Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

1. Week 14 | April 30 • Questions are Remarks 394; Long and Sluggish Lines 442; A Quiet Normal Life 443; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour 444; The Planet on the Table 450; The River of Rivers in Connecticut 451; Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself 451; A Clear Day and No Memories 475; Of Mere Being 476; First Warmth 597; As You Leave the Room 597 • Major Poem: The Rock 445 • Philosopher of the Week: Maurice Merleau-Ponty • Composer of the Week: Samuel Barber • Painter of the Week: René Magritte Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

2. Philosopher of the Week: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

3. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

5. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are encrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body. This way of turning things around, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision happens among, or is caught in, things in the place where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself by virtue of the sight of things; in that place where there persists, like the mother water in crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

6. The Earth . . . which is not in motion like objective bodies, but not at rest either, since we cannot see what it could be "tacked on" to . . . is the "soil" or "stem" of our thought as it is of life. We shall certainly be able to move it or carry it back when we inhabit other planets, but the reason we shall is that then we shall have enlarged our native soil. We cannot do away with it. As the Earth is by definition one, all soil we tread upon becoming simultaneously a province of it, the living beings with whom the sons of the Earth will be able to communicate will simultaneously become meaner if you prefer, terrestrial men will become variants of a more general human community which will remain one. The Earth is the matrix of our time as it is of our space. Every constructed notion of time presupposes our proto-history as carnal being co-present to a single world. Every evocation of possible worlds refers to a way of seeing our own world. Every possibility is a variant of our reality, an effective possibility of reality. . . . Maurice Merleau-Ponty Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

7. One earthquake does more to demonstrate our vulnerability and mortality than the whole history of philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

8. One day, once and for all, something was set in motion which, even during sleep, can no longer cease to see or not to see, to feel or not to feel, to suffer or be happy, to think or rest from thinking, in a word to "have it out" with the world. There then arose, not a new set of sensations or state of consciousness, not even a new monad or a new perspective, since I am not tied to any one perspective, my point of view, being under compulsion only in that I must always have only one at once let us say, therefore, that there arose a fresh possibility of situations. The event of my birth has not passed completely away, it has not fallen into nothingness in the way that an event of the objective world does, for it committed a whole future, not as a cause determines its effect, but as a situation, once created, inevitably leads on to some outcome. . . . In the home into which a child is born, all objects change their significance; they begin to await some as yet indeterminate treatment at his hands; another and different person is there, a new personal history, short or long, has just been initiated, another account has been opened. My first perception, along with the horizons which surrounded it, is an ever-present event, an unforgettable tradition; even as a thinking subject, I still am that first perception, the continuation of that same life inaugurated by it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

9. Everything comes to pass . . . as though the physiology of vision did not succeed in closing the nervous functioning in upon itself, since movements of fixation, or convergence, are suspended upon the advent of the body of a visible world for which they were supposed to furnish the explanation, as though, through all these channels, all those prepared but unemployed circuits, the current that will traverse them was rendered probable, in the long run inevitable; the current making of the embryo a newborn infant, of a visible a seer, and of a body a mind, or at least a flesh. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

10. Thinking "operationally" has become a sort of absolute artificialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines. If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices (as a decadent psychoanalysis and a decadent culturalism have done in the United States)then, since man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

11. [Painting] gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

12. Thus science began by excluding all the predicates that come to the things from our encounter with them. The exclusion is however only provisional: when it will have learned to invest it, science, will little by little reintroduce what it first put aside as subjective; but it will integrate it as a particular case of the relations and objects that define the world for science. Then the world will close in over itself, and, except for what within us thinks and builds science, that impartial spectator that inhabits us, we will become parts or moments of the Great Object. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

13. Science is and always has been that admirable, active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general . . . as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predetermined for our use. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

14. Composer of the Week: Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

15. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

16. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

17. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

18. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

19. Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

20. Painter of the Week: René Magritte (1898-1967) Magritte Quotes Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

21. Dada & Surrealism

22. Both responses to The Great War and the end of Enlightenment Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

23. Modernism • Late 19th to mid 20th Century • Produced radically experimental (avant-garde) art: atonal music, Cubism, stream of consciousness fiction) • Anti-bourgeois and disdainful of popularity (Jarrell: “If you won’t read me, I will make sure you can’t”) • Succeeded by Postmodernism • Both quintessential products of Modernism Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

24. Dada & Surrealism • Dada • The name is intended to evoke baby talk. • A punk-like nose-thumbing at everything sacred. • An exemplary Dada event: a poetry reading in which a half dozen poets read their work simultaneously on stage. ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

25. Dada & Surrealism Dada Duchamp Fountain—Marcel Duchamp Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

26. Surrealism • The name is intended to mean above/beyond realism Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

27. Dada and Surrealism • Surrealism • Greatly influenced by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

28. Dada & Surrealism Surrealism “As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.”—Comte de Lautréamont (born in Montevideo Uruguay, 1846)—from Les Chants de Maldoror ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

29. Dada and Surrealism • Surrealism • Andre Breton (right): Surrealism’s “pope” Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

30. Surrealism • An exemplary Surrealist activity: the exquisite corpse • Wikipedia article on the exquisite corpse Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

31. Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Spanish Painter The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad. Salvador Dali Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

32. I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. --Salvador Dali Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

33. Asked why he had a pet lobster (which the motorcycle-goggle-wearing Dali sometimes walked—with a leash—on the streets of Paris), he replied: “It doesn’t bark, and it knows the secrets of the deep.” Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

34. Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

35. Dada & Surrealism 1929 Un Chien Andalou ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

36. Dada & Surrealism Venus de Milo of the Drawers ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

37. Dada & Surrealism Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

38. Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque Cannibalism in Autumn

39. Dada & Surrealism ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque Persistence of Memory Asked why he was so fond of limp watches in his work, Dali replied: “Because they keep such good time.”

40. Dada & Surrealism Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, Premonition of Civil War ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

41. Dada & Surrealism The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

42. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: Perspicacity

43. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: The Therapeutist

44. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: Son of Man

45. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: Not to Be Reproduced

46. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: Personal Values

47. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte The Treachery of Images

48. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: The Lovers

49. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: Time Transfixed

50. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens René Magritte: The Menaced Assassin