Paterson, Gloucester, anonymous cities of eponymous citizens : William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s The maximus poems
Part of : Γράμμα : περιοδικό θεωρίας και κριτικής ; Vol.6, No.1, 1998, pages 169-183
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169-183
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Drawing on the poststructuralistré evaluation of modernist aesthetic and ideological polarities, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems are “appropriating” texts so as to “ resist” the high modernist universalism of the Eliot-Pound tradition. The paper focuses on these texts as “narrating ” America coming into being as a new nation. Paterson and Gloucester, strongholds of industrialization and multiculturalism respectively and, therefore, synechdochic versions of America itself—decentre well-worn métropoles of the modernist canon; Williams and Olson decentre the European oriented centripetal movement of Eliot and Pound from a subordinate periphery to the hegemonic centre. Their poetics and politics, in turn, result in a repositioning of the modernist centreperiphery binarism which, however, does not entirely escape the very rhetoric it contests. Following a trajectory from the Eliotic internationalism to an Emersonian “self-reliance”, Paterson and The Maximus Poems narrate the emergence of a new “centre” , of America as the periphery-become-centre.
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Περιέχει σημειώσεις και βιβλιογραφία
