“The Aberrant Is the Classic”: William Carlos Williams and Literary History

The “classic” is a vexed term in the work of William Carlos Williams. He uses the category to describe both the stale classicism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and, conversely, the authentic, “aberrant” classic of James Joyce and surrealism. Analyzing unpublished archival manuscripts alongside the posthumously published collection of essays, The Embodiment of Knowledge, I approach the classic through Williams's theories of pedagogy. Williams parodies and rejects academic modes of reading that cling to the “malignant rigidities” of the past. Yet Paterson and The Embodiment also theorize the reader's interpretive power to disrupt any homogenizing conformity latent in the literary tradition. This dissonant hermeneutics can recuperate the classics and represents a form of resistance to a binary logic of past versus present, or European versus American literature.