Resisting the Intelligence Almost Successfully

While the sweeping referentiality of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound might seem to form the clearest connection between modernist innovation and academic work, this essay argues that it is in fact Wallace Stevens's erudite irony that most precisely anticipates the current set of relations between innovative poetry and the discipline of literary criticism. Stevens's work can thus be analysed as an intellectual collaboration not with a particular scholar or discipline but with the development of discourses specifically concerned about the value of hermeneutics. In particular, his poetry looks towards academic anxieties about the world in which the humanities now live: one that relentlessly demands educational pragmatism. This anticipation takes the form of a persistent concern regarding the artistic capabilities of abstract cogitation, something he puts into uneasy contact with a more intuitive notion of ‘natural’ positivism. This contact, in turn, manages to resist both the remnants of Romanticism and fin-de-siècle discussions about educational rationalization via a similar form of reflexive critical thinking. By foregrounding the tension between the ‘real’ and thinking about reality, Stevens turns his readers into co-workers, as both struggle to carve out a place for the difficult, impractical effort of interrogating what we can know about the world

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Foregrounding · Irony · Literary criticism · Literature · Poetry · Pragmatism · Reflexivity · Romanticism · Social science · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism