Sarah Posman

The aesthetics of matter : modernism, the avant-garde and material exchange

This volume proposes an in-depth exploration of the materiality of art and writing in modernism and the avant-garde. The essays explore how the avant-gardes and modernism attempted to establish the material specificity and hybridity of media and art forms. The collection sheds light on the full range and import of the aesthetics of matter in avant-garde and modernist practice across all art forms from the 19th century to the present day.

Williams, Nostalgia, and Modernity

| The article reads Williams’s approach to the past in line with the concept of a reflective nostalgia, as coined by Svetlana Boym, with the aim of adding to our understanding of modernist reflection on time and temporality. Williams is, famously, a poet of the moment, but at the same time his poetics drives on the desire to return to a beginning, whether this takes the form of a personal stripping down, the invocation of a cosmic spring, or the digging for a historical ground. The articles focuses on two of Williams’s backward-looking projects, In the American Grain and “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” and read them in line with two philosophical projects that can be seen to bookend modernism: Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and Bruno Latour’s “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” Williams’s poetic trajectory takes us from a vitalist forgetting to a compositionist project in tune with contemporary reconfigurations of the make-it-new imperative.

‘Becoming’ in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë through the Eyes of Gilles Deleuze

Abstract In four of his books Gilles Deleuze makes a reference to the Brontës. In Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus he mentions Charlotte Brontë as an example of literature that surpasses a subject-centred narrative, a literature of what he calls a ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness’, in which events take precedence over subjects making life choices. This essay concentrates on Jane Eyre: An Autobiography in teasing out Deleuze’s surprising mentioning of Charlotte Brontë and explores how a Deleuzian ‘haecceity’-vantage point can change our understanding of life narratives and authorship.