Broken Images: Anglophone Modernism

Ecriture feminine

Female writing, flowing lines, no interpunction.

Tiresias

Prophet of Apollo, transformed into a woman, blind.

Dialectic

Argumentative

Analytical cubism

Braque and Picasso. Parts that shouldn’t be visible from one perspective. Analysis of the object, breaking things down. Process of building complex idea of item. Image of how artist’s perception of object has been built up. Complex in space. Gertrude Stein in literature.

Italian futurism

Not understood in history, because people didn’t grow up with moving pictures. Multiple shots overlayed. Image from different points in time. Complex in time. Mina Loy in literature.

British vorticism

No blurriness, energy. Static objects. Spatial energy - two clashing vanishing points. False perspectives. H.D. in literature.

Expressionist

Pointing a certain way forward, freeze-frame. Predecessor of cubism and imagism.

Impressionist

Fleeting experience of light, passing of time, series of snapshots. Predecessor of futurism.

Absolutism

Time contained within a pattern.

Emperialism

Dried, static categorising.

Gertrude Stein

Radical empirialism, William James, flow of time. Cubic still life. Literary portraits of objects.

Mina Loy

Identifies as futurist. Futurism started witha car crash. Rejects inherent fascism of futurism. Disentangling herself. Songs to Joannes - breakup poem between her and futurism.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Imagism - inception for English modernism. Given title by ex Ezra Pound, uncomfortable with it. Restricting her writing through expectations. Not a vorticist, but wrote a vorticist poem.

Imagism/vorticism

Direct treatment of the ‘thing’. Use no word that doesn’t contribute to presentation. Rhythm: sequence of musical phrase, not metonome. Short and sweet. Concentrated, vivid image. Most don’t manage this, are too long.

Super-position

One idea set on top of another.