Pedagogy and Poetics Nicky Marsh

This file is to be used only for a purpose specified by Palgrave Macmillan, such as checking proofs, preparing an index, reviewing, endorsing or planning coursework/other institutional needs. You may store and print the file and share it with others helping you with the specified purpose, but under no circumstances may the file be distributed or otherwise made accessible to any other third parties without the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Please contact [email protected] if you have any queries regarding use of the file. 9780230_202320_02_intro.tex 5/10/2009 22: 37 Page 1 PROOF Introduction: Pedagogy and Poetics Nicky Marsh The pedagogies of modern literary studies and the practices of modernist poetry have shared a long history. Pound and Eliot may have dreaded the ‘deadening’ life of the academic but the explication of their writing was at the core of the teaching practices that came to dominate the academy for over half a century (McDonald, 1993: 43). ‘New Criticism and modernist poetry were’, as Alan Golding notes, ‘almost literally made for each other’ and the institutionalisation of literary studies that took place in the early years of the twentieth century took many of its cues from the emerging principles of high modernism (Golding, 1995: 75). These pedagogical forms were exemplified by the Practical Criticism of I. A Richards and given ideological elaboration by the writing of the Leavis’ in Britain and of the New Critics in the US. The assumptions supporting this teaching practice were ubiquitous, pervasive, and are still familiar: the close and active reading of the difficult text was a redemptive act, uniquely able to withstand the deforming pressures of an increasingly powerful technocratic and industrialised mass culture. By the early 1950s such assumptions had become commonplace and standardised. ‘Every poem’, John Guillory asserts, became an ‘image’ of the ‘institutional space in which it is read’, a means of alerting its well-trained readers to the fact that ‘the retreat of literary culture into the university’ was a ‘transcendence of the conditions of modernity’ (Guillory, 1993: 165). The obvious ironies of this distancing of the perfected modernist poem from the unperfected travails of lived modernity fuelled the revisionist approaches to modernism that came to characterise the field from the early 1980s onwards. The modernist poem could remain the ‘unified whole’ of Cleanth Brooks’ imagination no longer as its repressed social histories, contradictory implications, varied textual manifestations, and complicated political allegiances all began to emerge (Brooks, 1939: 54). 1 9780230_202320_02_intro.tex 5/10/2009 22: 37 Page 2 PROOF 2 Teaching Modernist Poetry These scholarly developments followed the broader contours of the intellectual transformations of the period and their milestones are now relatively familiar. Some critics interrogated the political assumptions about class, race, gender, and empire that had facilitated the autonomy of the modernist poem whilst radically expanding the historical and geographical parameters of the movement.1 Others responded to the successive waves of phenomenological criticism, structuralist and post- structuralist theory that provided a more rigorous vocabulary for under- standing modernism’s critique of an earlier mimetic. Modernist poetry was increasingly recognised as both a significant participant in, and com- mentator upon, wider shifts in culture, aesthetics, and representation. Its relationship to discourses of psychoanalysis, science, technology, law, war, democracy, economics, advertising, work, political protest, and con- sumerism were made increasingly apparent, as was its connection to a wider range of arts practices, including music, cinema, sculpture, and the visual arts.2 The very category of Anglo-American high modernist poetics upon which New Criticism had been reliant was supplanted, as a diverse and continually contested range of geographical, political, and aesthetic modernisms emerged, and scholarly accounts of more complex genealogies and legacies for poetry began to proliferate. The effective reading of a modernist poem came to involve both an awareness of these new cultural histories and a revaluation of the defini- tions and implications of textuality itself. Critics such as Willard Bohm, Garrett Stewart, Jerome McGann, Johanna Drucker, and Marjorie Perloff expanded the critical vocabulary available for discussing the aesthetics of the typographical marks made on the physical page,3 whilst others, such as Lawrence Rainey, Michael Levenson, and Mark Morrison, com- piled the material and social histories that had allowed such marks to be made at all.4 These changes required a broadening of both the aesthetic and political methodologies of reading poetry. Renewed attention was paid to the look of the line and the sound of the syllable in poetry, just as issues around the cultural production and consumption of the poem as an artefact – questions of patronage, publication, dissemination, audi- ence, and reception – all became vital components of an active and aware exegesis. These new methodologies, critical vocabularies, and cultural histories demanded far more, from both reader and teacher, than New Criticism’s close reading ever had. As Gerald Graff caustically noted, the new critical ‘emphasis on the literary text’ had been a ‘tactic’ that ‘made it possible for literature to be taught effectively to students who took for granted little history’ (Graff, 1987: 173). Hence the plurality of critical approaches 9780230_202320_02_intro.tex 5/10/2009 22: 37 Page 3 PROOF Introduction 3 towards modernism that have appeared over the past two decades have expanded the possibilities of reading and have also asked much more, from both the reader and the classroom space itself. The expanded possibilities implicit in the resurgence of modernist studies have been made apparent in the burgeoning of new kinds of reading and teaching resources: anthologies that include letters, manifestos, art works, and critical essays alongside less standardised formats for the poems themselves have been produced by editors such as Bonnie Kime Scott, Lawrence Rainey, and, most notably, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris in their magisterial Poems for the New Millennium volumes.5 From the late 1990s onwards, the dramatically immediate possibilities offered by new technology offered their own counterpart to these resources. Key modernist poems appeared complete with their own annotated hypertexts and new kinds of electronic archives, such as Cary Nelson’s ‘Mod- ern American Poetry Project’, Brown University’s ‘Modernist Journals Project’, and Buffalo’s ‘Ubuweb’ all began to mature.6 Yet there has been relatively little extended reflection on what it means to bring this overwhelming array of new methodologies, resources, and knowledge into relation with the practical exigencies of a pedagogy that is attempting to encourage ten, twenty, or even two hundred students to confidently approach a poem that appears to resist a singular reading.7 How does a teacher make relevant the register of the small journals that facilitated the appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, recreate the political and aesthetic discussions about race and empire that were taking place in the salons of expatriate Paris in the 1910s, or stimulate a meaningful conversation about the significance of new forms of scientific knowledge that appeared across the twentieth century? Facilitating the experience of the material or abstract text, allowing students to respond to lan- guage as an aural, oral, performed, and/or visual form, is even more difficult to assimilate readily into a teaching tradition which has so consistently represented writing as the privileged but transparent medium through which meaning can be perceived. It is these difficulties that this collection attempts to explore through a range of pedagogical case studies which encompass the experiences of academics working in both Britain and the US. The collection acknowledges the radically expanded terrain of modernist studies and seeks to offer practical and expert guid- ance on how this field has been translated into the effective study of poetry and its multiple contexts and manifestations within the classroom. A crucial and founding premise is that these developments should be regarded as part of a broader cultural movement, which incorporates contemporary writing practices alongside recent scholarly, disciplinary, 9780230_202320_02_intro.tex 5/10/2009 22: 37 Page 4 PROOF 4 Teaching Modernist Poetry and intellectual innovations. Hence the collection consistently addresses the development of new critical methodologies, histories, and pedagogies alongside developments in contemporary ‘late’ modernist poetics in its attempt to acknowledge the continually evolving dynamics that teaching modernism needs to maintain if it is not to fall prey to the ‘deadening’ forces that Pound and Eliot so feared. This collection can, then, be read through the attempt to provide answers to two kinds of questions. Firstly, the collection offers an engaged debate about the definition and development of modernism as a historical and geographical literary movement, acknowledging a line of influence and contestation amongst poets that stretches from Ezra Pound to Susan Howe, from London to Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. This attempt by many of the essays in the collection to formulate new approaches to teaching and interrogating

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