Experimental : American literature and the aesthetics of knowledge / Natalia Cecire.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cecire, Natalia Aki, 1981- author.

Series:

Hopkins studies in modernism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature, Experimental--United States--History and criticism.

Literature, Experimental.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Literature and science--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and science.

United States.

History.

Physical Description:

xxii, 293 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Summary:

In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences.0Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest.

Contents:

The Double Period of Experimental Writing p. 2

Language: Representing and Intervening p. 9

Epistemic Virtues and the Abstraction of Knowledge p. 14

Romantic and Other Precedents p. 24

Experimental Writing Is a White Recovery Project p. 29

The Language of the Future p. 39

2 Flash p. 48

A Momentary Gleam of Light: Flash's Time p. 51

An Abstract of the World: Flash's Condensation p. 57

Black Riders: Flash's Chiaroscuro p. 65

Faces in the Crowd: Figuration, Redemption, Information p. 69

3 Objectivity p. 81

Bad Scientist: The Harvard Psychological Laboratory and Bottom Natures p. 84

Camera Work: Vision and Female Objectivity p. 91

"To Make Confusion Clear": Wandering and Objectification p. 100

Seeing Clear: Portraits and Repetition p. 115

4 Precision p. 118

The First Grace of Style p. 122

Natural History; or, the Principle That Is Hid p. 127

Open Secrets of the Natural World p. 133

Various Scalpels p. 141

Distrust of Merits p. 155

5 Contact p. 160

Contact and First Contact p. 163

Nakedness and the Form of Contact p. 167

Recovery, Salvage, and the Untimeliness of Contact p. 173

The Final Frontier p. 180.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781421433769

1421433761

9781421433776

142143377X

OCLC:

1135098321