“Just Looking” at the Everyday: Marianne Moore's Exotic Modernism

Abstract

Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University) argues that Marianne Moore was a connoisseur of modern clutter, drawing on the historical residues of “antiques, rare art objects and ancient artefacts”, but also the disorder of the information age: the disaggregated fragments thrown up by contemporary journalism. Moore takes the discursive production of China in the “Illustrated News” and creates a constellation, after Benjamin, that goes further than the confirmation of the West as “a superior site of knowledge” to gesture to something beyond a technocratic modernity.