{"title":"The Deceptive Ground of History: The Sources of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain","authors":"Bryce Conrad","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2018.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2018.0004","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The author investigates the range of historical sources used by William Carlos Williams to support his writing of his 1925 history of America, In the American Grain and argues that Williams sought to show how such narratives were constructed by refusing or disrupting their authoritative status. Conrad contends that Williams’s wish to wage a war on historians was contradicted by the latter’s reliance on historians’ sources. In the American Grain is seen to be a modernist act of historical writing in which the author educates himself about the processes involved in the making of US historical narratives while seeking to disrupt notions of historical verisimilitude.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2018.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47824095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography","authors":"J. Lowney","doi":"10.1353/wcw.2018.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wcw.2018.0003","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article offers a personal reflection on the impact of Bryce Conrad’s historiography in his 1990 critical work Refiguring America. The author highlights Conrad’s efforts to emphasize the importance of language in William Carlos Williams’s history of America, In the American Grain, published in 1925, through his analysis of the various rhetorical and narrative strategies that Williams employed.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/wcw.2018.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66553410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics: Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Evans, William Carlos Williams by Alexander Leicht (review)","authors":"M. Long","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2018.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2018.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In contrast to a method of American studies focused on democratic themes such as individualism, or the role of art in a democratic society, The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics proposes that particular artworks are “doing democratic theory” using the formal resources of art. The first part of the book provides a theoretical framework by defining democracy as egalitarianism, or the equal respect for autonomous persons; as pluralism, or how individuals come together while maintaining their distinctive identities; and openness, or the idea that democracy is an ongoing process (19). These three dimensions of democracy offer a schematic outline of contemporary democratic theory to organize the interpretive chapters that follow on the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, the photographs of Walker Evans, and the poems of William Carlos Williams. The method of critical analysis in The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics makes use of interactionist theories of metaphor to map relations across the conceptual domains of art and social structures. And these relations provides an organizational structure for the methodological challenge of discussing how particular aesthetic strategies share characteristics (or interact) with democratic theory across the distinct practices of painting, photography, and poetry. These metaphorical relationships include links BOOK Review","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2018.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48392874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gertrude Stein in the American Marketplace","authors":"Bryce Conrad","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2018.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2018.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The article highlights Gertrude Stein’s struggles with American publishers to accept her modernist work and her initial unwillingness to popularize herself to break into that market. This was achieved with the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published serially in 1933. The article traces her subsequent struggles with ideas of marketing her personality over and above her work as she engaged in an American tour in 1934.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2018.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47013474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Ann Marie Mikkelsen (review)","authors":"Terence Diggory","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2017.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2017.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2017.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46667071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Carlos Williams Bibliography 2015–16","authors":"Yi-Ting Chang, J. Broome","doi":"10.1353/wcw.2017.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wcw.2017.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/wcw.2017.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45831499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The birth of the imagination: William Carlos Williams on form by Bruce Holsapple (review)","authors":"Alec Marsh","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2017.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2017.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This is a thoughtful, admirable, rather dense book tracing the development of Williams’s thinking about poetic structure from his earliest Poems (1909) through The Wedge (1944). Holsapple’s discussion is not limited to the poetry only, but devotes considerable attention to parsing Williams’s often less than crystal clear thinking as expressed in prose, including the Contact editorials of the early twenties, A Novelette, The Great American Novel, the “Rome” manuscript, In the American Grain, The Embodiment of Knowledge, and more familiar essays, closing with the famous “Author’s Introduction” to The Wedge (SE 255–7). The book is a “developmental study of the form, structure and content of Williams’s poems, of how structure informs what his poems ‘say’ and”—here Holsapple quotes from “Against the Weather” (SE 217)—“why the ‘altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem’” (4). Of course, the poetry is scrutinized too—often with great intensity and grasp of linguistic detail. The tone is conversational but rigorous; that of an authoritative, experienced teacher. You’ll want to keep your copies of the Collected Poems, Volume One and Imaginations nearby as you read, for this is one of those strong critical books that demands we go back, reread and reconsider the work under discussion. A very crude sketch map of the book’s route would begin with the early material, especially “The Wanderer” and on to the “propositional,”","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2017.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47706626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Language is in its January\": Dada and William Carlos Williams's Early Prose","authors":"R. Abella","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2017.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2017.0008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article explores connections between Dadaism and William Carlos Williams. Williams's attitude toward Dadaism was ambivalent. However, he made ample use of the radical strategies of Dadaism to compose four of his more experimental and less studied texts, namely: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Novel (1923), and the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). Dadaism provided Williams with the techniques (illogicality, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness, confrontation, automatic writing, chaos) and the conceptual scaffolding he needed to pursue his self-appointed—and intrinsically Dadaist—mission to both wipe out and revive American literature.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2017.0008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45194220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Walking with William Carlos Williams","authors":"T. Crawford","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2017.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2017.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the \"Walking\" section of William Carlos Williams's Paterson Book Two is usefully juxtaposed against comments Williams makes about his development of the variable foot ten years later.","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2017.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66553400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dismantling Clinical Authority in Paterson","authors":"Alisa Allkins","doi":"10.1353/WCW.2017.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/WCW.2017.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how the relationship between William Carlos Williams and Marcia Nardi as represented by the \"Cress\" letters in Williams's modernist epic Paterson challenges the doctor/patient and normal/pathological binaries established by clinical practice. It argues that the dialectical tension between the masculine and feminine created by the hybrid construction of Paterson echoes psychoanalytic writings on femininity by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, reading the work in relationship to Michel Foucault's theory of the archive in The Order of Things .","PeriodicalId":53869,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/WCW.2017.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45870218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}