Williams, Nostalgia, and Modernity Posman, Sarah
William Carlos Williams review,
2016, 2016-00-00, 20160101, Volume:
33, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Where restorative nostalgia is goal-oriented, reflective nostalgia takes you through meandering loops. Because its stalling strategies are inefficient and timeconsuming-modernity's capital sins-she ...calls it an "off-modern" concept (Boym xvi). In terms of critical practice, furthermore, it implies that longing and critical thinking are not each other's opposites, "as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection" (ibid.). ...it grants a poetic state of mind critical leverage. The preface tells us that Williams read his way through letters, journals, and reports of historical events in search of "new contours suggested by old words" (AG v). ...we find Williams criticizing the "silly phrases and total disregard for what must have been the rude words of the old hunter" he comes across in the so-called autobiography of Daniel Boone, and decrying the "balanced statements" and "pretty scholar humor" that should introduce us to the incident of the May-pole at Merry Mount-statements and quips made by a historian "who has seen the time too near," and is therefore stuck in what Williams considers an inexcusable parochialism (133, 75). The short chapter, "Advent of the Slaves," notably, satirizes the historical accounts of slavery that tell us how the slave trade contributed to "to build 'a society that was rich and in some ways sumptuous and curiously oriental'" (AG 208).13 Williams sets up an encounter with those considered "nobodies" in mainstream historical accounts by means of the 1905 Bert Williams hit, "Nobody." ...he plants a tune into the heads of his readers, by which he makes felt the presence of African American voices in contemporary American history.
The Aesthetics of Matter Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, Benedikt Hjartarson / Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, Benedikt Hjartarson
2013
eBook
It has often been argued that the arrival of the early-20th-century avant- gardes and modernisms coincided with an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing. The European historical ...avant-gardes and modernisms excelled in their attempts to establish the specificity of media and art forms as well as in experimenting with the hybridity of the materials of their multiple disciplines. This third volume of the series European Avant- Garde and Modernism Studies sheds light on the full range and import of this aspect in avant-garde and modernist aesthetics across all art forms and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The book's contributions, written by experts from some 20 countries, seek to answer the following questions: * What sort of objects and material, works and media help us to properly grasp the avant-garde and modernist "aesthetics of matter"? * How were affects, emotions and sensory and bodily experiences transferred and transformed in the experiment with matter? * How were "immaterial" things such as concepts of time changed in this aesthetic moment? * What "material meanings" were disseminated in the cultural transfer and translation of objects? * How did subsequent avant-gardes deal with the "aesthetics of matter" in their response to historical predecessors?
The article reads Williams’s approach to the past in line with the concept of a reflective nostalgia, as coined by Svetlana Boym, with the aim of adding to our understanding of modernist reflection ...on time and temporality. Williams is, famously, a poet of the moment, but at the same time his poetics drives on the desire to return to a beginning, whether this takes the form of a personal stripping down, the invocation of a cosmic spring, or the digging for a historical ground. The articles focuses on two of Williams’s backward-looking projects, In the American Grain and “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” and read them in line with two philosophical projects that can be seen to bookend modernism: Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and Bruno Latour’s “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” Williams’s poetic trajectory takes us from a vitalist forgetting to a compositionist project in tune with contemporary reconfigurations of the make-it-new imperative.
In four of his books Gilles Deleuze makes a reference to the Brontës. In Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus he mentions Charlotte Brontë as an example of literature that surpasses a subject-centred ...narrative, a literature of what he calls a 'haecceity' or 'thisness', in which events take precedence over subjects making life choices. This essay concentrates on Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in teasing out Deleuze's surprising mentioning of Charlotte Brontë and explores how a Deleuzian 'haecceity'-vantage point can change our understanding of life narratives and authorship.
In 1922, Einstein and Bergson publicly discussed the nature of time. I argue that this debate, which pivoted on the question of whether there is one time or a plurality of times, and especially the ...phenomenological stance promoted in it by Bergson, makes for an illuminating context against which to read Stein's 1920s literary thinking on temporality.
