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Copyright by Iris Ralph 2005 Copyright By Iris Ralph 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Iris Ralph certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: An Ecocritical Study of William Carlos Williams, James Agee, and Stephen Crane by way of the Visual Arts Committee: _____________________________ Brian Bremen, Supervisor _____________________________ Phil Barrish _____________________________ Tony Hilfer _____________________________ Wayne Lesser _____________________________ Ann Reynolds An Ecocritical Study of William Carlos Williams, James Agee, and Stephen Crane by way of the Visual Arts By Iris Ralph, B.Sc., B.A., M.A. Di ssertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2005 To my mother and sister, Elvera Pascoe Ralph and Anthula Maria Ralph; my brothers Eric Kodjo Ralph and Danny Ralph; Igor Shochetman; and Willard Goodwin; to the memories of my grandfather Henry James Pascoe and grandmothers Maria Pavlides Pascoe and Mildred K. Ralph The […] dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. The […] dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass. -Oscar Wilde, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray 3 In the gullies, where streams of water slid from pool to pool leaving beards of rusty algae on their sandstone lips, giant cabbage-tree palms grew, their damp shade supporting a host of ferns and mosses. Yellow sprays of mimosa flashed in the sun along the ridges, and there were strands of blackboy trees, their dry spear of a stalk shooting up from a drooping hackle of fronds. -Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore 3 If there is a place where this is the language may It be my country -W. S. Merwin, The Lice 46 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost my dissertation chair, Professor Brian A. Bremen, who waded through many, many drafts of my work. I thank him for his patience, commitment, and unstinting support of me. Also, I thank my dissertation committee members Professors Phillip Barrish, Tony Hilfer, Wayne Lesser, and Ann Reynolds for their generous advice and support. Also, my teachers at San Francisco State University, foremost among whom are Professors Donald Doub, Wei Leung Kwo k, Lois Lyles, Talia Schaffer, Beverly Voloshin, and the late Randall Nakayama; my teachers at the University of Texas at Austin not already mentioned: Professors Evan B. Carton, Michael Charlesworth, John P. Farrell, Alan W. Friedman, Don B. Graham, Jacqueline M. Henkel, Charles Rossman, Richard Shiff, Thomas B. Whitbread, and Michael Winship; Christopher MacGowan and A. Walton Litz for their two -volume edition of William Carlos Williams’s poetry (much of my discovery of Williams was spurred by their notes ); S. Riisik, P. Hollway, and the late Mr. J. Cutler, my English teachers at Mooroolbark High School. Last but not least, to my friend Will Goodwin who always encouraged me no matter what direction I went. vi An Ecocritical Study of Willi am Carlos Williams, James Agee, and Stephen Crane by way of the Visual Arts Publication No. ________________ Iris Ralph, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Brian Bremen My dissertation addresses the ways in which formal aest hetic strategies in literature and art in the period of modernism, approximately 1890-1940, make visible, and problematize the relation between language and environment. Stephen Crane (1871- 1900), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), and James Agee (1909-1955) avail themselves of contemporary, avant-garde visual arts and artists toward expressing the modernist collapse of faith in the adequacy of representation. Concomitantly, their writings articulate a post -Enlightenment empirical but anti -rationalist and a post - Enlightenment anti -romantic conviction that language is not divorced from but is already part of the existing furniture of the world. I locate this conviction in a Franciscan philosophical and epistemological tradition, one that scholars have duly remarked upon but with characteristic omission of its rich ecological tenets. For Crane and Williams, the existing and extensive contextual inquiry of the influence of the visual arts provides by way of analogy a useful terminology for exploring this early and high modernist writer’s aesthetic ambitions. My work contributes to and extends the contextual inquiry by addressing the ways in which Crane’s and Williams’s responses to the visual and graphic vii arts evidence not only the modernist grappling with th e problem of representation per se but the confrontation with representation as this concerns the writing of the non-human subject -object figure by the human subject -object figure. The first chapters of the dissertation focus on the ecological avatar o f St. Francis, and on Williams’s responses to cubist, precisionist, and dada art, and the quasi -landscapes of the High Renaissance Northern European painter Pieter Bruegel (the Elder). The final chapter looks back to the late nineteenth century, to impress ionist painting and Stephen Crane, a writer who borrows from this painting the antithetical devices of flatness and atmosphere in ways that put into question normative distinctions between the human subject being and the non-human, so -called object being. The subject of the middle, sixth chapter is straight photography as this representational realist practice critically informs Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I argue that Agee’s encomium to, and excoriation of straight photography, a formidable tool of twent ies and thirties documentary expression, implicitly ecocritically attacks the anthropocentric lens. viii CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Abstract vii Contents ix List of Illustrations x INTRODUCTION 1 William Carlos Williams 1. St. Francis: an ecological avatar 16 2. The Twenties and Thirties: Cubism, Precisionism, Dada 33 3. Paterson 73 4. Pictures from Brueghel 96 5. Early critical reception: the ecologica l unconscious 121 James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 6. Black -and-White Photography and the Green World 134 Part I: Absolute Perspective and Straight Photography 134 Part II: Straight Photography and the Anthropocentric L ens 166 Stephen Crane 7. The impressionist’s language of flatness and atmosphere 178 CONCLUSION 235 Works Cited Primary Sources 239 Secondary Sources/Works Consulted 241 Vita 271 ix List of Illustrations Fi g. 1. La montagne Sainte -Victoire (c. 1886-88) by Paul Cézanne 41 Fig. 2. Granite by the Sea (1937) by Marsden Hartley 43 Fig. 3. Fields of Grain as Seen from Train (1931) by Arthur Dove 44 Fig. 4. Roses (1914) by Juan Gris 49 Fig. 5. Classic Landscape (1931) by Charles Sheeler 55 Fig. 6. I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth 58 Fig. 7. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1558) by Pieter Brueghel 99 Fig. 8. Hunters in the Snow (1565) by Pieter Brueghel 104 Fig. 9. “George Gudger” and Annie Mae Gudger” by Walker Evans 136 Fig. 10. Interior and exterior of a tenant farmer house by Walker Evans 137 Fig. 11. Schoolhouse and street front by Walker Evans 138 Fig. 12. The quays at Rouen (1883) by Camille Pissa rro 197 Fig. 13. La Grenouill ère (1869) by Claude Monet 198 Fig. 14. Dans les blés (1875) by Berthe Morisot 198 Fig. 15. Boulevard Saint-Denis, Argenteuil (1875) by Claude Monet 199 Fig. 16. Coin de village, effet d’hiver (1877) by Camille Pissarro 200 Fig. 17. Man Painting a Boat (1883) by George Seurat 201 Fig. 18. Les Grands Boulevards (1875) by Pierre -Auguste Renoir 202 Fig. 19. La Balançoire (1876) by Pierre -Auguste Renoir 203 Fig. 20. Olympia (1863) by Eduard Manet 210 x INTRODUCTION This dissertation began out of a passion for nineteenth - and twentieth -century literature. I was most drawn to the modernist period, from 1860 to 1960, and to three hallmarks of the modernist literary product: the self -conscious failure o f representation or inability to ‘write’ the real, the intensely self -reflexive operations or commitment to the medium itself, and its abstract representational practices (which seem to negate content). I was also interested in writers who stubbornly insis ted somehow upon being “realists,” did not let go of the objective condition, and were not altogether reconciled to the modernist assault on objective perspective. My use of the terms ‘realist’ and ‘realism’ is informed by Fredric Jameson’s early study Ma rxism and Form: Twentieth -Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971). By ‘realist’ I mean the writer who locates truth in material historical contingencies and who presupposes “neither the transcendence of the object (as in science) nor that of the subject (as in ethics)” (Jameson, Marxism and Form 190). By ‘realism’ I mean the expression that avoids symbolism and intensely subjective investigations, i.e. those found in romantic expression (Jameson, Marxism and Form 199). Jameson defines symbolism as “the vain attempt of subjectivity to evolve a human world completely out of itself” (Marxism and Form 198). I use symbolism similarly, to refer to an anti -realist aesthetic that subordinates material conditions or realities to a so -called higher, abstract , ahistorical, universal reality or truth. In addition to my interest in modernism and in writers who work against a Romantic philosophical and aesthetic inheritance, I was interested in poetry and prose that in someway engaged with a visual art or artist . Stephen Crane (1871-1900), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), James Agee (1909-1955) are three writers who possess a realist sensibility and also critically engage with visual art. Thus, when I embarked on my dissertation, I wanted to ask and provide answers to the following question: How do these three very different writers’ responses to visual art offer literary critics insight into the crisis of representation in the period of modernism? This thought process led to the present dissertation, which a sks and attempts to 1 answer how Williams, Agee, and Crane’s formal aesthetic strategies —strategies that they acquire in part by way of a visual art or artist —make visible the relation between language and environment.
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