With and Against the Powers of Contingency: an Introduction

Introductio

Kristen Case. American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe

Kristen Case’s study is a timely contribution to the ongoing scholarly interest in pragmatist genealogies and affiliations within American intellectual and literary history. Case’s exploration of “crosscurrents” between American poetry and the pragmatist tradition revolve affinities that “disrupt traditional, linear notions of literary inheritance” (xii). Framed by an introductory chapter on the tension between idealism and a proto-pragmatist perspective on experience in Emerson’s thought, Ca..

Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation

Kirsten MacLeod, American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4426-4316-1. Pp 474 Stamatina Dimakopoulou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens In American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation, Kirsten Macleod offers a compelling cultural history and posits these publications as an important force-field in a context where sho..

Politics and Paradigms for Art in America : Reframing Radicalism in The Little Review (1914-1929)

Launched in March 1914, months before the outbreak of World War I and folding in May 1929, months before the Stock Market Crash, the Little Review spanned a period marked by dramatic moments in the course of the twentieth- century. Consistently alive to its American contexts, the Little Review grew into an important document of the making of the Anglo-American modernist canon and the continental avant-gardes. Starting out in the Chicago Renaissance and promising to cover “literature, drama, m..

The “text of life” in Vito Acconci’s Diary of a Body

Vito Acconci’s early artistic practice combines textuality, visuality, and the involvement with the physical body. It also revolves around the tension between the transience of the performance and the various forms with which the artist’s activities have been devised, recorded, and documented. The voluminous archive that was assembled by Gregory Volk in the Diary of a Body 1969-1973 is worth examining in that respect, since these visual and verbal documents are not only secondary to the event, but make up an integral part of the artist’s early work. Therefore this essay revisits Vito Acconci’s notes and photographs as an assemblage that preserves the experiential substance of the artist’s practice, and also speaks of its in/transitive character, inviting reflection on the connections between writing, performance, and the ground of experience. A paratext to the performances and a continuation of his early writings, the diary is a storehouse that has a documentary value against the grain, which the essay dwells on

The “text of life” in Vito Acconci’s Diary of a Body

À ses débuts, l’artiste conceptuel Vito Acconci combine dans sa pratique poésie, vidéo, photographie et performance, engageant la présence physique du corps. Il explore aussi la tension entre le caractère éphémère de la performance et les formes variées avec lesquelles ses activités ont été pensées, enregistrées et documentées. Les archives volumineuses assemblées par Gregory Volk dans The Diary of a Body 1969-1973 méritent d’être examinées à cet égard, car les documents visuels et verbaux ne sont pas seulement secondaires par rapport à la nature unique et éphémère de l’événement, mais font partie intégrante de l’œuvre. Cet essai revisite les notes et les photographies de Vito Acconci comme un assemblage qui conserve la substance expérientielle de la pratique artistique, et qui témoigne aussi de son caractère in/transitif, invitant une réflexion sur les liens entre écriture, performance et expérience. Constituant un paratexte aux performances et une continuation des premiers écrits, le journal possède une valeur documentaire contradictoire dont on analyse ici les enjeux.Vito Acconci’s early artistic practice combines textuality, visuality, and the involvement with the physical body. It also revolves around the tension between the transience of the performance and the various forms with which the artist’s activities have been devised, recorded, and documented. The voluminous archive that was assembled by Gregory Volk in the Diary of a Body 1969-1973 is worth examining in that respect, since these visual and verbal documents are not only secondary to the event, but make up an integral part of the artist’s early work. Therefore this essay revisits Vito Acconci’s notes and photographs as an assemblage that preserves the experiential substance of the artist’s practice, and also speaks of its in/transitive character, inviting reflection on the connections between writing, performance, and the ground of experience. A paratext to the performances and a continuation of his early writings, the diary is a storehouse that has a documentary value against the grain, which the essay dwells on

From a “Garden of Disorder” to a “Nest of Flames”: Charles Henri Ford’s Surrealist Inflections

Virtually omitted from established narratives of American modernism, yet central in the histories of the reception of European Surrealism in the US, Charles Henri Ford’s life and work have been recovered in important queer genealogies within Anglo-American modernism. Yet within this process or recovery, Ford’s poetic work is still largely overlooked, and this may have to do less with its marked Surrealist influences and/or derivative aspects than with the somewhat unclassifiable and composite texture of Ford’s poems. This article revisits Ford’s early poetry as a space of convergence and dialogue between distinct yet interrelated poetics: from the 1938 A Garden of Disorder to the 1949, Sleep in a Nest of Flames, a queer subjectivity assimilates concurrently Surrealist poetics and Djuna Barnes’s equally unclassifiable queer modernism with and against American poetic modernisms

The Poetics of Vision and the Redemption of the Subject in John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

In the “Final Note” to his 1977 study of Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merril, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, David Kalstone wrote that on “reading Ashbery’s work, I often have the feeling that he speaks not only to his moment but to the condition of much postmodernist poetry.” A condition that is to do, in Kalstone’s terms, with the ways in which postmodernist poetry explores the relation between language — the medium of poetry — and the self: Ashbery, Kalstone goes..