Snapping the Spectrum Up for Food: Marianne Moore, Artistic Representation, and the Ethics of Use

Abstract

Avant-garde Modernism attempts to repopulate generalizations either with the particular experiences that may be imagined as having originally inhabited them or with experiences derived from the contemporary world. This is as true of mimetic Imagist practice as of nonrepresentational abstract art. For Hulme, and for Pound and the other Modernists who followed his argument, universais in the modern age had lost their real value and had become merely dead counters (Hulme 1936, i34~35)Pound associated this general inflation with the ascendancy of rhetoric and the use of abstract terms in artistic practice, and his Imagist and Vorticist interventions were meant to evoke the authority of the standards of concrete experiences and labor against which the real values of words and signs might be redeemed. Rhetoric in Pounds sense is the forgetting of this base of essential particulars; to make it new is to renew old metaphors with the blood of concrete particulars. The model for this empirical rootedness was the pictorialism of the Chinese ideogram, in Pound's understanding. Similarly, the