Subversive technologies: The machine age poetics of F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson.

摘要

This project explores how early twentieth-century avant-garde poetic practice registers the experience of emergent technologies of the period. Drawing upon examples from both Anglo-American and Continental European avant-gardes, the dissertation considers how the widespread implementation of machine-age technologies such as the phonograph, the cinema, and the typewriter encouraged innovations essential to the development of a particular strand of avant-garde poetic practice. A period involving intense debate and theorization about modern versification, the first half of the twentieth century yielded updated techniques inspired by encounters between poetic practice and emergent technologies. Adapting machine-age technologies to their developing poetic theories and conventions, F. T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson reconceptualized the page, reinvigorated stagnant techniques, and advanced new principles in their critical idiom. Prompted by the example of new technologies, Marinetti and Olson reconceived existing poetic techniques in order to reflect the intensity of the poet's evolving creative activity on the page. Most often realized through a stylized graphic arrangement of aural stimuli, their poetics were informed by interactions with technologies such as the airplane and typewriter. Prompted by the Parisian cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s, Pound discovered a way to revive the inert principles of Vorticism in commentaries about cinematic projection and in formal procedures of cinematic representation. The accelerated Vorticist aesthetic afforded by his encounter with the creative processes of the cinema initiated the definitive design for his long poem, the Cantos. Arguing that these poets often subverted techniques associated with technologies to serve the objectives of an avant-garde creative practice rather than the tasks technologies had been designed to advance, this study asserts that the interplay between emergent technologies and poetic practice yields important insight into how a group of poets fused technological models and poetic strategies to introduce highly individualized formal and creative processes. Taking advantage of an early twenty-first century perspective that allows for a tempered view of the machine-age technologies to which these poets responded, the study concludes that Marinetti, Pound, and Olson were inspired by contact with emergent technologies to manipulate, transform, and renew existing methods of versification to assert an innovative avant-garde poetics.