Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value

by Charles Altieri

Overview

Charles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri focuses his attention on modernist poetry, especially that of Wallace Stevens. He argues that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism. If we recognize the limits of that authority we can also recognize the close positive affinities between how we feel and how we value.

Nineteenth-century writing wanted to build values out of ways of looking at what could be established as fact. Early modernist poetry, particularly that of Stevens and Pound, labors to adapt Nietzschean attitudes toward poetry. Then Stevens embarked on an imaginative journey to find in linguistic activity itself a sufficient model for how we compose values. In both stages of his career facts must be respected, but they will not bear values simply by virtue of their connectedness to the world. We have to understand the constructive power taking place on intimate levels as we pursue that connectedness. Stevens matters, Altieri argues, because of the range and depth and intelligence by which he explores what such connectedness might involve. Stevens offers elaborate and moving experiments exploring how imaginative writing can help human beings grapple with questions about values that are at the very heart of our common experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801478727
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2013
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles Altieri is Stageberg Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, also from Cornell, and Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts.

Table of Contents

1. Philosophical Poetry and the Demands of Modernity

2. Harmonium as a Modernist Text

3. "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds": The Parts Negation Played in Developing a New Poetic

4. How Stevens Uses the Grammar of As

5. Aspectual Thinking

6. Stevens's Tragic Mode: Why the Angel Must Disappear in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”

7. Aspect- Seeing and Its Implications in The Rock

Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

J. Hillis Miller

Can poetry establish values? This brilliant, learned, subtle, and original book argues persuasively that Wallace Stevens is a philosophical poet. Charles Altieri supports this claim through detailed readings of selected poems from all Stevens' poetry books taken up in sequence. Nietzsche is shown to be a major resource for Stevens, as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are for Altieri. Stevens, Altieri demonstrates, investigates tirelessly, through the practice of poetry, ways poetry can actualize values. 'Stevens,' Altieri asserts, 'provides a brilliant way of reconciling experience and world by defining imagination as involving the theory of values because it provides images of the mind's power over the possibility of things.' Altieri persuasively demonstrates that the sequence of Stevens's books makes a story. It is the story of Stevens's progressive movement toward solutions for his search for values through poetry-making. This movement proceeds through the development of what Altieri calls 'aspectual thinking' in poetry and through an exploitation of the grammar of 'as.' Stevens in one place calls this process 'the intricate evasions of as'; in another, 'the edgings and inchings of final form.' Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is also, covertly or indirectly, a record of Altieri's own search for a phenomenology of value that will satisfy him. A major book for all those interested in Stevens and in the uses of poetry and criticism in our time.

Robert Chodat

Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is an enormously stimulating book. Charles Altieri is remarkably ambitious, marvelously learned, and an intensely thoughtful reader of Stevens (and many others). He is the rare critic who is speculative, theoretical, and interpretive, but who also recognizes that the practice of criticism usually begins in strong affection and an urge to celebrate.

Editorial Reviews

Altieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida,' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives ‘fuse’ over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Choice

Altieri provides the most authoritative treatment of Stevens in more than a decade.... He combines aesthetics and philosophy in a rigorous manner that is nonetheless resolutely literary. Wisely eschewing a commentary on all of Stevens's poems, Altieri extracts original interpretive insights from close reading, as seen in his discernment, in 'Farewell to Florida, ' of a flight from the female that is as much wishful thinking as renunciation, and a reading of 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which he emphasizes how the different perspectives 'fuse' over the disjunction emphasized by critics such as Harold Bloom. Altieri's detailed explication... reveals him as a dazzling reader of this difficult poet. Summing Up: Highly recommended.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

"Can poetry establish values? This brilliant, learned, subtle, and original book argues persuasively that Wallace Stevens is a philosophical poet. Charles Altieri supports this claim through detailed readings of selected poems from all Stevens' poetry books taken up in sequence. Nietzsche is shown to be a major resource for Stevens, as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein are for Altieri. Stevens, Altieri demonstrates, investigates tirelessly, through the practice of poetry, ways poetry can actualize values. 'Stevens,' Altieri asserts, 'provides a brilliant way of reconciling experience and world by defining imagination as involving the theory of values because it provides images of the mind's power over the possibility of things.' Altieri persuasively demonstrates that the sequence of Stevens’s books makes a story. It is the story of Stevens’s progressive movement toward solutions for his search for values through poetry-making. This movement proceeds through the development of what Altieri calls 'aspectual thinking' in poetry and through an exploitation of the grammar of 'as.' Stevens in one place calls this process 'the intricate evasions of as'; in another, 'the edgings and inchings of final form.' Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is also, covertly or indirectly, a record of Altieri’s own search for a phenomenology of value that will satisfy him. A major book for all those interested in Stevens and in the uses of poetry and criticism in our time."

J. Hillis Miller

"Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity is an enormously stimulating book. Charles Altieri is remarkably ambitious, marvelously learned, and an intensely thoughtful reader of Stevens (and many others). He is the rare critic who is speculative, theoretical, and interpretive, but who also recognizes that the practice of criticism usually begins in strong affection and an urge to celebrate."

Robert Chodat