnormality of offspring created in free-love sexual unions. Either the offspring is “a butterfly/ With the daily news/ Printed in blood on its wings” (Lunar, 54) or “NOTHING/ There was a man and a woman” (LB, 64). According to Peppin, what is also revolutionary about Love Songs is its unwillingness to allow for marriage between a scientific and sentimental depiction of sex. Instead they continually insist on “opposing and undermining each other, enacting formally the unrealizability of union between lovers and languages” employing the literary techniques of “fragmentation, collage, jarring juxtaposition” portraying sex as “discordant, contradictory, ugly” (574). Although this analysis contradicts his initial premise of Loy merging the two arenas, the point is a significant one.

In his conclusion he purports that the importance of Love Songs resides not in its eloquent diction or even radical feminist stance, but rather in its success at tilling a new terrain of thought. Love Songs “remains suspended between free love and social purity, literature and science, sentimentalism and modernism.” Loy neither chooses a side nor attempts to conciliate the polarities, but instead offers her readership something entirely new: an intricate juxtaposing of these extremes to “forge new relations between these allegedly incompatible disciplines” (575). When we consider what a male-dominated domain science was at this time (and still is), we can appreciate the boldness of Loy’s writing and the compelling questions and restiveness she exposes with her writing. This article offered insight into Loy’s singular projects of motherhood and sexuality.

Peppis, Paul. “Rewriting Sex: Mina Loy, Marie Stopes, and Sexology.” Modernism/Modernity 9.4 (2002): 561-79. Annotated by Brent Griffin.

Peppis traces the work of “popular science” author Marie Stopes and the avant-garde poetry of Mina Loy as central in the debate around the new science of ‘sexology’—a debate that preoccupied both the English and American public at the turn of the twentieth-century. As this new science attempted to ‘establish’ a discourse on male and female sexuality, Stopes and Loy took active roles in the debate around it, and regarded language “as the scene and material of conceptual change”—a medium, or mechanism, that “enables and constrains reform” (562). Stopes and Loy, Peppis argues, recognized the “inherent sexism” (562) embedded within the available discourses being used to discuss sex and gender and sought to illuminate such limitations. What they were up against, Peppis continues, were essentially two opposing arguments concerning female sexuality—social purity and free love. Social purists felt that women had transcended the stereotypical ‘baser’ natures of femininity. Women had been successful at abandoning their ‘animal instincts’ which were bent on fulfilling sexual desires in favor for a more ‘civilized’, socially pure existence. For many women, this notion was unacceptable, believing that it led to a denial and repression of female sexual desire and advocated instead for a ‘free love’, or free sexual unions. For Stopes and Loy, Peppis claims, both positions were inadequate at representing female sexuality and sought, instead, to merge both arguments. Recognizing that both positions deployed radically different, gendered vocabularies (social purity relied on notions of rationalist science, while free love arguments relied on notions of sentimentality), the two women worked to unite the two vocabularies in the effort to “develop new idioms of female sexual experience”, the goal being a liberation of “sexual language” (564). Offering a careful analysis of Stopes’s Married Love and Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes, Peppis elucidates both authors’ belief in the intimate connection that discourses on sex have with “lexicons of science and literature, intellect and sentiment” (563). In Stopes’s Married Love, Peppis suggests her attempt to “fashion a language of female sexuality out of the gendered discourses at hand” (568), relying heavily on the lexicons of sex science. Loy’s Love Songs, on the other hand, offers a unique perspective that details the limitations of such attempts, even the efforts of Stopes’s which some claim ultimately reinforces the heteronormative ideals and institutions of British patriarchy (568). Loy, Peppis claims, achieves a kind of “suspension between free love and social purity, literature and science, sentimentalism and modernism” (575). In this way Loy’s work not only rewrites the “languages of female sexuality” but it simultaneously call attention to its own limitations and the limitations of “modernism’s reformist aesthetic and sexual ambitions” (575).

Peppis’s article provides useful insight not only to modernisms attempts to reform the language and the politics of the sex/gender economy, but by exposing these issues, he is also able to carefully present the ambitious work of two women in the movement to “modernize gender by rewriting sex” (566). His argument is both compelling and convincing, lendi