Make it new! - Ezra Pound

1. Make it new!- Ezra Pound

2. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916) Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests.But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit.The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner! He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. DIEU was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God's real name was God. It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big

3. “O Sweet Spontaneous” by e.e. cummings (1920) “They Say that Hope is Happiness” by Lord Byron (1829) O sweet spontaneous earth how often have the doting           fingers of purientphilosophers pinchedand poked thee ,has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy       beauty      .how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightestconceivegods         (but true to the incomparable couch of death thy rhythmic lover thou answerest them only with                         spring) They say that Hope is happiness; But genuine Love must prize the past,And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose the first—they set the last; And all that Memory loves the most Was once our only Hope to be,And all that Hope adored and lost Hath melted into Memory. Alas! it is delusion all: The future cheats us from afar,Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

4. Pablo Picasso (1913) Rembrandt (1630)

5. 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.)

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

7. 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?

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

9. 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

10. 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.

11. collages complex allusions urban cultural dislocation theories

12. 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 disengaged from bourgeois values theories (feminist, in this case)

13. Preludes (IV)T.S. Eliot His soul stretched tights across the skiesThat fade behind a city block,Or trampled by insistent feetAt four and five and six o’clock;And short square fingers stuffing pipes,And evening newspapers, and eyesAssured of certain certainties,The conscience of a blackened streetImpatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curledAround these images, and cling;The notion of some infinitely gentleInfinitely suffering things. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;The worlds revolve like ancient womenGathering fuel in vacant lots. urban cultural dislocation collage of images theories (of time)

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