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.

Box

In between situation, container has no essence. Narrative, connects different places. Life story of a box, no longer objective.

Virginity

Not a real object, in between. Defined by absence, like the narrow footpath. Not a married woman, but also not a kid.

Eating (poem)

Imitates eating by reading it out loud. Reducing food to nothing, a mass, individual essence. Explaining an action.

Dining is West

Very simple, dining rooms were in the West so you had light and warmth from the setting sun. Shows how detached scholars are from their bodies and lives.

Philamel

Figure in Greek mythology, transformed into a bird after she was raped.

John Locke

Empirical science. Colour is inward and subjective, not in the object itself. Primary (objective) and secondary (perception of the subject) qualities.

George Berkely

Impossible to imagine object devoid of subjective sensations. The entire world exists in the mind of the subject.

David Hume

Subject is also an object in its own perception of the world. Subject is also a mere idea - what is perceiving the subject?

Immanuel Kant

Shocked by British empiricist philosophers philosophizing the world out of existence. There is a world external to subjective perception that we are unable to speak about.

Noumenal

Kant’s world outside subjective perception.

Phenomenal

Kant’s ‘our world’, the subjective world that we can discuss.

Hegel

Difference between subject and point of view. Subject has held many pov’s by changing its mind. Synthesis of previous and new beliefs.

Absolute idea

God. God contains and reconciles all pov’s.

Bradley

English Hegelian. T.S. Eliot’s master. Disintegrating self. External perceptions are also dependent on the person, just like their thoughts and feelings.

Da

Encounter with God. Three words in Sanskrit.

Sled

Memory and desire.

April

Life is coming back, but the speaker isn’t happy about it.

Arthus Schopenhauer

Subconscious. The body is the one nouminal object we experience directly. This is our window into the noumenal, material world. World as Will and Idea, upon which our individual Intellects float like bubbles.

Proust

Reaches memory through bodily experience of tea and madeleines.

Locke

Association of ideas. Moments of heightened emotion.

Henry Bergson

Our self endures through procession of time. Only breaks down in looking back.

William James

Consciousness doesn’t appear to oneself in bits. Ideas flow - river, stream of thought, consciousness.

Bisexuality

Feeling each sex through the body.

Dorothy Richardson

Nothing happens, just life going on and on. Closer to reality than any novelists. She rejects the term radical empiricist.

L’ecriture feminine

Helene Cixous’ theory. The women’s writing. That which women will start writing. Bypasses masculine emphasis on intellect, writing through the body.

T.S. Eliot

Dissolution of individual necessary.

Max Stirner

Very radical philosophy. Subverts Hegel’s logic. Ego escapes physical tyranny by embracing the mind, e.g. through religion, feminism, communism. Thesis - antithesis - Nothing. ‘I’ is not presupposed, but posited by myself.

Ego

Nothingness, gap, the point where you step outside yourself and decide to be different. Nothing, constantly renewing the self.

Dialectical

Two clashing perspectives in conflict.

Karl Marx

Young Hegelian. Communist Manifesto. Impact 20th century, after long period of obscurity.

Dialectical materialism

Matter over mind or spirit. Thesis - antithesis - synthesis. Twist on Hegel. Ripped off from Stirner.

Religion

Figures out of someone’s brain get a life of their own.

Ideogrammic method

Practice of montage in Pound. One image - superposition. Layers of transmission, distances to communicate. Fascination with Eastern literature.

Soviet montage theory

Recut American films to understand them and re-use them as propaganda. Chain of associations between short shots. Cutting.

Eisenstein

Intellectual montage. Stolen from Pound. Material idiograms together create concept. Reference to Chinese idiograms.

Canto 14

Doesn’t like modern world much, thinks it’s Hell-like. Not a fan of uni professors, journalists, politicians, liberal democracy, church figures. Says people in finance are behind it all, making money of war.

Canto 45

Usury as cause for bad modern society. Causes rise in anti-semitism as well.

Usury

Interest on loan. Major sin in medieval church. Dante says usury takes you to lower Hell.

Canto I

How to get out of the Hell of modern society — through reading, intellect, information.

Simony

Selling holy things (gods, Bacchus).

Canto 9

How will the journey ‘home’ be executed? Fascism