Autonomy to Indeterminacy

Abstract

From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in Twentieth Century by Jennifer Ashton Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 201 pages The much-vaunted millennium with its Y2K panic button seemed an appropriate time to finally bury eroded and otiose discussion of a modern/postmodern rupture. So prospect of yet another full-length debate on matter seemed, for this reader, to augur if not a critically still-born project, then prospect of a boring read. However, Jennifer Ashton's new study, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in Twentieth Century, proved to be a surprising reward, nothing less than a cornucopia of fresh critical thinking and revisionary relations. It is a demanding--and correspondingly rewarding--book, ambitious in its transdisciplinary articulations, negotiating aspects of cognitive science and logico-mathematical philosophy to accompany and complicate detailed close readings. Ashton is clearly a scholar of first order, a focused and diligent reader, amply equipped to take on obfuscations and obduracy of modernist and contemporary texts and much of their ambient (and frequently ignored) discourse networks. From Modernism to Postmodernism is an excellent book, and even those chapters that fall short of excellence at least vivify by advancing a vibrant polemic. Ashton outlines her ambitious project (and it is ambitious) in book's introduction, Modernism's new She writes: This project ... is an attempt to alter currently received history of twentieth-century American poetry by showing that Stein and (Riding) Jackson have been, and continue to be, misunderstood as postmodernists avant la lettre (2). The book seeks to shatter all conciliation between two purportedly divided period practices and takes direct issue with Marjorie Perloff's arguments in her Twenty-First-Century Modernism, especially Perloff's concept of literalism. Among other things, Ashton disputes Stein's alleged precursory status as regards contemporary penchant for open text. Ashton outlines a clear theoretical trajectory: from work of Stein and (Riding) Jackson, who are committed (according to Ashton) to upholding aesthetic autonomy of artworks and who presuppose as fundamental tenet of their practice centrality of authorial intention in creation of artworks to a postmodernist consecration of indeterminacy, irrelevance of intention, and ineluctable impossibility of aesthetic autonomy (as in work of Ashbery and Language poetry). For Ashton, two poles of this trajectory articulate great modern/postmodern divide. (Interestingly, Perloff's thesis is roughly congruent with Habermas's idea of a century sandwich, with postmodernism pastrami between two thick slices of whole-wheat modernism.) The book widens its parameters to further explore the fact that avant-garde credentials of Perloff's 21st-century modernists derive from New Critical 'mainstream' they claim to repudiate than from marginalized experimentalism they claim to embrace (11). (Lock Bruce Andrews in a room with ghost of John Donne and let's see what happens.) There's a further aspiration: to expose more pervasive project of postmodernism in general: effort to make meaning a matter of someone's intention, and to make interpretation a matter of reaction rather than understanding (13). There is much in this polemical work on which to comment. Given limitations of a short review, let me engage a couple of matters: period terms themselves and Ashton's handling of Language poetry. Like Brian McHale in his fine book The Obligation toward Difficult Whole, Ashton treats term postmodern as prefix to a national literary style or cluster of formal tendencies, largely ignoring wider ramifications of term as a designator of complex and evolving cultural forces--what Lyotard dubbed a condition. …