Wyndham Lewis's literary work 1908-1928 : vorticism, futurism and the poetics of the avant-garde

摘要

The focus of this thesis is Wyndham Lewis’s early literary work,namely: The Wild Body, an anthology of stories mainly writtenin the pre-war years and revised in 1927, Tarr, a semi-autobiographicalVorticist novel first published in 1918, and Enemy ofthe Stars, a Vorticist play first published in the magazine Blastin 1914. These texts are studied in the context of the Vorticistmovement, of which Lewis was a leader and main entrepreneurand also in connection with the principles and manifestos of theFuturist movement. The methodology used draws on the work ofJulia Kristeva on the poetics of the avant-garde for the analysisof the vorticist/futurist “revolution in language”, and MikhailBakhtin’s theory of the “carnivalesque literary genre”. Thus, thetexts by Lewis referred to above will be analysed in the light ofthe concepts of popular and modernist grotesque, carnivalesgueand polyphony. The poetics and politics of Wyndham Lewis’svorticist discourse are here analysed and understood as aestheticsof challenge and provocation, transgressive in its incorporation ofsociety’s own fragmentation and ideological crisis, rather than asan aesthetics of compensation within the context of Modernity.