Make it new! - Ezra Pound

1. Make it new!- Ezra Pound

2. Modernism: "a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions..... Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple points of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.“ (Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], s.v.)

3. retrospectively past eyes / view “modernism” is a term that is applied to a past movement. artists of the time didn’t call themselves “modernists.”

4. experimental and avant-garde trends What is the purpose of an experiment? What is the result of an experiment? How does the scientific method apply to the artistic process?

5. rejection a political middle cultural religious unity ? the rule of rationality

6. disengaged from bourgeois values 1bour·geois \ˈbu̇rzh-ˌwä ˈ\ Definition of : 1: of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class 2: marked by a concern for materialinterests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity 3: dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic Examples of : • Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding—that was all you needed … You were an intellectual. —Tom Wolfe, , June 2000 • Origin of : Middle French, from Old French townsman, from town, from Latin First Known Use: circa 1565

7. upset … stream-of-consciousness “… and it was unjust and cruel and unfair. He could not eat the blackish fish fritters they got on Wednesdays in Lent and one of his potatoes had the mark of the spade on it. Yes, he would do what the fellows had told him. He would go up and tell the rector that he had been wrongly punished. A thing like that had been done before by somebody in history …” (Chapter I, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce) “The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.” (Chapter VIII, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf) Thinking it would be nice for them down at New London if the weather held up like this. Why shouldn’t it ? The month of brides, the voice that breathed She ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses. Mr. and Mrs. Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of. Roses. Not virgins like dogwood, milkweed. I said I have committed incest, Father, I said. Roses. Cunning and serene. If you attend Harvard one year, but don’t see the boat-race, there should be are fund. Let Jason have it. Give Jason a year at Harvard. (The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner) “… refers to a style of fiction that takes as its subject the flow of thoughts, responses, and sensations of one of more characters. A stream-of-consciousness narrative is not structured as a coherent, logical presentation of ideas. Rather, the connections between ideas are associative, with on idea suggesting another.

8. collages complex allusions urban cultural dislocation theories

9. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law                  Adrienne Rich You, once a belle in Shreveport,with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,still have your dresses copied from that time,and play a Chopin preludecalled by Cortot: "Delicious recollectionsfloat like perfume through the memory." Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cakeheavy with useless experience, richwith suspicion, rumor, fantasy,crumbling to pieces under the knife-edgeof mere fact. In the prime of your life. Nervy, glowering, your daughterwipes the teaspoons, grows another way. complex allusions

10. 2 Banging the coffee-pot into the sinkshe hears the angels chiding, and looks outpast the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.Only a week since They said: Have no patience. The next time it was: Be insatiable.Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,a match burn to her thumbnail, or held her hand above the kettle's snoutright in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,since nothing hurts her anymore, excepteach morning's grit blowing into her eyes. collage of images

11. 3 A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,that sprung-lidded, still commodioussteamer-trunk of tempora and moresgets stuffed with it all: the mildewd orange-flowers,the female pills, the terrible breastsof Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids. Two handsome women, gripped in argument,each proud. acute, subtle, I hear screamacross the cut glass and majolicalike Furies cornered from their prey:The argument ad feminam, all the old knivesthat have rusted in my back, I drive in yoursma semblable, ma soeur! collage of images

12. 4 Knowing themselves too well in one another:their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .Reading while waitingfor the iron to heat,writing, My Life had stood---a Loaded Gun---in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scumor, more often,iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life. complex allusions

13. 5 Dulceridens, dulceloguens, she shaves her legs until they gleamlike petrified mammoth-tusk.

14. 6 When to her lute Corinna singsneither words nor music are her own;only the long hair drippingover her cheek, only the songof silk against her kneesand these adjusted in reflection of an eye.  Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, beforean unlocked door, that cage of cages,tell us, you bird, you tragical machine---is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned downby love, for you the only natural action,are you edged more keento prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shownher household books to you, daughter-in-law,that her sons never saw? complex allusions theories (feminist, in this case)

15. 7 "To have in this uncertain world some staywhich cannot be undermined, isof the utmost consequence."                                            Thus wrotea woman, partly brave and partly good,who fought with what she partly understood.Few men about her would or could do more,hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore. complex allusions

16. 8 "You all die at fifteen,"  said Diderot,and turn part legend, part convention.Still, eyes inaccurately dreambehind closed window blankening with steam.Deliciously, all that we might have been,all that we were---fire, tears,wit, taste, martyred ambition---stirs like the memory of refused adulterythe drained and flagging bosom of our middle years. complex allusions

17. 9 Not that it is done well, butthat it is done at all? Yes, thinkof the odds! or shrug them off forever.This luxury of the precocious child,Time's precious chronic invalid,---would we, darlings, resign it if we could?Our blight has been our sinecure:mere talent was enough for us---glitter in fragments and rough drafts. Sigh no more, ladies.                                Time is maleand in his cups drinks to the fair.Bemused by gallantry, we hearour mediocrities over-praised,indolence read as abnegation,slattern thought styled intuition,every lapse forgiven, our crimeonly to cast too bold a shadowor smash the mold straight off. For that, solitary confinement,tear gas, attrition shelling.Few applicants for that honor. theories (feminist, in this case)

18. 10                               Well,she's long about her coming, who must bemore merciless to herself than history.Her mind full to the wind, I see her plungebreasted and glancing through the currents,taking the light upon herat least as beautiful as any boyor helicopter,                    poised, still coming,her fine blades making the air wincebut her cargono promise then:deliveredpalpableours.

19. … challenge the reader … to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms