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William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found

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William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2009 Somehow a word must be found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found Brian L. Gempp University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gempp, Brian L., "Somehow a word must be found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2009. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/601 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Brian L. Gempp entitled "Somehow a word must be found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen Dunn, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Amy Elias, Mary Papke, Alexis Boylan Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Brian L. Gempp entitled Somehow a word must be found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found. I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allen Dunn Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Amy Elias Mary Papke Alexis Boylan Acceptance for the Council: Carolyn Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Somehow a word must be found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Brian L. Gempp December 2009 Copyright © 2009 by Brian L. Gempp All rights reserved. ii Acknowledgements This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Catherine and Leonard Gempp, who have long provided me with the support to indulge my interests and the conversations in the kitchen that helped to start me on this road. I would also like to thank my Dissertation Director and friend, Allen Dunn, for supplying me with an almost unfailing sense of patience, clarity, and calm through the many difficult stages of this project. It was as a student in Allen’s classes here in Knoxville that I first began to consider Williams’s relation to contemporary art. Allen supported my ideas when they were still largely undeveloped and encouraged me to pursue my own interests without forcing them into a direction or form other than my own. Thanks are also due to the other members of my committee. Dr. Alexis Boylan, Dr. Amy Elias, and Dr. Mary Papke all of whom proved integral at various stages in the dissertation’s development. I am especially grateful to Drs. Boylan and Papke for their willingness to serve, well after the dissertation was already in-formation. Both added important insights on my project and a model of professorial service that I hope to emulate and build upon in the future. Also at the University of Tennessee, I would like to thank Dr. Chuck Maland, Dr. Michael Lofaro, and the late Dr. Richard Finneran, for allowing me to work as a Research Assistant. I would be remiss without thanking Leanne Hinkle, who was an unyielding source of support at every stage of my graduate work. A number of people played important roles during my years in Knoxville: in the beginning stages, Brandon Loper provided me with a receptive ear to improvise and develop my ideas; Shaun Morgan was a comrade-in-arms at every stage; and Michael Modarelli supplied me with the humor and savvy on how to survive what sometimes felt like inhospitable conditions. I also would like to thank Hal and Susie Flynt for their support, generosity, and care. I am most indebted to Meredyth Sparks, who provided me, again and again, both here and there, with patience, love, and understanding. When I felt exhausted by the marriage of modern poetry and contemporary art, she was quick to suggest a perspective or angle I had never considered before. When I was looking too deeply into theory for answers, she reminded me to focus on the found. iii Abstract Somehow a Word Must be Found: William Carlos Williams, the Legacies of Duchamp, and the Troping of the Found Since the publication of J. Hillis Miller’s seminal chapter on William Carlos Williams in Poets of Reality (1965), there has been a uniform trend among critics to read the poet’s early experiments in relation to Marcel Duchamp. Miller situates Williams’s poetics within a range of avant-garde neologisms thought to challenge the autonomy of the bourgeois art object. Williams’s poetry rethinks the function and form of language and it is this self-reflexivity, and Miller’s deferral to the ready-made, that provides the foundation for this study. Inspired by a Dadaist-revival that reached its peak in the years leading up to the poet’s death, literary critics— including Miller—have glossed over Williams’s difficulties developing his own theories of art in relation to these avant-garde precedents. In the late 1960s, a new generation of artists revaluated Duchamp, a reconsideration that corresponds to Williams’s early commentary. Throughout his writing from the early 1920s, Williams emphasized a notion of the found easily confused— sometimes even by the poet himself—with the ready-made. Williams’s responses to Duchamp and the expatriated avant-garde evolved over the poet’s life as his and Duchamp’s works were embraced by the very institutions both had initially set out to complicate. Chapter One rethinks the ready-made’s legacy as the animating innovation within modernism. The ready-made embodies a principle of negation that contrasts with Williams’s far-ranging theory of the imagination. In driving a wedge between Williams’s troping of the found and the ready-made, I lean on postmodern theories of art, especially the ideas of Robert Smithson, the Earthworks artist, who named his childhood pediatrician, William Carlos Williams, a “proto-conceptual artist.” Chapter Two examines the broken style and theory of the imagination Williams formulates in Kora in Hell (1920), a text written in the year following the ready-made’s debut. Chapter Three analyzes the discursive interweaving of prose and poetry in Spring and All (1923), Williams’s most fully-realized avant-garde experiment. I conclude with a consideration of the verse written prior to the introduction of the ready-made, the poet’s earliest attempt to establish the local as a viable avant-garde tradition. iv Table of Contents List of Figures……………………………………………………………...……………………..vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: The Great Marcel: Duchamp, the Independents, and the Triumph of Sense .............39 Chapter II: My self was being slaughtered: Kora in Hell and the Paradoxes of Choice .............77 Chapter III: A Perfect Plagiarism: Spring and All, Illusionism, and the Undeceived Imagination ...............................................................................................................................................122 Conclusion: Photographing a photograph: Williams, Smithson, and a New Jersey Alternative ...............................................................................................................................................181 Works Cited............................................................................................................................207 Appendix ................................................................................................................................216 Vita.........................................................................................................................................223 v List of Figures Figure 1. Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. 217 Figure 2. William Carlos Williams, “Substratum,” from Paterson. 218 Figure 3. Robert Smithson, A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey, 1968. 219 Figure 4. Cover for William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1920. 220 Figure 5. George E. Lothrop, Nude, 1917. 221 Figure 6. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. 222 vi Introduction Found poetry. What is it? • “It is the culmination of realism. So the found poem is really a piece of realistic literature, in which significance appears inherent in the object—either as extravagant absurdity or as unexpected worth. It is like driftwood, or pop art, where natural objects and utilitarian objects are seen as the focus of generative form or meaning”—Louis Dudek. Possible distinctions. • Found object, objet trouvé, ready-made: Something removed from one context and placed
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