From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (review)

Barrett Watten: There’s a real confusion in American criticism as to how close the Formalists were to [the New Critics]. The Formalists saw language as relative to itself; the New Critics basically saw language as symbols for objects. [. . .] The only similarity is that they saw literature as an object for study. But their models of language were vastly different.

“Russian Formalism and the Present,” 1980 (Watten, Total Syntax 29–30)

I once had the good fortune to take a course with U.C. Berkeley’s Julian Boyd on the history of the English language. Occasionally, as a student in the class struggled with the finer points of deontic modality or the differences between “shall” and “will,” Boyd would suddenly glare at whomever was speaking and announce with mock sternness, “You are exactly wrong.”

That’s how I feel about Jennifer Ashton’s book. It is subtly argued; it deals with challenging material; and it is exactly wrong. Ashton proposes to rewrite the history of American poetry by arguing that “the postmodern criticism that understands itself as a repudiation of a once mainstream New Criticism should be understood instead [. . .] as its continuation” (179). Charles Bernstein, she claims, “turns out to be a belated incarnation of I. A. Richards” (118); Steve McCaffrey and Lyn Hejinian are the ideological heirs of Wimsatt and Beardsley; and “the language movement’s place in the history of twentieth-century poetic theory is not as a repudiation of New Criticism but as its reassertion” (98). Ashton lobs any number of these counterintuitive critical bombshells in a calculated effort to provoke maximum shock and awe among members of the pomo poetry crowd.

As Barrett Watten’s comments above show, this idea is hardly new, and was perceived early on as a critical issue (and a scholarly mistake) by the founders of the “language movement” (a phrase that Ashton uses with devil-may-care looseness). The New Criticism and Language poetics are different, according to Watten, because they are based on different models of language; their only similarity is a superficial interest in literature as an object of study. By cherry-picking her sources, Ashton generalizes this and other surface similarities between New Critical and language poetics to argue for a “history” of postmodernism that is untenable.

The best parts of Ashton’s study concern modernist poetics. Her chapter on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Louis Zukofsky is a concise summary of what the “objective” in “objectivism” means; she argues that these three “old literalists,” as she calls them, are committed in their different ways to turning nouns into things. She is also astute at rehearsing the reasons for (Riding) Jackson’s decision in the early 1940s to renounce poetry, showing how for (Riding) Jackson, paradoxically, “for the poem to mean it must not be” (110). Ashton is at her strongest in these chapters; her grasp of the issues informing the “objectivist critique of metaphor,” as she terms it, enables her to clarify important aspects of modernist poetics.

Ashton is less convincing when it comes to Gertrude Stein. She charts Stein’s “movement from what she understands as a phenomenological model of composition to a logical one” (32), arguing that Stein wants to “revitaliz[e] nouns by making them work like names” (89). Stein allegedly thereby produces texts that “have nothing to do with the reader” (93) and thus effectively shuts off the “indeterminacy” identified by critics like Marjorie Perloff as the distinguishing mark of avant-garde poetry. Accordingly, Ashton claims, Stein practices “a logical formalism irrevocably at odds with both the phenomenological commitments of poststructuralist linguistics and the materialist commitments of language poetry” (68). But while this may be true of a rune poem like “Rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not clear how Ashton’s method pans out when applied to longer, more complicated pieces, since she provides no readings of any other of Stein’s poems. How would...