I argue that while William Carlos Williams has been interpreted, to borrow Marjorie Perloff’s phrase regarding Frank O’Hara, as a poet among painters, what I have not seen in the criticism, and try to address in my article, is a discussion of Williams in relation to work by aestheticians. The writings of George Dickie and Arthur C. Danto in the 1960s and 70s provide framework models which are powerful tools for approaching Williams’s “found” poems such as “This Is Just to Say,” which I read closely here. Danto on his major subject, Andy Warhol, can teach us to consider “This Is Just to Say” in a philosophical manner and I argue that the poem is an example of Danto’s view of Pop as transfigurative of otherwise indecipherable objects. At the same time, I critique Danto’s understanding of Warhol’s Brillo Box as the “ur” text of an art that is indecipherable to the eye, but only discernible as art because of a philosophical understanding of it as belonging to the art world. My intention is to link Brillo Box and “This Is Just to Say” as both decipherable—visually decipherable—in ways Danto must significantly downplay for his conceptual theory of art to add up. I argue that the works by Warhol and Williams I look at signal to their audiences the intention to—in Danto’s key words—“transfigure the commonplace” through the formal work of establishing differences between objects of little or no value—soap pad cartons and forgive me notes—and versions that are conceptually significant containers of meaning belonging to the art world.
我认为，虽然威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯被解读为画家中的诗人，借用马乔里·佩尔洛夫关于弗兰克·奥哈拉的话，但我在批评中没有看到，并试图在我的文章中指出的是，威廉姆斯与美学家作品的关系。乔治·迪基(George Dickie)和阿瑟·c·丹托(Arthur C. Danto)在20世纪60年代和70年代的作品提供了框架模型，这些模型是研究威廉姆斯“发现的”诗歌的有力工具，比如我在这里仔细阅读的《这只是为了说》(This Is Just to Say)。丹托的主要主题，安迪·沃霍尔，可以教会我们以一种哲学的方式来思考“这只是说”，我认为这首诗是丹托的观点的一个例子，他认为波普是对其他无法理解的物体的变形。与此同时，我批评丹托对沃霍尔的《布里洛盒子》的理解，认为它是一种用眼睛无法解读的艺术的“ur”文本，但只有在哲学上理解它属于艺术世界，才能将其视为艺术。我的意图是将《布里洛盒子》和《这只是要说》联系起来，因为两者都是可解读的——视觉上可解读的——丹托必须在很大程度上淡化这种解读方式，这样他的艺术概念理论才能得到补充。我认为，我所看到的沃霍尔和威廉姆斯的作品向他们的观众传达了一种意图——用丹托的关键词来说——“改造平凡”，通过正式的工作，在价值很少或没有价值的物品之间建立差异——肥皂纸盒和原谅我的笔记——以及在概念上具有重要意义的属于艺术世界的意义容器。
{"title":"“This Is Just to Say This Is the End of Art: Williams and the Aesthetic Attitude”","authors":"D. Morris","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0004","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that while William Carlos Williams has been interpreted, to borrow Marjorie Perloff’s phrase regarding Frank O’Hara, as a poet among painters, what I have not seen in the criticism, and try to address in my article, is a discussion of Williams in relation to work by aestheticians. The writings of George Dickie and Arthur C. Danto in the 1960s and 70s provide framework models which are powerful tools for approaching Williams’s “found” poems such as “This Is Just to Say,” which I read closely here. Danto on his major subject, Andy Warhol, can teach us to consider “This Is Just to Say” in a philosophical manner and I argue that the poem is an example of Danto’s view of Pop as transfigurative of otherwise indecipherable objects. At the same time, I critique Danto’s understanding of Warhol’s Brillo Box as the “ur” text of an art that is indecipherable to the eye, but only discernible as art because of a philosophical understanding of it as belonging to the art world. My intention is to link Brillo Box and “This Is Just to Say” as both decipherable—visually decipherable—in ways Danto must significantly downplay for his conceptual theory of art to add up. I argue that the works by Warhol and Williams I look at signal to their audiences the intention to—in Danto’s key words—“transfigure the commonplace” through the formal work of establishing differences between objects of little or no value—soap pad cartons and forgive me notes—and versions that are conceptually significant containers of meaning belonging to the art world.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"53 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT: In this article I assess the aesthetic, interpersonal, and historical contexts—American and European—in which William Carlos Williams wrote his poem “The Great Figure” and to which his artist friend, Charles Demuth, responded with his 1928 work I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. Emphasizing what a work of art or poem “is,” as well as what it “does,” I discuss Williams’s poem and Demuth’s art in terms of the development of modern abstraction, but more importantly, in terms of Demuth as a visual heir to Williams. Celebrating new kinds of representation, modernism introduced new ways of seeing and saying. I argue that abstraction for both the poet and painter reflect creative responses to “angst, uncertainty, and confusion.” Discussing developments in cinema, jazz, advertising, photography, and experimental fiction (Joyce and Woolf), and dance as ways of understanding “The Great Figure” and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, I offer a close reading of both works. I also show how the city shaped literary and visual arts in the early decades of the twentieth century.
{"title":"Painting Williams, Reading Demuth: “The Great Figure” and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold","authors":"Daniel R. Schwarz","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: In this article I assess the aesthetic, interpersonal, and historical contexts—American and European—in which William Carlos Williams wrote his poem “The Great Figure” and to which his artist friend, Charles Demuth, responded with his 1928 work I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. Emphasizing what a work of art or poem “is,” as well as what it “does,” I discuss Williams’s poem and Demuth’s art in terms of the development of modern abstraction, but more importantly, in terms of Demuth as a visual heir to Williams. Celebrating new kinds of representation, modernism introduced new ways of seeing and saying. I argue that abstraction for both the poet and painter reflect creative responses to “angst, uncertainty, and confusion.” Discussing developments in cinema, jazz, advertising, photography, and experimental fiction (Joyce and Woolf), and dance as ways of understanding “The Great Figure” and I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, I offer a close reading of both works. I also show how the city shaped literary and visual arts in the early decades of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"17 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT: In my article, I examine the relationship between the work of William Carlos Williams and John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and show how their shared concerns create links to post-Second World War performance artists such as Laurie Anderson, the theatrical storyteller Spalding Gray, as well as Happenings master Allan Kaprow. I examine Williams’s impact on what is regarded as early postmodernism in the United States, by tracing Williams connections to Objectivists such as Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen from the 1930s and other culture workers who display what I call a “performative ethos” indebted to John Dewey. I contextualize poetry in relation to everyday experience, but also focus on the semantics of form, in which form emerges through exigencies of a work’s creation. Context and experience produce organic forms, as in the writings of Black Mountain and West Coast poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, each of whom emphasized breath groups and the visual “field” of the page when imagining a prosody that was structural, but antithetical to accentual syllabic verse. Like performance artists who followed in his wake, I argue that Williams challenged readers to co-create texts to re-evaluate experience as art and art as experience.
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ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that William Carlos Williams looks toward film as a means of grasping the power implicit within the modern era in which he finds himself, and I look at associations in Williams’s experimental writings, such as Spring and All and Kora in Hell, with an array of contemporary cultural figures. These include Frank O’Hara, Andrew Jackson, jurist Louis Brandeis, Labor secretary Francis Perkins, computer developer Charles Babbage, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Charles Baudelaire, Marsden Hartley, Barnett Newman, Edward Manet, and Walter Benjamin. I speculate about the role of qualities of brokenness, advertisement, vividness, speed, and attention to the part rather than the whole that one finds in Hollywood’s coming attractions and in Williams’s poetics. This cultural studies approach to Williams considers him in relation to the German-Jewish modernist intellectual Walter Benjamin, with special emphasis on the Frankfurt School theoretician’s understanding of allegory as a defamiliarizing, even proto-de Manian deconstructive, narrative mode that conceives of history as a paradoxical rendering of a continuous present.
摘要:在本文中，我认为威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯(William Carlos Williams)将电影视为一种掌握现代隐含权力的手段，他发现自己身处其中，并将威廉姆斯的实验作品(如《春与万物》和《地狱中的科拉》)与一系列当代文化人物联系起来。这些人包括弗兰克·奥哈拉、安德鲁·杰克逊、法学家路易斯·布兰代斯、劳工部长弗朗西斯·珀金斯、计算机开发者查尔斯·巴贝奇、泰迪·罗斯福、富兰克林·罗斯福、拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生、格特鲁德·斯坦、华莱士·史蒂文斯、查尔斯·波德莱尔、马斯登·哈特利、巴尼特·纽曼、爱德华·马奈和沃尔特·本杰明。我推测破碎、广告、生动、速度和关注局部而非整体的特质在好莱坞即将到来的吸引力和威廉姆斯的诗学中所起的作用。这种对威廉姆斯的文化研究方法将他与德裔犹太现代主义知识分子沃尔特·本雅明(Walter Benjamin)联系起来，特别强调法兰克福学派理论家对寓言的理解，认为寓言是一种陌生感，甚至是原始的德·曼尼解构主义，叙事模式，将历史视为对持续存在的矛盾呈现。
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ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that the 2013 Armory show retrospective hosted by the New York Historical Society missed an opportunity to put the original 1913 show in an adequate historical context. The show did not as fully integrate its rich historical material as it might have, and thus failed to give today’s visitors a fuller sense of the kind of environment artists and writers, such as William Carlos Williams, were then working in. It also did not allow contemporary spectators to uncover surprising connections between the great variety of artists who exhibited in 1913 but who were not referenced in the retrospective. Had the original contents been more comprehensively featured it would have provided an opportunity to offer a sense of the art historical context in which these works would have made sense—or would have entirely baffled their early twentieth-century American audience. In this way the show might also have been a boon to scholars of modernism of all stripes, enabling them to rejuvenate older critical conversations with fresh eyes. I argue that the real gem of the show was not in the show at all. Instead, it was the expansive, richly illustrated, and knowledgably written book collection, Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, edited by Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt and released along with the show, which presents an in-depth reexamination of the 1913 event, including an account of its key players.
摘要:本文认为，由纽约历史学会主办的2013年军械库展览回顾展错失了将1913年的展览置于充分的历史背景下的机会。这次展览并没有充分整合其丰富的历史材料，因此未能让今天的参观者更全面地了解当时艺术家和作家(如威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯)所处的环境。它也不允许当代观众发现1913年展出的各种艺术家之间令人惊讶的联系，但这些艺术家没有在回顾展中被提及。如果原稿内容能更全面地呈现出来，就有机会提供一种艺术历史背景的感觉，在这种背景下，这些作品就会有意义，否则就会让20世纪初的美国观众完全困惑。从这个角度来看，这场展览也可能是各种现代主义学者的福音，使他们能够用新鲜的眼光重新审视旧的批评对话。我认为这部剧真正的精华并不在剧中。相反，它是由玛丽莲·萨丹·库什纳(Marilyn Satin Kushner)和金柏利·奥卡特(Kimberly Orcutt)编辑的、内容丰富、文字丰富的藏书《军械库展览100周年:现代主义与革命》(Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution)，它与展览一起发布，对1913年的事件进行了深入的重新审视，包括对主要参与者的描述。
{"title":"Thin and Tantalizing: The Armory Show at 100","authors":"L. Siraganian","doi":"10.1353/wcw.2016.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wcw.2016.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that the 2013 Armory show retrospective hosted by the New York Historical Society missed an opportunity to put the original 1913 show in an adequate historical context. The show did not as fully integrate its rich historical material as it might have, and thus failed to give today’s visitors a fuller sense of the kind of environment artists and writers, such as William Carlos Williams, were then working in. It also did not allow contemporary spectators to uncover surprising connections between the great variety of artists who exhibited in 1913 but who were not referenced in the retrospective. Had the original contents been more comprehensively featured it would have provided an opportunity to offer a sense of the art historical context in which these works would have made sense—or would have entirely baffled their early twentieth-century American audience. In this way the show might also have been a boon to scholars of modernism of all stripes, enabling them to rejuvenate older critical conversations with fresh eyes. I argue that the real gem of the show was not in the show at all. Instead, it was the expansive, richly illustrated, and knowledgably written book collection, Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, edited by Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt and released along with the show, which presents an in-depth reexamination of the 1913 event, including an account of its key players.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"12 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/wcw.2016.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I demonstrate how a key material feature of verse—the line— becomes for William Carlos Williams a visual element of prosodic innovation through which he breaks (or enjambs) the line. I suggest that Williams, taking a clue from modernist arts, was by no means a proponent of “free verse” and that contrary to Marjorie Perloff’s statement that Williams “never quite understood the workings of his own prosody,” Williams’s understanding of the workings of a line is based on the fact that the ear is not a slave to the eye, while the visual response of the reader is one thing, and the aural response another. Even when one reads a poem silently, the ear is still there, though as a counterpart to the eye rather than in alignment with it. I argue that Williams’s approach to prosody assumes that the aural and the visual coexist and interact in his poems, although often in terms of tension rather than mutual support. Through comparisons with poems by Wallace Stevens and close reading of Williams’s lineation and syntax in poems such as “Good Night” and “Bird” I demonstrate Williams’s conviction that there is a fundamental connection between seeing and naming, and that in order to properly and effectively name our experiences and stay in touch with the real we constantly have to renew our language, in and outside poetry.
{"title":"The Poem on the Page, or the Visual Poetics of William Carlos Williams","authors":"P. Halter","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0007","url":null,"abstract":"I demonstrate how a key material feature of verse—the line— becomes for William Carlos Williams a visual element of prosodic innovation through which he breaks (or enjambs) the line. I suggest that Williams, taking a clue from modernist arts, was by no means a proponent of “free verse” and that contrary to Marjorie Perloff’s statement that Williams “never quite understood the workings of his own prosody,” Williams’s understanding of the workings of a line is based on the fact that the ear is not a slave to the eye, while the visual response of the reader is one thing, and the aural response another. Even when one reads a poem silently, the ear is still there, though as a counterpart to the eye rather than in alignment with it. I argue that Williams’s approach to prosody assumes that the aural and the visual coexist and interact in his poems, although often in terms of tension rather than mutual support. Through comparisons with poems by Wallace Stevens and close reading of Williams’s lineation and syntax in poems such as “Good Night” and “Bird” I demonstrate Williams’s conviction that there is a fundamental connection between seeing and naming, and that in order to properly and effectively name our experiences and stay in touch with the real we constantly have to renew our language, in and outside poetry.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"42 1","pages":"115 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My article offers a reading of the relations between materialist poetics and global universals in William Carlos Williams’s 1944 collection The Wedge. In this key-stone collection of mid-century modernism, the poet “represent[s] the negative” through a wide range of scenes of destruction as anticipation of and response to the Second World War and the nuclear age. I focus on the libidinal dynamics of Williams’s attention to destruction as prelude to cultural renewal in his work, seeing the “self-shattering” of sexuality, after Leo Bersani, as a life-long aesthetic concern. At the same time, I argue for the importance of The Wedge in periodizing, historicist terms, while recovering from the archive under-acknowledged value in work from the poet’s middle period. The Wedge, in my view, anticipates the turn to language in poetry, but in historicist as much as formalist terms; in both cases “language splits off from matter as the remains of what can be looked at but not comprehended.” Similarly, I see Williams’s thematic of destruction in the little-known cover image of The Wedge, from the celebrated Cummington Press edition, by Wightman Williams. My approach thus offers interarts comparisons along with a revisionary consideration of the relations between history, violence, formalism, and what I regard as the anti-formalist unity of The Wedge. Throughout my discussion, a concern with art’s materiality leads directly to Williams’s invocation of universals, connecting Williams and Critical Theory in the same period.
{"title":"Destruction and Universals in William Carlos Williams’s The Wedge","authors":"Barrett Watten","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0011","url":null,"abstract":"My article offers a reading of the relations between materialist poetics and global universals in William Carlos Williams’s 1944 collection The Wedge. In this key-stone collection of mid-century modernism, the poet “represent[s] the negative” through a wide range of scenes of destruction as anticipation of and response to the Second World War and the nuclear age. I focus on the libidinal dynamics of Williams’s attention to destruction as prelude to cultural renewal in his work, seeing the “self-shattering” of sexuality, after Leo Bersani, as a life-long aesthetic concern. At the same time, I argue for the importance of The Wedge in periodizing, historicist terms, while recovering from the archive under-acknowledged value in work from the poet’s middle period. The Wedge, in my view, anticipates the turn to language in poetry, but in historicist as much as formalist terms; in both cases “language splits off from matter as the remains of what can be looked at but not comprehended.” Similarly, I see Williams’s thematic of destruction in the little-known cover image of The Wedge, from the celebrated Cummington Press edition, by Wightman Williams. My approach thus offers interarts comparisons along with a revisionary consideration of the relations between history, violence, formalism, and what I regard as the anti-formalist unity of The Wedge. Throughout my discussion, a concern with art’s materiality leads directly to Williams’s invocation of universals, connecting Williams and Critical Theory in the same period.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"197 - 214"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT: In this article I approach William Carlos Williams’s poetry in the context of international modernism with special emphasis on Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract painter and theorist of the relation of color to spirit. What Williams found in Kandinsky, I argue, are qualities of liberation and spontaneous laughter as a response to pleasure at desublimating repressed desires for a visual mediation that signaled a break with the past and an embrace of the new. In Kandinsky, Williams embraced an artist for whom color was an expressive dimension that connoted harmony, emotion, eroticism, or spirituality. Kandinsky’s art, for Williams, conveyed properties of an open text that left room for creative reception. I argue that Williams followed Kandinsky’s lead in creating hybrid methods that blended the verbal, the visual, and the sonicm, and trace Kandinsky’s influence on works such as the improvisational Kora in Hell, Spring and All, and the Great American Novel, all of which challenge traditional ideas of genre. By tracing a connection to Kandinsky through the work of Williams’s close friend Marsden Hartley, I argue that we can see the initial ways that Williams synthesized his local interests with the growing trend towards abstraction. I conclude that Williams’s interest in abstract art, however, did not end with Kandinsky, as Williams appreciated the work of the later American movement known as Abstract Expressionism and interpreted their work as a continuation of earlier modernist goals.
{"title":"Improvisation at the Armory Show: An Approach to Understanding Wassily Kandinsky’s Influence on the Writings of William Carlos Williams","authors":"Paul R. Cappucci","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0006","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: In this article I approach William Carlos Williams’s poetry in the context of international modernism with special emphasis on Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract painter and theorist of the relation of color to spirit. What Williams found in Kandinsky, I argue, are qualities of liberation and spontaneous laughter as a response to pleasure at desublimating repressed desires for a visual mediation that signaled a break with the past and an embrace of the new. In Kandinsky, Williams embraced an artist for whom color was an expressive dimension that connoted harmony, emotion, eroticism, or spirituality. Kandinsky’s art, for Williams, conveyed properties of an open text that left room for creative reception. I argue that Williams followed Kandinsky’s lead in creating hybrid methods that blended the verbal, the visual, and the sonicm, and trace Kandinsky’s influence on works such as the improvisational Kora in Hell, Spring and All, and the Great American Novel, all of which challenge traditional ideas of genre. By tracing a connection to Kandinsky through the work of Williams’s close friend Marsden Hartley, I argue that we can see the initial ways that Williams synthesized his local interests with the growing trend towards abstraction. I conclude that Williams’s interest in abstract art, however, did not end with Kandinsky, as Williams appreciated the work of the later American movement known as Abstract Expressionism and interpreted their work as a continuation of earlier modernist goals.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"81 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By assessing the relationship between William Carlos Williams scholarship and the visual arts my article focuses on how Williams’s aesthetics, influenced by Cubism’s fusion of object with surrounding space, challenged human-centered perspectives. I compare traditions of appropriative art such as Dada that reconditioned, re-used, and redeemed “found” material that had been regarded as waste to perspectives on art, nature, and subjectivity that can be defined as post-human or at least not human-centered. Building on Clement Greenberg’s focus on the materiality of representation—pigments, language itself—I argue that modernists such as Williams drew their medium closer to physical environments and thus away from structuring the picture plane according to Renaissance/Humanist one-point perspective. My article reflects on the ecocritical implications of such work as Williams’s Paterson, and his loyalty to a city characterized historically by abandonment and pollution. A bond, I argue, that was forged partly by Williams’s Dadaist openness to conventionally unaesthetic and “irredeemable” subjects and objects, things that the industrial world used up, transformed into plate glass and automobile, or discarded as slag heap. The poem’s empathy with the Passaic’s “down-at-the-heel,” neglected, spurned, and ordinary beings also extends beyond humans.
通过评估威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯(William Carlos Williams)的学术研究与视觉艺术之间的关系，我的文章主要关注威廉姆斯的美学是如何受到立体主义将物体与周围空间融合的影响，挑战以人为中心的观点的。我比较了诸如达达这样的挪用性艺术传统，即修复、再利用和赎回“发现”的材料，这些材料被认为是废物，而对艺术、自然和主观性的看法可以被定义为后人类或至少不是以人为中心的。基于克莱门特·格林伯格对表现的物质性——颜料、语言本身——的关注，我认为像威廉姆斯这样的现代主义者使他们的媒介更接近于物理环境，从而远离了根据文艺复兴/人文主义的一点视角来构建画面平面。我的文章反映了威廉姆斯的《帕特森》等作品的生态批评含义，以及他对一个历史上以遗弃和污染为特征的城市的忠诚。我认为，这种联系部分是由威廉姆斯达达主义对传统上不美观和“不可救药”的主体和客体的开放所形成的，这些客体和客体是工业世界耗尽的东西，被改造成平板玻璃和汽车，或者被丢弃为渣堆。这首诗对帕塞伊克人“落魄的”、被忽视的、被唾弃的和平凡的人的同情也超越了人类。
{"title":"Ecocriticism and the Modern Artist’s Notice of Nature","authors":"Iris Ralph","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0008","url":null,"abstract":"By assessing the relationship between William Carlos Williams scholarship and the visual arts my article focuses on how Williams’s aesthetics, influenced by Cubism’s fusion of object with surrounding space, challenged human-centered perspectives. I compare traditions of appropriative art such as Dada that reconditioned, re-used, and redeemed “found” material that had been regarded as waste to perspectives on art, nature, and subjectivity that can be defined as post-human or at least not human-centered. Building on Clement Greenberg’s focus on the materiality of representation—pigments, language itself—I argue that modernists such as Williams drew their medium closer to physical environments and thus away from structuring the picture plane according to Renaissance/Humanist one-point perspective. My article reflects on the ecocritical implications of such work as Williams’s Paterson, and his loyalty to a city characterized historically by abandonment and pollution. A bond, I argue, that was forged partly by Williams’s Dadaist openness to conventionally unaesthetic and “irredeemable” subjects and objects, things that the industrial world used up, transformed into plate glass and automobile, or discarded as slag heap. The poem’s empathy with the Passaic’s “down-at-the-heel,” neglected, spurned, and ordinary beings also extends beyond humans.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"116 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article I focus on a handful of late poems from William Carlos Williams’s 1962 collection Pictures from Brueghel, to demonstrate how Williams’s attention to new beginnings may ignore his debt to what W. H. Auden in the “Musee des Beaux Arts” called the “old masters” such as Pieter Brueghel. I offer close reading techniques to draw interarts comparisons and address the meaning of grammatical elements in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” such as Williams’s use of syntax to “minimize Icarus.” My close reading of grammatical and syntactic features functions not so much to celebrate form for its own sake, but rather as a technical means to locate how Williams repositions Brueghel’s painting through grammatical equivalencies. I emphasize that Williams was a creative reader of Brueghel, with his imaginative renderings of the Flemish master’s paintings unconstrained by documenting the marks on a Brueghel canvas with uninflected veracity. This is true to the point that Williams takes great liberties with his literary impressions of Brueghel. Williams’s creative readings and revisionary writings of Brueghel are thus as much examples of him looking outward as part of an inner dialogue.
{"title":"Ways of Seeing Williams’s “Pictures from Brueghel”","authors":"Charlotte Kent","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2016.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2016.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I focus on a handful of late poems from William Carlos Williams’s 1962 collection Pictures from Brueghel, to demonstrate how Williams’s attention to new beginnings may ignore his debt to what W. H. Auden in the “Musee des Beaux Arts” called the “old masters” such as Pieter Brueghel. I offer close reading techniques to draw interarts comparisons and address the meaning of grammatical elements in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” such as Williams’s use of syntax to “minimize Icarus.” My close reading of grammatical and syntactic features functions not so much to celebrate form for its own sake, but rather as a technical means to locate how Williams repositions Brueghel’s painting through grammatical equivalencies. I emphasize that Williams was a creative reader of Brueghel, with his imaginative renderings of the Flemish master’s paintings unconstrained by documenting the marks on a Brueghel canvas with uninflected veracity. This is true to the point that Williams takes great liberties with his literary impressions of Brueghel. Williams’s creative readings and revisionary writings of Brueghel are thus as much examples of him looking outward as part of an inner dialogue.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"66 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2016.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66552885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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